To call bullshit on all of the jingoists' Turn the Tables cards, like "They're fighting for your rights!" or "He died a hero!" that superficially honor soldiers but whose real intent is to shield the bastards who start wars from culpability?

If you feel so moved, you can post your own poetry/essays/experiences at this site. And they will welcome any support that people can contribute.

Thanks!

Sweet sweet delicious pepperos!

The novel, Regeneration, by Pat Barker was made into a movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120001/
I haven't seen it yet, but would very much like to get the DVD.

This one has always stood out for me.

Lamentations

I FOUND him in the guard-room at the Base.
From the blind darkness I had heard his crying
And blundered in. With puzzled, patient face
A sergeant watched him; it was no good trying
To stop it; for he howled and beat his chest.
And, all because his brother had gone west,
Raved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief
Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling
Half-naked on the floor. In my belief
Such men have lost all patriotic feeling.

That's why I read this blog: I was ignorant of Sassoon's story. And of Richard Thompson. And Joss Whedon. And the many wonders of prime numbers. Etc etc - thanks to all, and a thoughtful Armistice Day, 2005....

I'm readig a lot of stuff like tht having to do with the survivors of the Pakistan earthquake.

The comfort comes from knowing that others have felt this way, that I'm not crazy for thinking about how awful the lies are or how our politicians are decieving us. The despair comes from the fact that I'm shocked, over and over, by how these things are perpetrated. You'd think I'd stop with the shock and outrage, but I swear the duplicity and dishonesty and meanness are a constant revelation.

In Stoppard's play, "The Real Thing" the character Henry gives a speech about a war resister who is a prisoner and has written a very poorly crafted political play. Henry has this to say about it, and about bad writing:

" Because it's balls. Mary's part is the least of it - it's merely ham-fisted. But when he gets into his stride, or rather his lurch, announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific - war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft... It's all here: the Stock Exchange, the arms dealers, the press barons... You can't fool Brodie - patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism... Pages and pages of it. It's like being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show of favourite simpletons, the india rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea..."

And, when it all ended, there was nothing really to justify it, except the supposed beastliness of the Hun. The Mobilisation of 1914 was somewhere between a Cold War scramble of nuclear bombers and an actual missile launch, only nobody seemed to have worked out how to stop.

It seemed far more futile than WW2, and the next twenty years made it seem a very hollow victory, and that has affected the image of that war in popular culture.

And Sassoon, as a survivor, was a part of that.

(I worked briefly at Napier University, which occupies the old neurasthenia hospital where the two lived and worked; the small collection of War Poets material there is quite remarkable.)

Never such innocence again

By the way, I once read soneone who said that Lord of the Rings was heavily by Tolkien's own experiences in the Great War. Is that just one interpretation of the story, or is there any record anywhere of Tolkien actually saying so.

There's one thing I remember very clearly from reading The Return of the King almost 30 years ago, which was how, even though Frodo did make it back to the Shire, the War had changed him.

He was in combat a couple times, got wounded (I think, or else got sick) and sent back to hospital in England.

And there he stayed. Every time it seemed like he might be well enough to be sent back to the front, he got sick again. His biographer insists that he wasn't malingering - his body was simply reluctant to endanger itself again, and staying sick was the best way to prevent that.

He lost two of his closest friends, and saw a lot of destruction and carnage, but his personal experiences in WWI were probably not as bad as some others'.

After seeing A Very Long Engagement, where Petain shows up in a less than flattering role, I asked my friend Elisabeth whatever had happened to that bastard after WW2. She says he never went to jail, because he was so old by then, but I understand that his last years were not happy ones.

Not that simple, by a long chalk.

The Great War was just another European control-of-trade war -- huge differences between wars for territory and wars over control of trade -- except there was industrialization, railroads, and the consequent logistical capacity to create a continuous front. That had never happened before. There's an alternate history where the Peace of Vienna was not a success, and the Great War didn't happen because the continuous front had the opportunity to not be a surprise, in that time and place. (Anyone who wants to point to the ACW as an obvious precursor has to explain why the various European powers involved were supposed to give more credence to minor features of that war than the dozen-odd each they'd fought in the meantime.)

Twentieth century wars don't categorize neatly; there were an awful lot of them. ("rebellion, or police action, containment or crusade") The influence of ideology wasn't increased; the influence of much better command and control technology was. (In part because the institutional memory of having none, zip, nada during mass battles lasting days during the Great War remains to this day.)

In a way, I wonder if the technology that made the Great War possible also caused that war. I am reminded of Sam Neil in Reilly, Ace of Spies where control of oil resources in the East was considered vital.

It's not that close.

Resources are only valuable if you can move them, or what you make with them, to where they are more valuable than they are now. (Otherwise you can't get mutually beneficial trade going, on the scale of nations, and otherwise you can't get the iron ore and the coal in the same place, etc. on the scale of industry.)

So, basically, who cares about control of resources if you can control how they are moved around? That's what 'control of trade' comes down to, and at the time, the British Empire had every major ocean strait and passage on the planet (with the partial exceptions of Panama and the Carribean approaches to the Gulf of Mexico) bolted down.

Which meant that they had substantially control of how trade worked, and the new German Empire had a sufficiently stupid head of state that they wound up trying to change this by fighting a land war.

(Oil, as the prime energy source that enables stuff to be moved around with the infrastructure we've got, is in something of a special mental category that it doesn't really deserve.)

I am glad people are asking, and glad to be able to explain. (The question about the poppies was from an 18-year-old in Georgia; I'm not surprised it wasn't in her high school curriculum.)

If any question why we died,
It was because our fathers lied.

I think there was some mention of his son dying in WWI, but I could be misremembering.

I never thought about it that way, Graydon. Thanks.

(You know, Teresa & Patrick, this is one of the many things that are great about your site. This is the place to be if we want an education. And it's fun too! Planning to issue Diplomas from the Making Light Institute?)

Funny how that works, eh?

It's interesting that the first real account of WWI I ever read, though fictionalized, was from the Canadian point of view. When I was a kid I adored the Anne of Green Gables novels, and the last book in the series takes place during the Great War.

And, well. Let's just say that one got a little soggy. I hadn't even realized previously to that that Canada had fought in WWI.

(Of course, I was, like, nine years old, and was still a little unclear on, um, everything.)

Patrick: chords here.

Two Sides of War

All wars are planned by older men
In council rooms apart,
Who call for greater armament
And map the battle chart.

But out along the shattered field
Where golden dreams turn gray,
How very young the faces were
Where all the dead men lay.

Portly and solemn in their pride,
The elders cast their vote
For this or that, or something else,
That sounds the martial note.

But where their sightless eyes stare out
Beyond life's vanished toys,
I've noticed nearly all the dead
Were hardly more than boys.

~Grantland Rice

From Poetry of the First World War.

Which meant that they had substantially control of how trade worked, and the new German Empire had a sufficiently stupid head of state that they wound up trying to change this by fighting a land war.

Which makes it rather odd to realize that Britain was basically the last major European power to get caught up in the war, and that various elements of the German government (including the Kaiser) seemed to have believed and even hoped that Britain would stay out.

I certainly wouldn't deny that economic and trade motives were important at some level, but I have a bit of trouble with the idea that it was "just another European control-of-trade war."

VIMY
(Steve and Rob Ritchie)

CHORUS
Raise your flask; aim your rifles high
I've had a dream, I've seen we three should have no fear at all
You'll die in Kenora, Billy; you, Jim, in Winnipeg
And I will end my days in Montreal

These people come to see me in my bedroom
With faces dim and names I can't recall
Some woman with a golden ring she comes to comb my hair
Then she dresses me and walks me down the hall
Well I can still put one foot before the other,
If someone points the way for me to go
Today the sun is shining and a crowd has gathered 'round
They put circles of red flowers on the stone

Chorus

Old Jim Rankin stood behind me in the tunnel
Spat on his bayonet and he wiped it with his hand
And he rocked from heel to heel, blew out his cheeks and whistled
While we waited for the signal to advance
Jimmy Rankin he was twenty and we thought him an old man
He said he'd fathered children by the score
By girls back in Winnipeg and girls in Calais
And he bragged, by God, there'd be a hundred more

Chorus

And Billy Whitefish from Kenora: jet black hair and eyes like coal
We all called him 'Chief' behind his back
He never smiled or laughed or joked or spoke that much at all
Just sat and smoked while we waited to attack
Well they poured shells over our heads into the hillside
In thirty yards our kit and boots were full of mud
But as we made the ridge, Jimmy went down on both knees
And he coughed into his sleeve and there was blood

Chorus

The last sound I ever heard was an explosion
And bodies flew like apples thrown by boys play
When I could see again, I was alone Jimmy wasn't there
And a crater marked the hillside where he'd lain
And Billy Whitefish from Kenora wound up in a German trench
Where he captured their machine gun all alone
And held them off until his ammunition was all spent
And they swarmed around and they hacked him to the bone

Chorus

Now every day I still remember what I told them
My two friends who that day from this earth were torn
And the craters and the trenches where they died now bear the names
Of the cities and the towns where they were born

Chorus

He'd fought to get his son a commission - pulled strings to get him through the medicals (he had terrible eyesight), arranged matters to get him into a front-line regiment, because it was what Kipling himself wanted. The fact that John was there to be killed was, in many ways, Kipling's doing alone. And then he died; he died wastefully, pointlessly (as did everyone in 1915, I suppose), and in the worst possible way from the point of view of his parents - there was no body, no closure that he was known to be dead, but there were reports of people who had seen him, grievously injured and in great pain, so even the comforting lie of "at least he died quickly" wasn't available. The self-loathing that came after that is entirely unsurprising. But the writing is powerful - Epitaphs of the War (which you quote one part of); My Boy Jack; The Children (the latter sums it all)

There's a comment above that he was for the war until John's death, which is a bit iffy. He still supported the war - I'm not sure he could do otherwise - but in a much more complex manner, and it shows in his writing. You still had cheerful things like The Irish Guards (I sing this in the shower sometimes), but it was tempered with work like Children, above, or Beginnings, or Death-Bed...

And thanks, Linkmeister, for a startlingly profound Grantland Rice poem. It touches the same core as this Wilfred Owen gem, which Britten sets most powerfully juxtaposed with the Agnus Dei in his War Requiem. If you don't know it, run, don't walk (and get the composer conducting - no other performance stacks up.)

At a Calvary Near The Ancre

One ever hangs where shelled roads part.
In this war He too lost a limb,
But His disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with Him.

Near Golgotha strolls many a priest,
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ's denied.

The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In 1989 Derek Jarman actually made a film of Britten's War Requiem. It is an extremely odd piece of work, both metaphorical and literal at the same time. I ordered it through inter-library loan last month, and the choices he made to visualize Britten's setting of that Abraham and Isaac text are...most disturbing.

For all its weirdness, though, the movie has some extraordinary performances. Sean Bean (Sam, from LOTR) is in it; Laurence Olivier has a cameo; but Tilda Swinton is really remarkable as Wilfred Owen's sister (? Nurse? Lover? It's all very ambiguous.)

Well, yeah -- the High Seas Fleet wasn't done yet. (Rather like the German General Staff a generation later having a planned kick-off date of 1945, things started a little earlier than expected.)

And yes, another European control-of-trade war, like the 100 Years War, not a war over the definitions of society or legitimacy of power, like the 30 Years War.

The carnage was a surprise; it wasn't supposed to be possible to sustain that intensity of combat. (Nor were the various high commands at all indifferent to it; the common understanding isn't all that accurate, having been set half a generation later through the filter of other crises.)

Someday, I'll figure out why it's so much easier to co-operate, to hold to duty beyond life or reason, in wars, in a despair of mud, than in the hope of a better world. (It might be as simple as the prospect of death acting to concentrate the mind.)

I read Owen, and I am trying to stuff my best friend's intestines back into his belly.

It's been mentioned above, but I really cannot recommend Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy highly enough.

The first, Regeneration is centred around the period when Sassoon and Owen were at Craiglockhart hospital,the second, The Eye in the Door, is a fascinating look at the Home Front in the latter stages of the war, and The Ghost Road, the third in the trilogy is altogether a great book.

Do yourself a favour, read these books.

There's a TV adaptation that's been running on various of the History Channels -- ten one-hour parts, right now running Tuesday evenings on the Military History Channel (in the US, anyway). It's all right, and again spends much time on the "faraway" fronts, but it's mostly a narrator and stock film (though, ironically, its maps are quite good).

Of course, this book is a short version of the three-volume general history Strachan is working on -- the first volume is out, and is, alone, four times the length of this one (making this, as someone noted, a Borgesian condensation of a book that does not yet exist). That may well become the standard long history, if it's ever actually finished.

Uh, speaking of which, Igor go defile paper with ink now.

You may be thinking of Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker last year, where he suggested that Strachan was "giving us, with a slightly Borgesian note, the popular synopsis of a trilogy of books that does not, as yet, actually exist." As I mentioned in the other WWI thread, it's a very good review (covering several recent books on the Great War), and definitely worth reading.

Gopnik was quite impressed with Strachan's book, so when I add in your recommendation, I find that I must add it to my list of "next things to order from Amazon"....

*10 bars excised to maintain formal tension.

http://www.wgbh.org/pages/pri/spirit/2005index.html#111

That reminds me of the French comics weekly Spirou from 30 years ago. One of its features was an illustrated history of firearms, going wayyy back. Every once in a while, a drastic new improvement would come up and the narrator would unfailingly exclaims:

"With such a weapon, War has become impossible!"

Churchill eventually resigned, and went off to France to command an infantry battalion.

A part of the argument of the programme was that this experience greatly influenced the D-Day planning, with Churchill determined not to see the disaster repeated. Which is partly why the British and Canadians used so much of the specialised armour, and why there was so much emphasis on getting troops inland as fast as possible.

That argument may have been exaggerated, but I don't doubt that Churchill, and the British armed forces, was influenced by that experience.

Another comparison: infantry casualty rates in the NE Europe Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day, were pretty close to the long-term average on the Western Front. But the ratio between infantry and others had changed a great deal.

Resistance - Not So Futile After All

There never was such a useless war.

It would be a very different world now if Britain had said in 1914 "OK, fine, have Belgium, have France, who cares about the Continent anyway, you want to conquer yourselves another couple of French provinces every forty years until the end of time, no problem." The more I look at WWI and what came out of it, the more that looks like a sensible strategy.

I have to apologize in advance; adjectives like "all" tend to bring out the pedant in me ;-)

There were a passel of nationalistic wars in Europe during that period: either wars of liberation/unification (e.g., Italy, or the various Prussian wars) or wars of aggrandizement (e.g., various Balkan nations trying to recover their Glorious Lost Empires).

There were also various independence struggles in Latin America, followed by wars between Latin American states and civil wars and revolutions within them.

Some other wars between technologically more-or-less equal combatants:
The Crimean War
The Spanish-American War
The Russo-Japanese war -- which could, if you like, be seen as an early sign of the planet getting too full -- two expanding empires colliding.

It's perhaps worth remembering that the Afghans were eventually able to defeat the British, and that the Ethiopians were able to defeat the Italians in the 1890s.

Wasn't there a British historian who argued recently that Britain should have done just that, in part because it would have let Britain hold on to its empire longer? (As well as the argument that then Hitler wouldn't have amounted to anything more than a failed painter.)

So, even if you remove someone, it doesn't mean that History won't bounce back to the same overall sequence of events.

(Still, I'd like to see what would happen if someone from the Future snatched away Dubya, Cheney and Rove.)

There was also a background noise of conflict over coaling stations as control of the seas. See the voyage of the Russian fleet to meet the Japanese with Russian routing so well covered in the press.

I'd sooner argue the US Civil War was between disparate tech levels than argue the South matched Northern technology. One very quickly begins to either confound or distinguish technology and industrial base - both the Boers and the Spanish had superior technology but it wasn't their own.

Some say the German war aims of 1914 were as much control of the Allied colonies as of the Allies; as a continental power Gemany could not attack in the colonies and so attacked at home.

I think that in the context Jo Walton was talking about, "disparate tech levels" meant things like Britain vs the Sudan, or France vs Vietnam.

Technology in the North and South really was pretty much equal (it wasn't like one side had cannons and trains and the other didn't). And the South was able to come up with military innovations like ironclads, electrically detonated naval mines, and a submarine.

Tolkien's war may not have been so bad as say, Owens', or Graves', but it was bad.

War breaks one. Even a brief taste of it changes one, in ways both great and small.

I spent most my my war year in hostpitals. In some ways that was worse than had I been in Iraq. Had I been there my fears (and guilt) for those who were not in so safe a place as I would have been less. The happiest day of my life was when the plane landed and all of them (even the few I despise) were safe at home again.

For Tolkien, it had to have been worse.

TK