“During
the endless hours flat on your back, you try to distract yourself to pass the
time; once, I reckoned up my wounds.
Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least
fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel
ball, four hand grenade splinters and two bullet splinters which, with entry
and exit wounds , left me an even twenty scars.
In the course of this war, where
so much of the firing was done blindly into empty space, I still managed to get
myself targeted no fewer than eleven times. I felt every justification therefore,
in donning the gold wound stripes, which arrived for me one day.”
STORM
OF STEEL by Ernst Jünger
With next
year’s anniversary of the start of World War One publishers and the other media
has begun their campaigns to make it as boring as they made World War Two.
World War
Two became at least in New York City only the Holocaust. In the rest of the country it became the
story of the “greatest generation” probably the dumbest phrase ever concocted
by the mangers of our memory.
World War
Two was usually the Battle of Britain, D-Day and then the defeat of
Germany. There was something about Pearl
Harbor, about Iwo Jima (thanks to Clint Eastwood) and then dropping the Atom
Bomb.
I suspect
World War One will become:
===How wonderful was the summer of 1914.
===An archduke gets killed in some God forsaken Balkan city…
and people will be off to the races talking about the more recent war in Serbia
and Bosnia (Saint Susan Sontag will appear for the thoughtful New Yorkers)
===O, yeah there will be trenches and dead English poets and
maybe even we’ll have Hemingway in Italy… but he’s not much in favor with the
academics
===Lawrence of Arabia will appear and Peter O’Toole will
again ride his camel…
===The Americans will get themselves involved into the war
thanks to Woodrow Wilson, the 1917 pre-incarnation of Barack Obama… good
intentions run amok
===Gary Cooper will do Sergeant Alvin York.
===Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month or
something like that in 1918
===Lenin and Hitler as aftermath.
Not for a
moment am I exaggerating or being cynical but such is how we are being shaped.
Before the mental
sculpting begins I suggest reading WOUNDED A New History of the Western Front
in World War I by Emily Mayhew. (Oxford University Press) The book tries to
tell the reader what happens after:
The
Flanders casualty was almost torn apart.
Gone were the neat round holes by rounded ammunition that flew slowly in
the hot dry African sun, (The Boar War) could be easily located and extracted
and didn’t leave much damage behind. Instead, the cylindroconical bullet fired
by the new powerful weaponry hit fast and hard, went deep and took bits of
dirty uniform and airborne soil particles with it. Inside the human body it ricocheted off bones
and ploughed through soft tissue until its energy was spent. Shrapnel fragments were just as bad. They created jagged wounds, huge blooms of
trauma that didn’t stop bleeding and, if the casualty could survive long enough,
provided the perfect environment for infection and sepsis. And there were so many of them. At base hospitals soldier after soldier
arrived with the most dreadful injuries: deep ragged wounds to their heads,
faces, limbs and abdomens.
There are
stories of the stretcher bearers, the medics, the doctors, the nurses, the
reconstructive surgeons and the chaplains…
the prose is dutiful and the stories all a bit too upbeat but then they
are usually the memories of those who survived.
But it is very good to have such a book in these months before “the
celebrations” begin as it reminds us that the central act of war is killing and
failing that, wounding… everything else is something like packaging.
I think I
would like to have just read the actual memoirs, letters, reports than the reconstructions
and scene settings but as the following shows the WOUNDED IS memorable in a way
not soon to be forgotten:
One of the
duties of the nurses was to write to the surviving relatives. Here is a letter from Elizabeth Boon to the
family of a Private Simpson:
Dear
Mrs. Simpson
You will have heard the sad news
that your son Pte Joseph Simpson passed away on Tuesday November 12th. The funeral is taking place today at
Terlincthun Cemetery. The No. of his grave is 4E Plat 10. We would like to have
you with him but when he saw he was so acutely ill there was no time to get you
here before he died. He passed away
peacefully at 5:52 on Tuesday 12th November.
He talked of going to Blighty to see
you and then before he died he thought he was with you all and put out his
hands to first one and the other with such a glad smile, he called you by name
and then ‘Ada’ but we could not catch what else he said. He was a very good
patient and we did all we could for him and he had everything that was
possible.
With
sincere sympathy
E.
Boon
(for
Matron)
“Boon worked
on the moribund wards at CCS, Moribund wards--- the last stop at the CCS for
those soldiers beyond help--- had been given their own RAMC regulations, and it
was according to regulation that special
care was taken to safeguard the belongs of the dying and that the patients
final messages and wishes should be carefully recorded in a notebook designated
for that purpose…. Two years on and Boon had written so many sympathy letters
that she had lost count. All she knew
was that she had to make sure she didn’t get behind with them. A colleague tried to write at least a dozen letters
a night but during the battle at Aras he had got behind and had to write almost
sixty letters in one night to catch up.
Another nurse wrote almost 400 letters during Passchendaele… Battles and
deaths in winter were the worst, when the freezing wind blew through their
tents and gutted their candles. They had
to warm the bottle of frozen ink in their hands or beg a pan of hot water from
the kitchen before they could begin the work of writing.
I copy those
lines again: Battles and deaths in
winter were the worst, when the freezing wind blew through their tents and
gutted their candles. They had to warm
the bottle of frozen ink in their hands or beg a pan of hot water from the
kitchen before they could begin the work of writing.
And
one other detail for it is in details such a book as WOUNDED is to be valued for
:
Once a boy had cried out and she
thought she must have missed his morphine dose, but when she got to his bed he
gasped that his lavender bag had fallen to the floor and he could suddenly
smell his own decay. She picked up the
bag and pinned it on the pillow next to his face. The boy immediately turned his head towards
it and began to inhale the clean scent.
He died a short while afterwards.
NOW
There are only two essential books
about World War One: Ernst Jünger’s STORM OF STEEL. I think it the
single best book ever written about the experience of actual front line
combat. Jünger lived to be 103 and is the only
Twentieth Century German language writer who can be compared to Goethe, without
apology.
The second
book is IN PARENTHESIS by DAVID JONES, a perfectly written visionary book (Introduced
by T. S. Eliot) based on the actual experience of one individual soldier
but through the language
is able without pretense to represent the
experience inside a world which would not be foreign to a soldier in the Iliad who had also passed through the
Welsh epics and Arthurian romances:
never has the modern reality been more neatly summoned up:
49
Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt.
Coming
sergeant.
Pick ‘em
up, pick ‘em up---I’ll stalk within yer
chamber.
Private
Leg … sick
Private
Ball … absent
’01
Ball, ‘O1 Ball. Ball of No. 1.
Where’s
Ball, 25201 Ball--- you corporal,
Ball of
your section
Movement round and about the Commanding Officer.
Bugler, will you sound 'Orderly Sergeants'.
And I would allow Erich Maria
Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front
though it is finally too sentimental and ironic but if read in conjunction with
the two novels that Remarque as a sort of sequels THE Road Back and THREE
COMRADES.
And
there you have it.
But…
but… I know no books either
fiction or nonfiction that describe the great other First World War along the
Eastern Front, in the Balkans, in Africa, in the Far East. There is The White War by Mark Thompson which
does justice to the Alpine war between Austria and Italy… Solzhenitsyn tries in The Great Wheel, August 1914 to describe the great battled at Tannenberg and there is Viktor Shklovsky’s A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY which is an attempt to describe the war that
was endured in the far east of Turkey where was the war was joined by the
Russians…
For the Civil War In the United Stares we are fortunate to have Shelby Foote's great narrative of
the War Between the States from a sort of Southern point of view and we have
Bruce Catton’s more popular version from the Union side… but at least we have
these grand narratives there is none for
World War One.
