Armistice Day
Veterans Day is a necessary, worthwhile holiday. All too often, our commemorations of war focus too much on the dead, when most of those who have fought in any recent war are among us, no less worthy of recognition that their brother-in-arms who died in battle while they happened to live. But there’s a problem with Veteran’s Day; it replaced Armistice Day. As I’m sure you all know, November 11th was originally made into a holiday to celebrate the end of World War I and to mourn the horrors of it. More so in England than the States, World War I was the defining event that marked the transition from a kind of prelapsarian innocence into the horrors that only a modern world can bring. Quantitatively and qualitatively, World War I was miserable in a way that many Americans have trouble understanding. At Somme, a battle that lasted from June to November of 1916, more 8,000 men in every 10,000 division was either killed wounded or captured. Every day of the battle, almost 3,000 British men were killed, wounded or captured. In a world where more than 4,000 war deaths made the Iraq war politically dicey, the sheer magnitude of the First World War is almost beyond our comprehension.
Just repeating the numbers, however, do not really do justice to what happened. World War I, with the horrors of trench and mechanized warfare, exposed humans to a type of miserable violence that they had never seen before. The death toll was so great — more that 2% of the British population, more than 4% of the French — that culturally and politically, both countries were immensely changed. We, today, often sneer at the French and British before World War II, at the French who thought they could hide behind their defense and the British who saw developments in Germany in the most peaceful, optimistic light. But they deserve our sympathy. A mere 20 years after the most destructive events in their national histories, wars that had been fought for the political imperatives and pride of military and civilian leaders, they were reasonably wary of engaging in yet another conflict.
Because we are so far from World War I in both circumstance and time, I think it’s more important to remember the lessons of Armistice Day. Though we are greatly lucky that the world really has become less murderous and warlike, the pathologies that lead Europe to slaughter itself over political and imperial maneuvering are still with us. We still have a great over-estimation of the State’s need to defend itself, even at the cost of human lives. We are still too quick to see violence and war as both a feasible and legitimate response to any number of threats, and we are all too likely to demonize our victims — who are usually terrified young men — because we have decided that we must kill them.
All of this is just a long introduction to one of the few sweet fruits of World War I: the literature. World War I helped bring about a certain Modernist sensibility that came to dominate English letters in the two decades thereafter. It’s no wonder that all the great figures of Modernism — Woolf, Pound, Eliot — wrote some of their best work in response to World War I. To to this day, Woolf’s portrait of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is one of the great portraits of a veteran still haunted by war. Eliot’s Waste Land, while describing an infertile, barren land in almost mythic or ahistorical terms, is most certainly a response to the mass death and disrespect for life on display between 1914 and 1918.
I want to share some of my favorite of these poems. Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” of course, is the most famous of the so-called war poems, but there are others. Three of them are below the fold.
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young – Wilfred Owen
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and strops,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
They – Siegfried Sassoon
The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back
‘They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought
‘In a just cause: they lead the last attack
‘On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought
‘New right to breed an honourable race,
‘They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’
‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.
‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;
‘Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;
‘And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find
‘A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’
And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (excerpt) – Ezra Pound
IV
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case . . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” non “et decor” . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
