How Far Is It? How Far Is It Now? – Assault on the Donbas (The Russian Invasion of Ukraine #50)

The media is raging with demonic glee this evening. Headlines scream that “the Russian offensive in the East has begun” and “Russia’s Donbass assault has begun.” Russian artillery is striking all along a three hundred mile front in Eastern Ukraine. The steppe is once again swallowing shells and it will soon swallow thousands of lives in the weeks to come. Media outlets, with their inky black headlines in elegant font, spread the news as though it is an obituary for the Donbas. If a region could die of dreadful expectations than the Donbas must be on its last legs. The anticipation has been overwhelming in a media landscape that lusts for something worse to report. Now they have death instead of desperation to keep their readers attention. A 21st century war on an unprecedented scale, at least until the next one. This is the way so many news outlets would like the world to end, with not a whimper, but a bang. The Donbas consumed in a cauldron of fire and fury.

The tension has been brought to the breaking point by a week’s worth of preparation. The reporters are ready to announce that David could only defeat Goliath for so long. Now the dead reckoning has started or at least that is what they want their readers to believe. The truth is dirtier, if not downright disgusting. The war began a long time ago in the same place and has not stopped since. Perhaps we are about to witness the beginning of the end, or at least the end of the beginning. No one can really know for sure, just as they did not know in 2014 that fighting in the Donbas would last for eight years and take 14,000 lives. The current war is an extension and an escalation of all the fighting that has come before. The titanic tug of war over this benighted region continues.

How Far Is It - German Officers on the Eastern Front (Credit: Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-B07788)

Going The Distance - Stepping Backward Into History

When I learned that the latest iteration of the War in the Donbas had begun, my mind was possessed by a memory, long forgotten, but lurking somewhere deep in the subconscious, waiting for a moment that had finally and improbably arrived. The Donbas calls to mind paradoxical images of smokestacks and steel mills, sunflower fields and steppe rolling away to an endless horizon. On this occasion though, I thought of the poem “Getting There”* by Sylvia Plath. I had not read it in years. Nevertheless, I could still recall several of its most memorable lines that meant the most to this conflict. The poem can be read as either personal or political. I prefer the latter, as the poem acts a metaphor for destruction and war. “Getting There” encapsulates the Eastern Front. In Plath’s rendering it is the Eastern Front of World War II, in my mind it is War in the Donbass. Those opening lines, “How far is it, how far is it now” speak volumes of the distance that must be covered. The futility of forward progress in a war that expands to infinity.

The title of the poem, “Getting There”, is metaphorical for Plath, it is historical for me. The poem takes place on a train that is nothing short of sinister. It could be headed to a battlefield or a concentration camp. My imagination sees the train surging through the steppe. Taking soldiers to the front, but where are they really going? Oblivion is the space this region reserves for soldiers. In the context of Plath’s poem, “It is Russia I have to get across, it is some war or other.” Now it is Ukraine and the Donbas. The current conflict can be substituted for “some war.” Thus, the passengers on this journey have traveled forward in time, only to step backward into history.

We now find ourselves in a similar situation, separated chronologically by seventy-five years, but psychologically the past and present are indistinguishable from one another. Plath asks again, “How far is it?” Does she mean to the front or the fields or the fighting? Perhaps all three. She says, “There is mud on my feet.” Mud and blood are the Donbas’ unforgiving foundations in wartime. It is not just the ground, but also the horizon that takes a turn toward the ominous. “And now detonations ---Thunder and guns. The fire’s between us.”

Getting There - Sylvia Plath (Credit Giovanni Giovanneti)

Being Present – Insane For The Destination

The poem is written in the present tense, which gives it a sense of immediacy. While war plans are based on the past or look to the future, the actual battles are always fought in the present. Self-preservation has a way of making everyone live in the moment. Death tends to focus the mind. I imagine thousands of soldiers who cannot see beyond their own survival facing the moment of truth. When the missiles and mortars rain from the sky and fall upon them indiscriminately they will come face to face with their worst fears. This is war on a micro level, the essence of every firefight. Plath’s train, like the war, hurtles headlong towards the horror. She says, “The train is dragging itself, it is screaming --- An animal, Insane for the destination.” And that destination is the madness of destruction. This is what will come along every inch of that three hundred mile front.

Interpreting “Getting There” in the context of the Donbas campaign gets to the heart of those fighting this war on the battlefield. It reflects those hunkered down in foxholes carving initials in the mud of the trenches with their fingernails, those waiting for death or to deliver it, those shaking uncontrollably in the grip of an all-consuming fear. War in the Donbas is more than a fight for Ukrainian independence or against Russian malevolence, more than a fight for territory or to redraw borders, more than the ambitions of Putin or the courage of Zelensky, more than the towns we have never known and never will, more than strategy and tactics. It is soldiers whose names you will not know, fighting for causes we can hardly imagine. They are fighting for an ideal, fighting for freedom, fighting off fear and fighting just to fight. It is the world reduced to its most savage and primitive nature.  It is a place we would never want to know, but now must go. The past has vanished, the future does not exist, the present is here, it is now. “How far is it? How far is it now?”

*Click here to read "Getting There" by Sylvia Plath