Where Wars Go to Die Read online

  The military reputation of Germany is so great in the world, and likely to remain so, whatever the issue of the present war, that we are here faced by a grave critical issue which concerns the future of the whole world. The conduct of wars has been transformed before our eyes. In any future war the example of Germany will be held to consecrate the new methods, and the belligerents who are not inclined to accept the supreme authority of Germany may yet be forced in their own interests to act in accordance with it. The mitigating influence of religion over warfare has long ceased to be exercised, for the international Catholic Church no longer possesses the power to exert such influence, while the national Protestant churches are just as bellicose as their flocks. Now we see the influence of morality over warfare similarly tending to disappear. Henceforth, it seems, we have to reckon with a conception of war which accounts it a function of the supreme State, standing above morality and therefore able to wage war independently of morality. Necessity—the necessity of scientific effectiveness—becomes the sole criterion of right and wrong.

  The conclusion seems to be that we are to-day entering on an era in which war will not only flourish as vigorously as in the past, but with an altogether new ferocity and ruthlessness, with a vastly increased power of destruction, and on a scale of extent and intensity involving an injury to civilisation and humanity which no wars of the past ever perpetrated.

  From Essays in War-Time, by Havelock Ellis; Constable and Co., London, 1917.

  Keep Our Mouths Shut

  —W. B. Yeats

  A Reason For Keeping Silent

  I think it better that at times like these

  We poets keep our mouths shut, for in truth

  We have no gift to set a statesman right;

  He’s had enough of meddling who can please

  A young girl in the indolence of her youth

  Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

  From The Book of the Homeless, edited by Edith Wharton; Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1916.

  Chapter Three:

  Witness

  Writers seeking to do more than pontificate from the comfort and safety of their studies could go see for themselves what the war was about. From the ferry terminal at Folkestone to the front lines in Ypres was ninety miles—the distance from Manhattan to Philadelphia—and a good part of the journey would be in the clubby smoking room of a cross-Channel steamer. From Paris to the battlefields on the Marne was thirty miles, so even a leisurely tour would get a writer back to the Ritz in time for cocktails. The cataclysm lay close at hand, and once the stalemate of trench warfare set in, the writer could make the visit in complete safety.

  There were several ways civilian writers gained proximity to the war. They could have themselves accredited as war correspondents for one of the numerous daily newspapers, though—after an initial freewheeling period—this meant coming under the control of military censors. Too much control; the correspondents’ stream of cheery, optimistic dispatches having nothing to do with actual conditions would eventually contribute to the postwar disillusionment. Even as early as 1915, a favorite catchphrase among soldiers, delivered with a cynical shake of the head, was “Can’t believe a word you read.”

  Writers, if sufficiently famous, would be taken on elaborately choreographed official tours of the war zone. While authors as honest as Edith Wharton could rise above the obvious traps of these chaperoned visits, lesser writers usually couldn’t.

  Writers, especially younger ones, could join one of the numerous volunteer ambulance brigades or hospitals springing up in all the Allied nations—the American Field Service, the Friends Ambulance Unit, the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, and dozens of similar outfits. Indeed, being a wartime ambulance driver was all but de rigueur for postwar writing success; a partial list of those who served includes Hemingway, Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Somerset Maugham, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, Malcolm Cowley, and, yes, Gertrude Stein.

  Some writers didn’t have to go to the war—the war came to them. Mildred Aldrich, after a long editorial career in the States, retired to the small hamlet of Huiry, east of Paris, to spend the remainder of her days there tending to her garden and beloved cats. A few months after moving in, the Battle of the Marne erupted all around her, and for the next four years she was never far from the front lines, giving her the material for five bestselling books.

  (My small, tidy copy of A Hilltop on the Marne, the first in this series, is a sixth impression from December 1915; on the flyleaf, written in pencil, is “Christmas 1915,” the initial “J.,” and the note “The author is a friend of mine.”)

  During the war’s first three years, the best, most objective witnesses tended to be American. Their country still remained neutral, which gave them more freedom to move around than their British or French counterparts, plus the ability to stand at least somewhat above the fray. Most of them favored the Allies (H. L. Mencken was one exception), but, at least until 1917 and Wilson’s declaration of war, they could write honestly and not feel like they were letting down the side.

  Their reactions when facing this enormous new fact of total war are of permanent value, if for no other reason than that they are new. None of them had seen anything like this before; their moral sense hadn’t been jaded, and so, reading them now, we can witness what happens when the nineteenth-century way of looking at the world collides with the twentieth-century way of doing business.

  Several things hit the writers hard. Civilian refugees fleeing the fighting—this contradicted all writerly notions of mercy and fair play. The sound of artillery—writers could hear this well back of the front, and it was often the first of war’s realities to hit them. Destroyed houses in shelled villages—writer after writer describes the pathos of these homes split in half, exposing the family’s secrets.

  (If you want to separate the real writers of World War I from the hacks, focus on how they describe the sound of cannon. The hacks like to write, “The guns spoke,” which is both as passively bland a description as you could find and, unwittingly, the most telling. Writers who worked harder at their craft always devoted more care to describing the sound of artillery, without resorting to the obvious clichés.)

  Many of these writers noted another bizarre aspect of the war. A few miles behind the desolation of no man’s land were often scenes of lush pastoral beauty, as if the war were being fought a thousand miles away. This kind of irony added to the writer’s sense of unreality, the sense that they were trying to describe something “entirely beyond human experience.”

  Given that this was an experience entirely beyond anything these civilians had ever witnessed before, it’s remarkable how well they managed to write about it. Compare their prose style with the earlier writers in this volume, the ones who opined, argued, and pontificated far from the shooting. The eyewitnesses, as they move closer to war’s reality, work their way—are forced to work their way—toward a tauter prose style; they replace lazy, bloated adverbs with lean, well-chosen adjectives; purple passages with objective ones; sweeping generalizations with individualized moments and particular scenes.

  Few of them bother wasting time on their own personal responses, though these come through implicitly by what they choose to describe and how they choose to describe it; they take their duty as eyewitnesses seriously. Their prose styles, along with the attitudes that shaped them, were changing under the pressure of the enormities their words had to describe, becoming more modern, more tempered.

  As Camus wrote after the century’s next world war, “When even the simplest words and phrases cost their weight in freedom and blood, the artist must learn to handle them with restraint.”

  No other writer felt so heartsick over the war as Edith Wharton. A passionate Francophile (she lived in France for over thirty years), she could write in total sincerity that the French were “the most intelligent people in the world,” and worried, in novels, essays, poems, and letters, that civilization would fall if France were defeated
.

  Biographer Hermione Lee describes how deep this identification went.

  “She spoke French immaculately. Her letters and diaries are full of French words and phrases, almost instinctively used. Much of her correspondence—and her conversation—was in French. She was divorced through the French courts. She dealt with every aspect of French bureaucracy, law and administration, particularly in wartime, with tremendous competence. She could write fiction in French. She had numerous French friends, French publishers, French readers. Whether she dreamed in French we do not know.”

  She was fifty-two when the war began, at the height of her literary talents and her equally impressive organizational ones. As part of her commitment to the war effort (partial list), she raised money for Wharton’s American Hostels for Refugees; operated charity grocery and clothing depots in Paris; set up fund-raising committees in America; hosted Christmas parties for hundreds of refugees; opened two sanatoriums for soldiers with tuberculosis; collared her writer, painter, and composer friends for contributions to The Book of the Homeless (which, after her relentless promotion efforts, brought in $9,500 for her hostels); and authored three books on the war herself.

  Her Fighting France was intended to help sway a still-dithering United States into taking a more active role. She wrote American friends:

  “The German atrocities one hears of are true. Spread it abroad as much as you can. It should be known that it is to America’s interest to help stem this hideous flood of savagery. No civilized race can remain neutral in feeling now.”

  The French knew how valuable a champion they had in her; in 1916, she was made a Chevalier, and then an Officier of the Legion d’honneur. Her war work wore her out; she collapsed with heart trouble in 1918, and never totally regained her health. “In more than a manner of speaking, she gave her heart to France.”

  Mildred Aldrich is one of the most forgotten writers of World War I, and one of the most deserving of rediscovery. Written in epistolary form, as letters to a friend back home in America, her books tell of life in a simple French village just behind the front lines, and combine two literary genres that would seem to be incompatible: a book of simple rural pleasures with a book on war.

  She spent her working life in Boston, then—a lifelong Francophile—retired to a peasant’s cottage in the small village of Huiry, just in time to be caught up in the Battle of the Marne. She was a close friend of Gertrude Stein (she liked saying that she really didn’t understand Stein’s work, but was sure Gertrude knew what she was doing), and, at least in her first book, the letters (though she doesn’t use salutations) are probably addressed to Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

  She was sixty-one when the war broke out—old enough to remember young men going off to fight the Civil War—and the surprising courage she found in herself was her making both as a writer and as a woman.

  Though ignored by critics, Aldrich has always had her small band of devotees, many of whom, a hundred years after her books came out, still make the pilgrimage to her cottage in Huiry to see for themselves the village she wrote of so movingly.

  A Hilltop on the Marne was a bestseller in the States, going into seventeen printings; she used the royalties to help care for Huiry’s wounded soldiers. Next to the title page on my copy is a medallion of her profile done by an artist named Theodore Spicer-Simson. If Aldrich was as strong and compassionate in person as the face he depicts, than she would have been a woman well worth meeting.

  Richard Harding Davis, at fifty-two, was not only the most famous and highly paid war correspondent in the world—he had all but invented the role. In America, at the turn of the century, his adventurous life, even more than his highly romanticized novels and reportage on war, was a tremendous influence on a whole generation of American writers.

  Van Wyk Brooks’s summary is worth quoting.

  “These were the times of Richard Harding Davis, a young man who was so dramatic in such a special way that he became the symbol of a young man’s epoch. He was one of those magnetic types who establish patterns of living for others of their kind, and the notion of the novelist as war correspondent which prevailed so long in American writing began in the early 1890s undoubtedly with him. It was the result of a personality that brought back in a humdrum business world the adventurous swashbuckling life of another time … One of the most influential of writers, not as a writer but as a man, Davis was like the reporter who made himself King; Kipling himself had less personal influence than this literary soldier of fortune who was all high spirits, good looks and sporting blood … Davis was a man of generous sympathies, always on the side of the under-dog; as a correspondent, he was swift and shrewd.”

  By the time he wrote With the Allies, his youthful good looks were gone, but not his boyish sense of adventure; much of the book involves his staying one step ahead of the Germans in Belgium who arrested him and threatened to shoot him as a spy. But it’s more than that. Davis had seen as much of war as any writer, and he brought a steely professionalism to bear on scenes of horror that might have overwhelmed a less experienced man.

  Another American caught by the war was Frances Wilson Huard, the feisty chatelaine of the luxurious Chateau de Villiers, sixty miles from Paris on the Marne. Her husband was Charles Huard, a prominent French lithographer, etcher, and illustrator, who was mobilized as a war artist by the government.

  “Listen,” he tells her, as he’s about to leave for the front,

  “Listen—before I forget. My will is at my notary’s in Paris, and on your table is a letter to your father. If anything happens to me you know what to do.”

  But it’s Frances who turns out to be the one in danger. As the German troops advance on her village of Charly, she evacuates the chateau and the hospital she’s begun there for French troops, fleeing with her maids, cooks, and butlers, one step ahead of the Uhlans, until with the battle over she returns to her home through the desolation described in her bestselling My Home in the Field of Honor.

  The book is illustrated with drawings by her husband in the style of Gustave Dore. At the back of my copy is an ad for other books on the war published by Grosset & Dunlap, including I Accuse! by A German; “a Scathing Arraignment of the German War Policy,” showing “to every patriotic American” how “the German masses were deluded with the idea they were making a defensive war to protect the Fatherland.”

  Henry Beston’s classic account of his life in a beach shack on the dunes of Cape Cod, The Outermost House, has been continually in print since first being published in 1928, and is considered one of the masterpieces of American nature writing.

  Beston was twenty-six when the war broke out, and he had already spent his student years in France. He volunteered for ambulance duty, and his account of his experience, A Volunteer Poilu (published under his real name, Henry Sheahan), is totally different in style and tone than his later books on the natural world. In the latter, he seldom writes about people or world events; it’s as if the war permanently soured his interest in humankind, and he turned to celebrating seascapes and landscapes as a relief from the horrors he had witnessed on the western front.

  He wrote a second book on the war, Full Speed Ahead, about his time aboard Navy destroyers, which is even harder for collectors to find than A Volunteer Poilu.

  His experience in the trenches seems to add a second level to passages in his nature writing that at first glance seem to have nothing to do with war.

  “Every once and a while, when one lives in the country and observes wild animals, one is sure to come upon dramas and acts of courage which profoundly stir the heart. The tiniest birds fight off the marauder, the mother squirrel returns to the tree already scorched by the on-coming fire, even the creatures in the pond face in their own strange fashion the odds and the dark. Surely courage is one of the foundations on which all life rests! I find it moving to reflect that to man has been given the power to show courage in so many worlds, and to honor it in the mind, the spirit, and the flesh.”


  John Reed was a younger, more radical incarnation of Richard Harding Davis—a war correspondent with a vivid writing style, an outsized personality, and tremendous courage. His eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, has been considered a classic since the day it was published, and the biopic movie Reds brought him an even larger posthumous reputation. “The playboy of the revolution,” Upton Sinclair called him. When he died in 1920 he was buried in the Kremlin.

  Twenty-eight when the war broke out, he went in search of something more adventurous (and underreported-on) than the western front—and found it in Serbia, Bessarabia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The War in Eastern Europe is a forgotten minor classic; here in the introduction he tries to explain what he was striving for.

  “The most important thing to know about the war is how the different peoples live; their environment, traditions, and the revealing things they do and say. In times of peace, many human qualities are covered up which come to the surface in a sharp crisis, but on the other hand, much of personal and racial quality is submerged in times of public stress. And in this book, I have simply tried to give my impressions of human beings as we found them in the countries of Eastern Europe, from April to October 1915.”

  My first edition is wonderfully illustrated with drawings by his companion on his travels, the artist Boardman Robinson. Just the captions alone give you a sense of what they look like.

  “Half-savage giants dressed in the ancient panoply of that curious Slavic people whose main business is war … Turcomans from beyond the Caspian … Blind for life … A glimpse of the Serbian retreat … A little avenger of Kosovo.”