Where Wars Go to Die Read online

  The books excerpted here were written with passion, sincerity, and belief, and they deserve to be read one last time, to see what’s worth remembering in them and worth preserving. Taken as a whole, they should help widen and deepen the narrow literary canon of the war that has ossified into place.

  So. It’s the summer of 1914—to outward appearances, a time of peace and unprecedented prosperity right across the European continent. The heir to the tottering Austrian-Hungarian throne makes a foolish, ill-advised trip to the city of Sarajevo and is shot along with his wife by an amateurish Bosnian-Serbian assassin. Ordinary people hardly notice, so caught up are they in their peaceful lives, until, without warning, the thing happens, the long-dreaded thing, and these same people, with no quarrel against each other or conceivable interest in the fate of the silly archduke, are joining armies in their millions as if, demented, they have caught a common, lemming-like impulse of mutual extermination, an evil death wish that will all too soon come true.

  The nations look to their great novelists, poets, and dramatists as they look to their statesmen and generals, desperate for guidance. A telegram arrives, the maid brings it into the parlor. It’s an editor asking for a quick 1,500 words on the developing struggle, and already talking about a visit to the war zone and a possible book. (A book? Well, that’s some good news at any rate; our writer, like other breadwinners, worries about the war robbing him of his livelihood.) The author scans it again, nods—he or she has been expecting just this—and immediately goes up to the study and starts work, determined to prove, in the unfolding crisis, that writers can do their part.

  Chapter One:

  Argue

  Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but as war broke out in 1914 it was the first response of the mystery writers, the playwrights, the Nobel Prize winners. Events happened so fast that writers hardly had time for anything more nuanced than reflexive chauvinism. The archduke was shot in Sarajevo on June 28. On August 2, near the small border town of Jonchery, a French corporal named Jules Andre Peugeot shot a German lieutenant named Camille Mayer as he fired back; both died, thereby becoming the first casualties of the First World War—and eerily prefiguring the tit-for-tat stalemate of the next four years.

  Four weeks later, forty thousand French soldiers had been killed and over two hundred thousand wounded, with German casualties just as high. The unstoppable inertia of mobilization, the secret treaties that compelled nations to fight, the speed of the German advance through Belgium. Writers could respond to this fait accompli, but they couldn’t get out ahead of it, or have the luxury of arguing whether or not their country should get involved.

  They argued anyway, inspired not so much by the ethos of “my country right or wrong” as by “my country is right—and here’s why.” England had only a small standing army and no conscription, so to fill up the ranks they needed volunteers and they needed them fast—many of these writers’ arguments are intended to drive young men to the recruiting offices. Then, too, all eyes were already fixed on the neutral United States, the world’s greatest industrial power—it was important to convince Americans that right was entirely on the Allies’ side.

  And posterity was an issue, right from the start. Much of the writing excerpted here, English, French, and German, seems like arguments made to future generations, an attempt to set the record straight, or rather to slant it in favor of whichever country the writer lived in, primarily by framing it as a “just war,” a war of national defense.

  Almost all the excerpts (Shaw’s is the exception, but he had his own argumentative fish to fry) are arguments prompted by one or more of these motives. What immediately stands out is how the writers tend to treat countries as individuals, with an individual’s code of morality; this could be a bitter family quarrel we’re reading about, which of course in many respects it was. (H. G. Wells: “One writes ‘Germany’ as though it had a single brain and single purpose.”) And, as in family fights, the argument quickly descends into name-calling, the French writers calling the Germans “barbarians,” while the Germans—prickly proud of their kultur— hurl the epithet right back.

  You get the sense that this vitriol was a kind of defensive transference. Maybe, in their deepest hearts, men like Galsworthy, Bergson, and Chesterton sensed that they themselves were the barbarians, and the only way to fight this realization off was to accuse the other side of being worse.

  From our own cynical vantage point, most of these writers seemed easily shocked—this is one of the great differences between our era and theirs—and this adds an old-fashioned soundness to their moral outrage, so that the dropping of a tiny bomb on a Belgian town from a primitive aeroplane seems the ultimate in newfangled horror, an unspeakable outrage, a criminal brutalization of all civilized values.

  And while the younger generation who would actually do the fighting eventually looked back in anger at the shrillness and chauvinism of these writers, a reader today will be struck at how well it’s all written, never mind the tone. These were men and women who, whatever their opinions, used language with power, economy, and grace. The purple floridity of the nineteenth century was already a thing of the past; newspapers—and a large, educated reading public—had tautened up everyone’s prose style.

  When I first read these books, I detected something I thought at first was vanity, then realized was something deeper and more essential—supreme self-confidence. These men and women wrote believing that they were the equals of the soldiers and statesmen, and that their words would carry enormous weight.

  Writers, editors, publishers, the reading public. They all seemed terribly aware of participating in “history,” and wanted not only to set the record straight, but to rush into print as soon as possible. The New Statesman, founded in Britain by Sidney and Beatrice Webb just before the war started, commissioned essays from most of the leading writers of the day; after first appearing there, the essays were stapled together and issued as “Special War Supplements” that, tattered and faded now, diligent readers can still find in British used bookstores, complete with the original advertisements.

  The more solemn and established New York Times, adding their own specially commissioned essays, reprinted these in the United States, binding them into book-sized, chocolate-colored volumes under the general title Current History; the European War. These are massive dreadnoughts of literature, ranging upwards of 1,200 pages—and that’s just for Volume One, covering December 1914 to March 1915. It includes photos of the contributing writers, printed the same size and with the same prominence as kings, field marshals, and generals. My copy has a beautifully written name, “Erik Achorn,” and a bookplate from “Georgia Southern College Library.” Someone has stamped Withdrawn over it in black ink—the epitaph for a whole literature.

  One of the most stridently bellicose writers of any combatant nation was Arthur Conan Doyle, fifty-five at the start of the war, and the wildly popular creator of Sherlock Holmes. He had seen war’s suffering up close serving as a doctor in South Africa during the Boer War, but this didn’t stop him from doing everything in his power to make sure British manhood joined wholeheartedly in this latest, more perilous fight. Before the war had even started, he organized a local rifle detachment that trained in his village; once the fighting began, he was full of war-winning ideas, ranging from the futuristic (a Channel tunnel) to the immediately practical (lifebelts for Tommies crossing to France).

  He wrote The German War to help speed recruiting. Some of the book’s anger may come from a sense of personal betrayal, since Doyle, before the war started, had been one of the leading lights of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. (“I did everything I could to avoid the war,” he wrote plaintively, “and I realized that I had been wrong.”)

  His nephew died in the fighting, his brother-in-law, many family friends. His son Kingsley was badly wounded on the Somme, then died of the Spanish flu just weeks before the Armistice, as did Innes Doyle, the brother Conan Doyle worshipped, dyin
g of exhaustion while serving with the army in Belgium.

  With all these deaths in his own family, it’s not entirely surprising that the postwar years would see Doyle putting all his considerable energy into promoting the cause of Spiritualism, hosting séances, photographing fairies, talking knowledgeably about ectoplasm. At one séance in the family parlor, Kingsley materialized, laid a hand on Doyle’s shoulder, and said his wounds had healed now and he was happy. Doyle was always more like Watson than Holmes—a bluff, sports-loving pillar of the establishment—but the Great War totally unhinged him.

  He came to feel the war was part of a “Divine plan” that would cleanse and purify the world before the emergence of a utopian state. After doing so much to make sure they fought, he had the courage—or effrontery—to go before the newsreel cameras in 1928 and tell British mothers still mourning their sons that they weren’t really dead at all, but happy in an afterlife they could communicate with if they attended the right séance.

  Europe couldn’t have contained two more different sensibilities than Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Maurice Maeterlinck’s, yet they both hated Germany with similar passion, in the latter’s case with perhaps more justification, since he was a native of the invaded Belgium. His reputation as the “Belgian Shakespeare” came from writing plays like Pelléas and Mélisande, adapted by Debussy into the opera that is still performed today. He was an exponent of art for art’s sake, which was the exact opposite of Doyle’s view of a writer’s task. Yet like Doyle he had a mystical side, and became one of the leading lights of the fin de siècle Symbolists. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911.

  At the outbreak of the war, it is said that he tried to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, though many fifty-two-year-old men would later claim they had “tried” to enlist. His hatred of the Hun led him to write a play, The Mayor of Stillmonde, about the occupation of Belgium. This ruined his reputation in Germany, and in 1940 he had to flee the advancing Wehrmacht and move to America. He wrote a classic of natural history, The Life of the Bee, from which Winston Churchill liked to recite to his generals.

  He was considered a great sage in his day, and his essays on world events were much in demand. Current History; the European War includes his photo; he looks like a banker who aspires to be a poet, with a vie de Boheme cravat above the wide lapels of his dining jacket, and, loftily above it, a sensitive face swept by a boyish cowlick.

  G. K. Chesterton, forty-four at the outbreak of the war, had the reputation of being an astute literary critic, a lover of paradox, and an eloquent apologist for the Catholic Church. Like Doyle, he wrote mysteries, with his priest-detective Father Brown solving cases through spiritual intuition.

  Of all the writers in this book, Chesterton may have the largest fan base today; a search of his name on the Internet brings up three million entries. The American Chesterton Society, with over sixty local chapters, has as its goal “raising Chesterton’s profile and bringing his common sense, his profound Christian faith, and his joy to a new generation so desperately in need of hope.” And it has an even more ambitious goal now—getting Chesterton canonized as a Catholic saint.

  His brother Cecil, also a writer, enlisted in the army and was wounded three times, dying in a hospital after the Armistice. Chesterton, who remained convinced all his life that the war was a righteous moral crusade, wrote of him, “He lived long enough to march to victory which was for him a supreme vision of liberty and the light.”

  Henri Bergson was much more than a public intellectual in France—he was the nation’s favorite philosopher, and his lectures drew enormous crowds. He was famous for stressing the importance of what he termed élan vital, or “living energy”; his metaphysical worldview emphasized becoming, process, flux, over mechanistic determinism.

  A bastardized version of this philosophy was taken up by the intellectually inclined in the military, particularly General Ferdinand Foch, who, long before he became the Allies’ Supreme Commander, translated Bergson’s élan vital into the “doctrine of the offensive,” stressing how an army’s spirit (and its bayonets) would always triumph over an army whose strength was merely in cannon. The government adopted this as its official strategy in the years just before the war, with new field regulations ordering that “The French army, returning to its traditions, henceforth admits no law but the offensive,” a law that led to those 250,000 casualties in the war’s first month.

  Bergson was no ivory-tower intellectual. With a big reputation in America, he was sent to Washington to help negotiate the terms of the United States’ joining the war; he was said to get on famously with his fellow professor Woodrow Wilson.

  He was fifty-five years old at the outbreak of the war, and was married to Marcel Proust’s cousin. He would receive his Nobel Prize in 1927.

  When the war started, George Bernard Shaw, at fifty-eight, was at the height of his power and influence, not only as a popular playwright, but as England’s most prominent iconoclast, contrarian, and gadfly. He was Protestant Irish, and saw himself as an outsider who could deliver bitter home truths to the British public. (“I retain my Irish capacity for criticizing England with something of the detachment of a foreigner, and with a slightly malicious taste for taking the conceit out of her.”) He published a long, deliberately provocative pamphlet in 1914, Common Sense About the War, which generated as much controversy as anything he ever wrote.

  He was immediately attacked on all sides—there was even talk of prosecuting him for treason. It wasn’t until 1923 and his enormously popular St. Joan that he managed to restore his popularity. Heartbreak House, written during the war, reflects his bitterness about British society and his disillusionment with a world at war.

  Shaw was no pacifist, and when you read his writings on the war, it’s clear that he is basically in favor of it; what he objects to is the way it’s being considered and approached—he believes that if the Great War were run his way, England would be better off. As one writer puts it, “Shaw seemed to be one of the belligerents himself, enjoying the use of his verbal firepower in his pugnacious campaign against politicians’ ineptitude and his audience’s fatal misunderstanding of what is going on.”

  Despite—or because of—his iconoclastic stance, Shaw became friends with one of the war’s great heroes, T. E. Lawrence; when Lawrence joined the Royal Air Force as an enlisted man after the war, he used the pseudonym “Shaw.” Shaw himself published a hard-to-find story during the war to raise money for Belgian children, “The Emperor and the Little Girl,” wherein the Kaiser encounters an innocent child on a corpse-ridden battlefield.

  He won his Nobel in 1925, and died, age ninety-four, from a fall while trimming a tree.

  It’s not surprising that the British establishment immediately hit back at Shaw for his views; what’s surprising is who one of the counterattackers turned out to be.

  The thirty-four-year-old Christabel Pankhurst along with her mother and sister were the most prominent suffragettes in England, the founders of the influential Women’s Social and Political Union; their militant campaign for women’s rights made them detested by some, worshipped by others. Pankhurst had been imprisoned for assault after interrupting a Liberal Party meeting in 1905. She fled to Paris to avoid being imprisoned again, returning to England only when war broke out.

  And now something strange happened. Pankhurst turned all her considerable passion and energy to supporting the war. Not just supporting it—demanding that it be fought as ruthlessly as possible. Primed with a generous (and secret) grant from the government, she changed the name of her paper from The Suffragette to Britannia, and traveled the country making speeches that urged the introduction of conscription and the immediate replacement of those politicians whose attitudes toward Germany weren’t sufficiently hawkish.

  Famous before the war for her “anti-male” stance, she now seemed obsessed (a cynic might say) with getting as many young males killed as possible. Her supporters were said to be the ones who handed white feat
hers to men of military age not in uniform. While this has the feel of an urban legend transformed into history, Pankhurst was a past master of such attention-grabbing tactics, so she may have indeed been behind it.

  In 1936, for her services to England during the war, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

  By the time John Galsworthy was forty-seven, he had achieved a reputation as one of England’s most important novelists and playwrights, with a special talent for dissecting the lives of the prosperous upper middle class.

  He tried his best to contribute to the war effort, working as a hospital orderly in France, letting his house be used as a rest center for wounded soldiers, and writing articles and essays for England’s official War Propaganda Bureau. By the end of the war, he had gained a reputation as a strong advocate for disabled veterans, but felt guilty over his early propaganda work.

  “I have often thought during these past years, what an ironical eye Providence must have been turning on National Propaganda—on all the disingenuous breath which has been issued to order, and all those miles of patriotic writings dutifully produced in each country, to prove to the other countries that they are its inferiors! A very little wind will blow these ephemeral sheets into the limbo of thin air. Already they are decomposing, soon they will be dust.”