WHAT REMAINS

What remains of a January voyage--- 2014--- about in the West of the United States.  I had meant to insert some photographs but lethargy and the possible call of one's bleeding wrists/  Please silently fix my harried errors of grammar and all the rest

EIGHT

This afternoon between two and three o'clock between Olancha and Panamint Springs on route 190 which is a long descending approach to Death Valley I was aware of something along the lines of the constant possibility of self-extinction with the mistaken slight movement of the steering wheel, while at the same time I felt all of my lifelong fascination with Europe and things European disappearing...

And on re-reading in the morning after the careful composition of this paragraph…  I had repeated the word between.      

ELEVEN

Edward Dahlberg had pointed out this flaw of repeating a word  to me once before back in 1970 when I had dared to show him a page of my prose and he discovered I had repeated a word.  Why do you reveal your impoverished vocabulary?  There is never a reason to repeat a word and you do so within a sentence.  Go back to your desk and read decent books.

                                           SIX

The trip is to the west since it is January. 

I am not an adventurer.

          FOURTEEN

Life as an oasis---

death as the desert all around---

What makes me think that?

   (from DRAFTS FOR A THIRD SKETCHBOOK by Max Frisch written in the early 80s when he lived in New York and I knew him ever so briefly.  His remaining 10 years would be consumed by cancer)

TWENTY

           IN THE DESERT REGIONS: 

The nature does not disappoint

I do not have sentences or vocabulary for what I see.

It is entering a wordless state where no words come to mind, not even cliches.  

Thornton Wilder might be perfectly right:  “grandeur of the ride an hour into the Book of Genesis…”

Though there is plant life...  but my ignorance:  I can identify a maple tree, a pine tree, a tulip, Lily of the Valley, a bleeding heart bush, a weeping willow and now I am reaching…

Near Death Valley there is more stone so much less vegetation but around here along the border in southern New Mexico and Arizona…

THIRTEEN

From  SPEAKING TO CLIO by Alberto Savinio:

History collects our actions and gradually deposits them in the past.  History gradually frees us from the past.  A perfect organization of life would ensure all our actions, even the least and most insignificant, become history so as to relieve us of them.

As to washing our face in the morning, we do it to cleanse it of our dreams, those “actions” of sleep, those nocturnal “sins.”

The ills of the world, its slowness, its obstacles, its stupidity, can be attributed to this incomplete functioning of history.  The past festers on some men and rots. 

This constant throwing of the past over one’s shoulder, this constant “self-purification.”

So does life have an end?  In the last gaze coming from our eyes, the last light from our intelligence, that gaze, that light, will not be directed to the past, placed for good behind the closed door, but to the future.  And the future, as you will have understood, ladies and gentlemen, is dark, inaction par excellence and supreme purity.

Works that enter into history--- works that enter into the ghost of history.

Memories, too, slowly but inexorably fade.

 THREE

Yesterday coming over from Columbus, New Mexico two freshly squashed animals... The brightness, near glistening, of the redness of the blood in contrast to black pavement and tan tall grass along both sides of road

                                             TWENTYTHREE

“Selling books doesn’t pay the bills,” owner of TOMBSTONE OLD WEST BOOKS.  When I was first going to Tombstone this was a shop packed with books.  Over these last years the titles have diminished, the real estate ads got bigger and now the making of holsters and belts have come to be the businesses around three bookcases of books and most of them second-third-fourth hand.

                                                  FIFTYONE

Worn out, aching, mostly impotent,  I HE found my/himself in a bookshop in Deming N.M… and after buying two post cards of the Bataan Corregidor monument that was out side next to the museum and after looking at a locally published history relying on memories of the survivors of that terrible time at the beginning for the Americans in  World War Two:  many of the men at Corregidor had been from the nationalized New Mexico National Guard---I saw another book… 

And this is where as I picked  it up I felt  heckled by the book that this was not going to be ...and thinking though it is hard to credit so much was going on… I also thought of being now married for twenty years for the third time and she more than 20 years younger and deeply distressed as to what she is going to do with her life and being away from her back there in New Jersey as she was not living in our room on East First Street in Manhattan during the weeks of my being away but out in her child home commuting into the city and having to deal with a mother going on 93 still living independent but increasingly frail and with a husband who lusted after her yet she felt awful about her physical shape and craved for some sort of deliverance or possibility of change and here I was picking up a book that was either reduced in price or who knows but it cost $5.00 and had the title:

The VilIista Prisoners of 1916-1917 by James W. Hurst...

But I was so caught and knowing:  I was nobody, no agent, having two published books--- both well reviewed in the NY Times though my third was now postponed by the publisher.

Do I even start to read this book... The picture on cover of seven men without hats and two guys with hats…

The book was published in 2000

So, of course only if you have been to Columbus, New Mexico do you remember that Pancho Villa and a group of his men attacked Columbus on March 9,1916 and the men on the cover are the guys subsequently captured by the Pershing Punitive Expedition into Mexico and everyone always mentioned two things:  George S. Patton got his so-called baptism of fire in this mission and it was all a dress rehearsal for the sending of the American Expeditionary Force to Europe in 1917...

One word Guantanamo should bring into focus...

So of course this is a cliché and I had at first thought I was writing a short proposal of a movie of novel about these captives and the how to find out about them and of course  the buying of  the book.. does it even have to be shown.. just the title really or maybe it could start with the man looking at the two cells from the Deming jail  that are on display in the history museum.. and then the book and realizing that it is possible that these men were held in these cells before they were lead out to be hanged and there is a photograph of Deming citizen posing about the gallows wearing hats and staring into the camera with that pride of conviction and knowing what is right.

7 Mexicans from Villa’s raid were tried and hanged. 

16 Mexicans from Villa’s raid were sentenced to life in prison in New Mexico after being brought back from Mexico and put on trial.

Other Mexicans were captured during this punitive expedition but were freed after a period of time without trial.

Who are we to trust?

How does one show research?

Does that make a movie?

A raid happens.  People are killed.  The raiders retreat and the chase is on…

Shock.  Funerals.  A demand for action.

Mexicans are not supposed to attack the United States.

Why did Villa attack the US?.

Was it an arms deal gone bad?  He got the guns but not the ammunition.

When I was at the Slaughter Ranch outside Douglas a story on display about how the Villa soldiers were stealing and killing Slaughter cattle.  Slaughter protested to Villa and was given a saddlebag of gold coins.

A civil war going on in Mexico.

WWI going on in Europe.

The idea that the Germans were cultivating the Mexicans. 

Now why would Mexicans think kindly of the Germans?

Why would American be worried about these Mexicans?

In almost all of the westerns and film noirs set in the west there is always talk of running away to Mexico. 

Even in Ray Wylie Hubbard’s song Dallas After Midnight

“we had such plans after we got to Mexico”, as the guy who got caught for robbing a liquor store sings.

                                      Fortyone

I drove 2476 miles according to the receipt from Alamo Car Rental.   It is hard to list what I have become detached from but I am aware of becoming detached.  For the moment, maybe, before the city closes in upon me and I am once again in the forest.  That is what New York City is: the forest.  And nothing good lurks in the forest.  Out of the forests came the barbarians who sacked Rome. Or rather, the barbarians sacked a city already mentally sacked.

                             

 FORTYTHREE

I put the following found obituary from the local Deming newspaper.  A life, like so many and if read here on East First Street in Manhattan in the year 2014 as if from another planet.

William Homer Young Jr., 85, Silver City resident passed to his eternal home Sunday Dec. 22, 2013 at Anna Kassman Hospice Center in Albuquerque. 
The Memorial Service will be held Saturday, January 25, 2014 at 11 o'clock in the morning at the Special Events Center in Deming at the corner of Country Club Road and Pine Street. 
Homer was the fifth of six sons born to William Homer and Beulah Jane Horn Young in Phoenix, AZ on the 16th of June 1928 and in the early 1930's moved with his family to New Mexico where he grew up on the family farm in the Sunshine District south of Deming. He married his high school sweetheart, Joann Munson, at the First Christian Church in Deming on the 16 of July 1948. Four children were born to this union: James Munson (1949), Ida Belle (1952), Susan Gale (1957) and Patricia Jane (1958). They continued in the family farming business in Wilcox, AZ until 1950 when he went to work for the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation in Morenci, AZ. In 1959 the family moved to Toquepala, Peru, S.A. where Homer was mill repair foreman for Southern Peru Copper Corporation. They resided in Peru until 1967 when they returned to the States to manage a farm for his mother in Eastland, Texas. When the farm sold they were able to return to New Mexico and became employed at the newly opened Phelps Dodge Copper Mine at Tyrone. He retired in 1992 and became an avid golfer and world traveler, but, dancing to the Forrest Delk Bank was his favorite pastime and his three girls will always recall learning to dance while standing on their daddy's boot toes! 
He was raised a Master Mason in Coronado Lodge #8 F&AM Clifton, AZ in 1954 and joined, along with wife Joann, Clifton's Century Chapter #10 in 1955 where he is a Past Patron and Past Rainbow Dad of The International Order of the Rainbow for Girls. Homer was a charter member and past master of Toquepala Lodge #60 AF&AM Toquepala, Peru. When they returned to New Mexico he affiliated with Georgetown Chapter #4 OES and Mimbres Lodge #10 AF&AM at Mimbres where is a past patron and past master. He served New Mexico Grand Chapter as Worthy Grand Patron with sister Adele Durnell in 1978-79. He was named ambassador to Peru 2000-2003, Jurisprudence Committee 1989-1991 and Ambassador to Mexico 2011-2013 for General Grand Chapter OES. He is Past Grand Chaplain and Past District Deputy Grand Master for the Grand Lodge of New Mexico AF&AM. In 2004 New Mexico Grand Lodge named him "Mason of the Year" and accorded him the prestigious "Kit Carson Award". Homer was raised a 33 degree Scottish Rite Mason in 2005 and served on the advisory board for the Silver City Order of DeMolay, was Rainbow Dad for the Tyrone Assembly Organization and Rainbow Dad for the newly instituted Rainbow Assembly in Silver City. 
Homer is survived by his wife, Joann; 3 daughters and their families, Ida Belle and John Walsh, Susan and Don Wallin, Patricia Young and dear friend Linda Miller; 5 grandchildren and their families, Jennifer Mary (Walsh) and husband David James Hare, Elizabeth Ann (Walsh) and husband David James Gilroy, William Trevor and wife Amber Wallin, Steven Shane and wife Jenae Wallin, Lisa Jean (Wallin) and husband William Curtis Lents,; 5 great-grandchildren, Maya Sophia and Dylan James Hare, Jonah Finn and Nina Magdalena Gilroy, and William Augustus Wallin; 
2 brothers, J. W. and Marvin and wife Wilma Young; 2 very dear sisters-n-law, Catherine Munson Smith and Sabra Munson Humphrey and husband Robert and their families,; numerous nieces and nephews and a very special nephews, Roy Young and wife Mildred; many cousins and a host of loving world-wide friends. 
He was preceded in death by his parents, 3 brothers, Jim, Oral and Buford and his only son, James who died in 1970. 
He felt very privileged and very blest to have had the opportunity to play golf at the "Old Course" in Scotland and to have walked the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, but, most of all to have shared 65 years of love with his wife and children, to have developed very special ties with each of his 5 grandchildren and to have held the small hands of each of his 5 great-grandchildren. 
He was a good husband, a good father, a good grandfather and great-grandfather, a good friend to all... He was a good man. 
Homer will be remembered for his pride in, and love for , his family, his kind and generous ways, his love and appreciation for our beautiful earth and his favorite figure of speech, "Oh How Nice!" 
Memorial donations may be made to: Rite Care Childhood Language Program, New Mexico Scottish Rite Foundation, P. O. Box 2024, Santa Fe, N. M. 87504-2024 or a Charity of Choice. 

Entrusted to the care of Baca’s Funeral Chapels.Exclusive provider for “Veterans &Family Memorial Care”.

IF I WAS THE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR THIS WEEK

Necessary information:  for more than 30 years sections from ST. PATRICK’S DAY Dublin 1974 have been appearing in journals and magazines both in the  United States and in Ireland.  It was supposed to be published during this coming Spring but I have been told that publication has been postponed. 

            In too many ways to mention I find that my life has been ruined.

            Yet.

1-    I have been planning to do IF I WAS THE BOOK SECTION EDITOR and here are the books for this week

2-    I got distracted and thought about the problem of what to do about books that get themselves forgotten as happened because I found in my books TRAVELING LIGHT by Lionel Mitchell. 

3-    Coming out in 1980 it was one of those--- as they like to say--- path breaking books that sadly did not break any paths--- not because it was not a path-breaking book--- and while favorably written about by Stanley Crouch, Mitchell died a  nasty gruesome death from AIDS and not being wildly reviewed in the so-called mainstream media…. 

4-    Mitchell in some way was a Black or Negro version of a contrary version of what it meant to be homosexual or even sexual in the United States and is much like John Rechy who is still thought to be marginal while in reality having written the single best book, CITY OF NIGHT,  (now in a 50^th Anniversary edition) as to what it felt like to be homosexual in the 50s and 60s USA.  

5-    What distinguished Mitchell was that he dared to take up the inevitable question of violence, real physical violence and he did not make it nice, alluring or respectable

a-     Of course there is also Hal Bennett:  I had had the experience of urging through Turtle Point Press a new edition of Hal Bennett’s LORD OF DARK PLACES but that also did not get its place in the sun of readers and did not move over the dead statue of Toni Morrison one inch though Bennett is to my mind one of the rare truth tellers of American Letters.

b-    As is the fate for most truth tellers Bennett has been ignored and died in a veterans’ hospital in Edison New Jersey, mourned probably only by myself and his publisher Jon Rabinowitz.

c-     Bennett’s short memoir available only in one of the those Dictionary of Literary Biography collections devoted to autobiography  uniquely details as never before done, the great chain of beating that lead from the whip of the white owner to the whip held in the hand of the Black mother or father or other figure in authority:  that peculiar American experience still nearly impossible to even mention as it is seen to be too controversial, too disturbing as it might let the beaters off the hook---as being simply unknowing participants--- so that the silence continues to be seared by the crying, the crying, the whimpering…

            BOOKS TO BE REVIEWED THIS WEEK.

                        ONE.         1941 THE YEAR THAT KEEP RETURNING by Slavko Goldstein. New York Review Books.   The book is in:  “I think I can pinpoint exactly the hour and the day when my childhood ended, Easter Sunday April 13 1941.  On the promenade in front of Zorin Dom nor far from our house German tanks, armored vehicles and military kitchens on large wheels with fat tires were neatly lined up….  My father stopped me at the door.  “Where are you going?” “Out to play.” “To play?’  My father looked at me with surprise.  “Well, okay.  Go, but don’t be late for lunch.”  When I got back my father was no longer at home.  And he was never to return.”

            Not just a holocaust book--- and in no way is that to denigrate or argue against their proliferation but in so many ways we have come to the point of now re-reading and sorting--- however the Croatian writer  Slavko Goldstein while describing the  murder of the Jews of Yugoslavia also goes on to explain the incredibly murderous assault upon the Serbian population by the Croatian fascist forces.  In patient detail and careful thought one is lead to see how forty years later during the breakup of Yugoslavia, precipitated by the pre-mature German recognition of Slovenia and then Croatia would in turn would be unleash a violent war of ethnic violence that defied explanation until one was reminded of the past Goldstein delineates, something people like Susan Sontag and Bill Clinton were willfully ignorant of  since it did not fit into their preconceived ideas of who was victim and who was perpetrator even when the evidence was  not reducible to the good guys and the bad guys, unless you wanted to stage Beckett in Sarajevo and claim heroine status for such an endeavor.

            TWO.     AGAINST AUTOBIOGRAPHY:  ALBERT MEMMI AND THE PRODUCTION OF THEORY by Lia Nicole Brozgal.   (University of Nebraska Press)  While the book is a perverse exercise in “theory” and wants us to over-look the autobiographical nature of Memmi’s great book  THE SCORPION  (which came out in English in 1971 from Orion Press then a part of Grossman Publishers and which  first great autobiography to come out North Africa after Augustine’s CONFESSIONS, if truth be told.  Brozgal’s book is interesting only if it gets readers to read Memmi’s THE SCORPION.  They should not be distracted by his so-called serious books of theory about who and what is a colonizer… all of that is mere sociology and was dated before it is read.

            THE SCORPION creates what it meant to be a Jewish individual in Tunisia and Memmi by adapting the very best of the Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon produced a book equal to their own… but this aspect of his career was lost in the dreary usual politics and while Brozgal is more enamored of Memmi as a thinker it is as a novelist, memoir writer that THE SCORPION makes its claim upon a statue in the garden of the essential.

            THREE.    Some years ago I had admired and recommended HOLY BONES HOLY DUST by Charles Freeman which takes up the question of how relics shaped Medieval history…  so I had wished to see WHY CAN THE DEAD DO SUCH GREAT THINGS  by Robert Bartlett (Princeton University Press) which focuses his discussion on the actual bodies of the saints and in great detail brings the same years to life in a more detailed and obsessive manner—marred only by a sadly too small of a type face.  Bartlett is a TV presenter and knows a good tale if one can ignore the rather condescending attitude towards what was as opposed to a possibly more rewarding approach which is to delight in, to respect and to wonder what has really been lost when instead of invoking a saint to do battle we program a drone in Maryland for a killing in  say Yemen.   Of course Robert Calasso might suggest that the gods and I would include the saints in all of this—are maybe still about as in his LITERATURE AND THE GODS

            FOUR  I refuse to forget GLENWAY WESCOTT.   Joining from the University of Wisconsin’s edition of Wescott’s  HEAVEN OF WORDS Last Journals of 1956-1984 is a selection of the uncollected fiction of Wescott that adds to the absolute necessity at least for me of his two earlier books  THE GRANDMOTHERS and GOODYBE, WISCONSIN.  One should start with A Visit to Priapus and realize the sadness of what was not to be as Wescott found it impossible to discover books within himself beyond the two I have mentioned and the short novel THE PILGRIM HAWK which while widely praised and a great delight is still to my mind in the shadow of THE GRANDMOTHERS and the title story of GOODBYE, WISCONSIN.  The editor Jerry Rosco has done a very good deed for literature with these two books and his earlier book of Wescott’s journals and writings CONTINUAL LESSONS and his own biography of Wescott GLENWAY WESCOTT PERSONALLY.  I do wish that Rosco had included the much longer version of The Smell of Rosemary that had appeared in Prose but that is another tale and a much lamented journal…

AN ASIDE.             Wescott like Julian Green is lost to America since our attention span for the 20^th century seems stretched between Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald,  Ellison and Kerouac…  every other writer is part of a supporting cast: so be it… 

                                                Each of us should have a few of the others: in my case: Wescott,  Julian Green, Edward Dahlberg, Ronald Johnson, Lorine  Niedecker, Hannah Green, Eudora Welty and  that might just be enough…                     

            FIVE. George Steiner mentions that one of the great failings of modern literary education is the absence of any discussion of the great modern theologians and the resulting impoverishment that can be seen in any English department today.  That the names of Josef Pieper, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and Romano Guardini are mostly unknown while … I will not contaminate this sentence with the likely suspects: open the pages of The New York Review of Books or the New York Times Book review for my evidence

            So!    THE WAY  Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and their Journal 1925-1940 by Antonine Arjakovsky  (University of Notre Dame Press)   Beautifully written and detailed with inviting descriptions of the fate of thought in Paris which provides the necessary correction to over-told story of Paris between the wars… haven’t we all had enough of the Americans in Paris?...

            Am I the only person who has read Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov? I first heard of Berdyaev from Chad Walsh at Beloit as being a modern thinker who dealt with the problem of belief in such a way that it did not ignore Beckett who I had just discovered and who had a very good understand of just how awful the Russian Revolution had been from a spiritual point of view and not from a kneejerk rightest understanding.  Shestov, I had read of from Dahlberg:  IN JOB’S BALANCES PENULTIMATE WORDS and I added ATHENS AND JERUSALEM.  And in the index  a novel by Nina Berberova--- who I knew late in her life--- is mentioned Astachev in Paris   and in how fruitful a way the writers discussed in THE WAY, “ insisted on the necessity of preserving the reality of history from the seduction of myths that  explained everything,  They sought to propose   an alternative to a purely ethical existential and finally to affirm that the union of Athens and Jerusalem is not necessarily synonymous with a betrayal of reason.”

            SIX.  Even Dalkey Archive Press has a book that will be over-looked and shouldn’t be:  AN UNWRITTEN NOVEL Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet  by Thomas J.  Cousineau.  This is the first actual book I know of about the great central work of Pessoa.  Cousineau tries to make a case for the unity within disunity of this collection of fragments which has been translated into English in a number of versions based on which edition the translator used: Spanish, French, Italian edition that had been translated from the Portuguese original and of course there is at least for this writer, only Richard Zenith’s version  from Penguin…

            SEVEN.  Again another over-looked critical book is a collection of essays on Herta Muller.  POLITICS AND AESTHETICS edited by Betiina Brandt and Vaentina Glajar.  Of course it is always good to know that receiving a Nobel prize is no guarantee that your work will be widely read in the US or in the English speaking world unless it is trivial work by someone like an Alice Munro or  Toni Morrison  mere writers of local interest as  hardly do they re-arrange any of the statues in the great garden unlike Herta Muller’s whose THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS provides the central imaginative text as to the ordinary life in what was then called the communist countries or socialist countries as they styled themselves  to be more precise…  but boy that’s a long time ago  23 years ago and we were done with it, right…no hardly… Muller’s Nobel lecture:  EVERY WORD KNOWS SOMETHING OF A VICIOUS CIRCLE is essential reading and is included in a collection of essays that add to our understanding of Muller unlike too many of such collections. 

            EIGHT.   I don’t usually mysteries  or so-called genre books after having read two Ross Macdonad books when younger and getting what it is all about…which is what is to happen next as opposed to what is happening right now on the page  (stolen from Nicholas Mosley but a note from New DIrections got me to read   THE MONGOLIAN CONSPIRACY by Rafael Bernal.. a  nasty novel set in Mexico city centered by a hired killer who happens to be working for the police.. well I do admit to having read the first 3 novels of Mickey Spillane and this is like them but nastier and with more verbal nastiness and slimy behavior… but good editors of book sections have to have prejudices otherwise…

            So to end….  the last words of Muller’s Nobel address:  the acute solitude of a human being.

WORLD WAR ONE: WOUNDED

“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 12^th.  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 12^th 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.