Where Wars Go to Die Page 3

  “No particular reason,” I said. “I found it footnoted in a book. The Americans fought there, a small action, not really a battle.”

  “Small?” He shook his head. “My grandfather was killed there. Shot through the shoulder and bled to death three hours later.”

  He said this matter-of-factly, but still, it hit home. It’s not that John was actively grieving over his grandfather—a man my age, he had been born long after his grandfather’s death—but he had a gap in his life that memories of his grandfather should have filled. I had wonderful experiences with my own grandfather (exempted from the war as a New York City fireman), he taught me many valuable things—but John had never had this, and so it’s right to say he suffered from “some form of life-diminishing trouble.”

  Just recently, visiting a dear friend who is about to turn ninety-six, she asked me what I was working on, and I told her about this book.

  “My father was in that awful war. Served with the French. My mother was terribly cross with him, going off when he didn’t have to, and she was alone when I was born in 1918.”

  Jane told me the story—not so much about the war, which of course she doesn’t remember, but a trip eight years afterward, when her father took the family over to France to see where he had fought. They went to Verdun first, and Jane described the powerful impression all the spiky, broken trees made on her little girl imagination; they then went on to Chateau-Thierry, where they visited the grave of her father’s best friend, killed in the battle there.

  “That’s why I go to Veterans Day service in town every November,” she said. “To remember Norman Williams, my father’s best friend.”

  My wife, daughter, and I made our own pilgrimage to the Flanders battlefields a few years ago. Our guide, Annette, was a self-taught expert on the war—she lived in one of the few houses in Ypres that survived four years of fighting. On our first day, she got us up early, loaded us in her van, and off we drove toward the Somme. Along with us were a couple from Australia, a man and woman in their fifties.

  Later, after touring the battlefield proper, we stopped somewhat south of it on a country lane running through the middle of rolling farmland.

  “Right here,” Annette announced. She got out, held the door open for the Australian woman, took her hand and led her to a grassy knoll.

  The woman’s great-uncle had died here in 1918, fighting with the Australians in the battle for Villers-Bretonneux. Annette, as part of her guide service, will research where your ancestor was stationed, where his unit was engaged, where he was wounded or killed. The Australian woman had never known her great-uncle, of course, but she had always been very close to her grandmother, her great-uncle’s sister. Her grandmother had never been able to afford to come to France to visit her brother’s grave, but, before dying, she begged her granddaughter to go visit it for her. And so, a little later, when we came to the cemetery and found the grave with his name on it, the moment—ninety-six years after he had been buried there—was almost unbearably poignant … and not just for the great-niece.

  If you visit the Flanders battlefields or the ones along the Somme, walk the rows in the well-kept cemeteries managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, stare up at the plaques to the missing and their endless names, visit Ypres, go that night to the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate (“We will remember them,” intone the onlookers as the ceremony ends)—if you do these things, do them solemnly, you will end up thinking that one of the central purposes of the world is to remember World War I. This is Remembrance with a capital R, with many people, even now, earning their livelihood from it; thousands of pilgrims still come to the fields of the western front to see where their ancestors died.

  But if you visit Kobarid in Slovenia as I have, on a very different front of the Great War, you will come to the exact opposite conclusion. Here, the war is almost totally forgotten by the larger world, though this is the epicenter of its most infamous battle. It’s not Remembrance that is capitalized here, but Forgetting.

  Before Kobarid was a Slovenian market town, before it was a Yugoslavian market town, before it was, briefly, an American market town (in the zone of occupation in 1945), before it was a German market town, before it was an Austrian market town, it was an Italian market town, not “Kobarid” but “Caporetto.”

  Caporetto was the scene of the catastrophic Italian defeat of 1917, when hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers, poorly led, cold and weary, homesick, fled before the Austrian-German attack in the nightmarish retreat described in A Farewell to Arms; it’s Caporetto where the Italian army got the reputation for cowardice it’s never shed since.

  The Italians don’t want to remember Caporetto, despite Mussolini having erected, on a hill above the town, a “Charnel House” for the dead. The Austrians, victors in the battle, went on to lose the war, so they don’t visit either. A few military buffs, West Point or Sandhurst types, come with their maps, and they can hire mountaineering guides to take them to where the fighting raged on improbably high Alpine peaks, but other than that, the Great War is forgotten—at least until you go for a walk in the woods.

  Walk almost anywhere, especially above the beautiful Soca River (called the “Isonzo” in 1917, scene of a dozen named battles), and you’ll soon come upon old dugouts, trenches, pillboxes, latrines, tunnels which the falling autumn leaves, the erosive hand of time, have blended with ruins dating from the Roman era, so sometimes—with no signage to help explain—you don’t know which earthwork was raised in 1917 by Italian Alpini and which in 217 by Roman legionnaires. And yet, looking at these remains, climbing up the hidden stairways, knowing a little something of what happened here in 1916–17, the tragedy comes alive in an even stronger way than it does in Flanders, just because the memory isn’t served to you all prettied up, but raw, so to grasp it you have to reach.

  Flanders with its commemorative sites on one side of Remembrance; Caporetto and its hidden ruins on the other. It’s exactly this difference that divides the familiar literary canon of World War I and the forgotten literature included here.

  In the years leading up to the ninety-fifth anniversary of the war, the media kept an eye on the last known surviving veterans, and noted with sadness when each died. One of the liveliest, right to the end, was 111-year-old Harry Patch, the last known survivor of trench warfare, having been wounded in the groin at Passchendaele while serving with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in 1917. You can go online and watch an interview with Private Patch recorded shortly before his death in 2009, and it’s fascinating—not just his stories of the trenches, but the wobbly yet strong voice he tells them in. It could be the voice of the Great War itself, the inflection, the tone, coming out of the mouth of the only man left who could speak to what it was like.

  Now they’re all gone, not only the soldiers, sailors, and nurses, but anyone who can tell us what that pre-1914 world was like. In their place, we have grainy black-and-white photographs, newspapers rotting away in museum attics, a few jumpy newsreels, and—strongest witnesses—the books written and published during the war, the ones I so assiduously seek out. Old veterans, as compelling as their stories were, tended to have their reflections shaded by everything that happened in the world since, or the expectations of the people interviewing them. The surviving books are immune to this shading. When you read them, you’re getting 1914–18 pure.

  On our tour of the Somme battlefield, Annette drove us to a place that is usually off-limits to most visitors. Mouquet Farm, on a slight rise behind Thiepval, was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the battle, the German trench line there holding out long after every other position around it had been captured; there can’t have been many spots on the western front that received such concentrated shelling, nor had so many young men killed trying to take it. “Moo Cow Farm,” they called it, or sometimes “Mucky Farm.”

  Annette had made friends with the farmer who lives there now, thanks to a gift of fine Belgian chocolates delivere
d every Christmas. He was on his tractor spreading manure over his fields when we got there (the fields that still show chalk white stripes where the old trenches were), but he climbed down and came over to greet us. He spoke only French, so I didn’t catch all that he said, but at the end, stooping, he picked something up from the ground and handed to me as a souvenir.

  It was shrapnel—three rusted, marble-sized balls of it, plus a little pretzel-like twist of rusty barbed wire. He didn’t have to search hard for this—his fields are composed of scraps of old metal. It staggered me, holding these; I had enough time to wonder if it was “good” shrapnel, having exploded and gone flying directly into the earth, or whether it was “bad” shrapnel, having been intercepted by a young man’s arm, leg, or heart on its way. I carefully wrapped the metal up when we got back to Annette’s house and carried it with me across the Atlantic; it’s been on my shelf ever since.

  It brings much back, when I take it out to hold it again; it gets me thinking. But when I hold these books, the ones manufactured during the war like shrapnel was manufactured, I feel it even stronger—the last faint pulse of the past, with no rust, no tarnish, no diminution.

  In almost every instance, the books from which the excerpts are drawn are ones I found through the process described above—by searching as many used bookstores as I could, near home and on my travels. Almost every book cost less than a dollar—further proof that this literature is forgotten, even by collectors.

  Once, in an old bookstore in Chicago, in a locked, glassed-in case, I came across a volume that Edith Wharton put together to raise money for Belgian refugees. Published by Scribner’s in 1916, it’s called The Book of the Homeless (Les Livres des San-Foyer). Wharton recruited her friends in the art world to contribute, so not only are there essays by Joseph Conrad and Henry James, poems by W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, and Jean Cocteau; not only are there little exhortative paragraphs by Teddy Roosevelt, General Joffre, and Sarah Bernhardt; not only are there musical score excerpts from Vincent d’Indy and Igor Stravinsky (Souvenir d’une marche boche) … not only are there all these, but plates drawn by, among others, John Singer Sargent, Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Charles Dana Gibson, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

  Great geniuses pitting their art against the horrors of war. Who wouldn’t want to bring a book like that home? My hands were trembling when I turned to the price. $7,500. I almost cried.

  But, as with every other aspect of life now, dusty old bookstores have gone online, so you can search the world with your computer for an affordable copy of a book you’re longing to have. A bookstore in Pittsburgh listed a 1916 first edition of The Book of the Homeless for $65; some of the plates have been pilfered, but other than that it’s perfect—and so one of the most interesting survivors is now mine.

  While probably no one cares about the distinction but me, this is not an “anthology,” not in the old sense, where writings are dumped higgledy-piggledy into a book like old clothes into a trunk, with little sorting. A “compilation” might be a better word, or, in 1914 phrasing, a “reader,” a transformative reader, where the compiler shares a personal selection, with lots of comments along the way, trying to give the sense of reading and exploring together. It’s also a book of literary criticism and comparison, a historical record, and not least of all a personal narrative by someone who, just when the world seems to be abandoning them, is still in love with printed books.

  As much as I’ve learned from reading the books in their entireties, almost all of them benefit from being shortened and abridged, so there will be no shortage of editorial ellipses. As for the whys and wherefores of the passages selected, I had several considerations in mind.

  Excerpts that vividly reflect the mood of the time caught my eye, as did, conversely, writings that speak to our era across the years. Some passages were chosen primarily because of who wrote them. Henry James, writing of visiting the wounded in London hospitals, uses his most impenetrable late-Jamesian style—but Henry James is, well, Henry James. Other excerpts were chosen because they contribute to telling a story, or rather two stories—one about the larger tragedy of a civilization in the process of destroying itself, the other about the individual tragedies of the souls caught up in it. (The older writers tend to be better on the first, the younger writers on the second.) Empathy is important—I was always looking for writers who rose above their nationality and remembered their humanity. Several were chosen because they are outstandingly bad, but revealing in their wretchedness, giving us insight into what people of the time, ordinary people, were reading.

  It’s hard to generalize about the overall mood of these writings when you have, on one hand, the radical originality of Randolph Bourne and, on the other, the cheery rhythms of the (then) world’s most popular poet, Robert W. Service. But decades after the war ended, Philip Larkin, looking back on the assumptions and beliefs of the prewar era, wrote his famous line about “never such innocence again.”

  Innocence? Yes, perhaps—but writers like Shaw, Wells, Conrad, Mann, and Rolland, whatever else they were, were certainly not innocents.

  Or were they? There was little in human nature that would have surprised fifty-year-old Nobel Prize–winning novelists, but the organized, mechanical butchery of the first truly “total” war—yes, this would have surprised them, shaken them, staggered them … and it’s this response of brutalized innocence that colors many of the passages quoted here.

  To stress a point made earlier—one of the surprises I had in compiling this book was how so many of the attitudes characteristic of what we now term the “modern” age were on display even while the war was in progress. No historian, looking back on the Great War from the cynical vantage point of the 1960s, managed more irony than George Bernard Shaw did writing in 1914; no one, writing today, had a larger, broader sense of war’s human tragedy than the classicist Gilbert Murray writing in 1917. Chauvinism, jingoism, hate—there’s plenty of these in the writers’ responses, but there is also objectivity, generosity, forgiveness.

  Murray, who understood war’s awfulness better than most, still thought it was worth fighting.

  “I desperately desire to hear of German dreadnoughts sunk in the North Sea,” he wrote, marveling at his own bloodthirstiness. “Mines are treacherous engines of death, but I should be only too glad to help lay one of them. When I see that 20,000 Germans have been killed in such-and-such an engagement, and next day that it was only 2,000, I am sorry.”

  Almost all the writers included here shared this opinion, and the courage of the ones who didn’t, writers like Bertrand Russell, Jane Addams, and the all-but-forgotten G. F. Nicolai, still compels our admiration 100 years later.

  If I were to choose one word to describe the characteristic quality in all these writings, it would be not “innocence” but “wonder”—wonder in the old, prewar sense, meaning “to feel astonishment.” The British writers in particular use the word “wonderful” surprisingly often, applying it to what in our view is the exact opposite of “wonderful”—to heavy artillery barrages or the towns those barrages destroyed. This kind of astonishment, this incapacity to believe man is capable of doing what he was then in the process of doing, this “wonder” that it isn’t all a nightmare but real, colors almost every word included here. It’s a response that wouldn’t survive the war; after 1918, bloodlettings and butcheries wouldn’t surprise us again.

  There’s another note that colors much of the writing: guilt. These were middle-aged or older men and women, and many of them felt ashamed and embarrassed that they were only writing about the war, not fighting it. Maurice Maeterlinck lamented, “At these moments of tragedy, none should be allowed to speak who cannot shoulder a rifle, for the written word seems so monstrously useless and so overwhelmingly trivial in the face of this mighty drama.” Even a raving jingoist like Kipling, when visiting the trenches, could write, “The soldiers stared, with justified contempt I thought, upon the civilian who scuttled through their life for a few emotional min
utes in order to make words out of their blood.”

  With the guilt came doubt—were their talents up to describing what they witnessed? Even the supremely confident Edith Wharton could speak of “those strange and contradictory scenes of war that bring home to the bewildered on-looker the utter impossibility of figuring out how the thing really happens.” And, assuming they could find the right words, would it even matter? H. G. Wells has his thinly disguised alter ego, Mr. Britling (in his forgotten classic, Mr. Britling Sees It Through), penning articles about the war, worry, “If he wrote such things, would they be noted or would they just vanish indistinguishably into the general tumult? Would they be audible and helpful shouts, or just waste of shouting?”

  The writers worry about understanding the war, but in the end, they all give it a try. Even as Mr. Britling frets about his son in the trenches, tries to balance this with his own involvement, he realizes, “He could find no real point of contact with the war except the point of his pen. Only at his writing desk were the great presences of the conflict his.”

  Most writers, while feeling those doubts, probably, in the end, consoled themselves with a reflection similar to that made by Richard Harding Davis, the great American war correspondent:

  “Some men are born to fight, and others to write.”

  There’s an important final point. This book will have much to say about war, but even more to say about literature. For it was a literary challenge each of these authors faced—how to write about something that (unlike love and hate, friendship and loneliness, hope and despair, and all the “normal” human emotions) they had never experienced before: the end of the world. For this is what they honestly thought they were faced with—the destruction of the civilization of which they were among the primary creators, and the loss of everything they held dear.

  What kind of moral, ethical, and imaginative forces do you find in yourself to pit against this? In total war, writers would be expected to “enlist” like everyone else; writers in 1914 were more influential than they ever were before or ever would be afterwards; print remained the dominant means of communication. How writers used print, how they responded to the catastrophe, tells us much about the power—and lack of power—literature had at its height. The writers included here argued about the war, moralized about it, witnessed it, prevaricated and lied about it, pitied those caught up in it, mourned the dead, sought—some of them—to amuse and entertain, and, in the end, exhausted, reflected on what it all meant—and the chapters will be organized accordingly.