Smarties

One could be forgiven for not knowing that there is a memorial to the First World War in Washington, D.C. (Wikipedia | Google Maps). The first time I stumbled across it, it was as an exploration of a curiosity. I wanted to figure out what that unknown building was, barely visible through the trees along Independence Avenue. To approach the memorial is to get a sense of what it must have been like for a Renaissance-era scholar on grand tour of the continent to come to Rome for the first time, when the ruins of Rome were still that: ruins — mysterious, forgotten, pillaged, unkempt, crumbling, ignored. The First World War Memorial is lost in a grove of trees on the south side of the Mall. It's like coming across an abandoned temple in a forest. The flagstone paving stones of the walk up to the memorial are lose, scattered, broken and on their way to gravel. The memorial itself is blackened with mildew, its marble cracked and stained. It is like a mushroom that popped up in a forest clearing after a rain. Completed in 1931, its archaic inscription simply reads "The World War."

Our wars aren't merely matters of fact, narratives or parables from which we are to take the vaunted historical lesson. Our wars are tropes: they represent certain touchstones of the American consciousness. The Second World War was the good war: the forces of good arrayed against the forces of evil, proving the directionality of history. The Vietnam War is central figure in the right wing Dolchstoßlegende. They are all morality plays. The First World War is a forgotten war because it does not signify anything that fits easily into the American mythos. It is an amorality play. Its obvious meta-narratives of miscalculation, system effects, the amorality of state interest, the fleetingness of progress, the shabbiness of war, the divisions of class interest and the meaninglessness of our social conventions around war don't figure in U.S. discourse on war. So the event is simply excised from the national consciousness, not a part of the pantheon of nostalgia writ in Neoclassical white marble in the nation's capitol.

Though a central category of the critique of Modernity, the phrase "the banality of evil" is, owing to its origin, mostly associated with the Second World War and Hitler's circle of power. John Quiggin takes the opportunity of Armistice Day to point out the relevance of the concept for the First World War ("Armistice Day," 11 November 2009):

The cataclysm of the Great War brought forth monsters like Hitler and Stalin, who killed millions. But the War itself, with the millions and tens of millions of lives it took, directly and indirectly, was loosed on the world by political leaders more notable for mediocrity than for monstrous greatness.

The names of Asquith, Bethmann-Hollweg, Berchtold and Poincare are barely remembered, yet on any reasonable accounting they belong among the great criminals of history. Not only did they create the conditions for war, and rush (eagerly in most cases) into it, they carried on even as the death toll mounted into the hundreds of thousands and beyond. Even as the original grounds for war became utterly irrelevant, they continued to intrigue for trivial postwar benefits, carving up imagined conquests among themselves.

The First World War no longer seems like the nadir of civilization after the horrors of the Twentieth Century that were to follow — the collectivization and the famine, the purges, the Holocaust, Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Bataan, the area raids, the atomic bomb, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But the First World War set the conditions. In this regard, mediocrity often prepares the ground for monsters.

Civilization is fickle and an inopportune mediocrity in governance is a great danger. Unhappily, this is probably the realm where ken pales and Fortuna runs amuck.

The obituary this week in The Economist is Lazare Ponticelli, the last French veteran of the First World War. He was born in Italy on 7 December 1897 and enlisted in the French army at the age of 16. He died on 12 March 2008, age 110. The Economist chooses the theme of memory and — strangely more significant — the forgotten for its elegy ("Obituary: Lazare Ponticelli," 19 March 2008):

Mr. Ponticelli wanted none of that: no procession, no racket, pas de tapage important. He was grateful for his belated Légion d'Honneur, which he kept with his other medals in a shoe-box. But he was keenly aware that he drew such attention only because he was the last.

What had become of the others? The stretcher-bearers in the Argonne, for example, who had told him they didn't dare leave the trench for fear of German fire. The man he had heard from no-man's land, caught in the barbed wire and with his leg severed, screaming to be rescued, until Mr. Ponticelli ran out to him with wire-cutters and dragged him back to the lines. The German soldier he tripped over in the dark, already wounded and expecting to be killed, who mutely held up his fingers to show him that he had two children. The comrades who helped him, because he could not read or write, to keep in touch by letter with the milkmaid he had met before the war. Or the four colleagues who held him down when, after the battle of Pal Piccolo, the army surgeon gouged out of his cheek a piece of shrapnel already lodged in gangrene.

With each new round of shelling, he said, they all expected the worst. They would reassure each other by saying, "If I die, you'll remember me, won't you?" Mr. Ponticelli felt he had a duty to try, but struggled. These were mes camarades, les gars, un type: faces, not names. And as he faded, even those faces lost their last hold on the living.

...

Increasingly, however, people wanted to talk to him about the war. He always courteously obliged them, though by the end his thin, scratchy voice came out in gasps. It was as important to him as it was to them to underscore the horror and futility of it. More than anything, he was appalled that he had been made to fire on people he didn't know and to whom he, too, was a stranger. These were fathers of children. He had no quarrel with them. C'est complètement idiot la guerre. His Italian Alpine regiment had once stopped firing for three weeks on the Austrians, whose language many of them spoke; they had swapped loaves of bread for tobacco and taken pictures of each other. To the end of his life, Mr. Ponticelli showed no interest in labelling anyone his enemy. He said he did not understand why on earth he, or they, had been fighting.

On March 17th he had his wish, or most of it: a state funeral for all the poilus at Les Invalides, and then a simple family burial. The government badly wanted this last foot-soldier to be memorialised; but he preferred to be uncelebrated and ordinary, even in some sense forgotten, and thus the more symbolic of all the rest.

The passing of the last French veteran of the First World War is most significant in that the French are considered the most outstanding participant, as both victim and hero, of that war, perhaps the most outstanding war in modern history. As the New York Times obituary notes (Martin, Douglas, "Lazare Ponticelli, France’s Last Veteran of World War I, Is Dead at 110," 13 March 2008), the passing of the last German veteran of the war, Erich Kästner, on 1 January 2008 went unobserved. There is no honor in villainy, even when it's as inadvertent as the corresponding heroism.

Americans like to ridicule the French for their recent military fortunes. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is the phrase. It's always easy for the young to get the better of the old. By the time the First World War came about, France was a country in the full of relative decline. By the time it faced the blitzkrieg, it was a nation exhausted.

Perhaps it was easy too for the United States to roll Germany because by the time we showed up on the scene French and German casualties had already passed a million on each side. Total U.S. casualties in that war were 117,000 — less than were killed among the French in some single running battles. The French suffered 161,000 killed between February and December 1916 at the Battle of Verdun; 50,000 killed in action between July and November 1916 during the Somme offensive; and 95,000 casualties (killed and wounded) between July and August at the Second Battle of the Marne.

When you consider that in the Twentieth Century France sustained 2,262,000 killed blunting the German onslaught, compared to 409,000 for the United States — a fifth the French number — our boasts seem pretty hollow. G.I. Joe looks a little Johnny Come Lately. We installed the keystone and take credit for the entire arc. But the big wheel keeps on turning and the United States is no longer a young country. Our day to be elbowed aside by a young upstart is in the works already and our dotage will be similarly unhonored by youth.

The Financial Times today (Stephens, Philip, "A Physicist's Theory of the Transatlantic Relationship," 14 December 2007):

The overarching geopolitical fact of coming decades is likely to be the relative decline of US power. The word relative is important. Measured by economic, technological and military might, America is likely to remain the pre-eminent nation during the first half of the present century and, perhaps, well beyond. But the US is already an insufficient as well as an indispensable power. As China, India and others rise, and Russia re-asserts itself, the US will become more dependent on the goodwill of others. How it responds to the shifts will in large degree shape the new international order — or disorder.

The image of the future in the minds of many is of a multipolar system, with power shared between two or three groups of nations. ... Others — in the US as well as Europe — conjure up a world divided into two competing blocs: the liberal democracies on one side, the authoritarian capitalists, notably but not exclusively China and Russia, on the other. ...

More probably we are on the cusp of an era of great power competition in which alliances and allegiances shift according to accidents of circumstance and geography. Those who like historical analogies could look back at the second half of the 19th century.

The problem with looking back at the second half of the Nineteenth Century is that we all know how that ended.

A hitherto unknown to me, but apparently famous exchange from the tense final days of the July 1914 Crisis (May, Ernest R. and Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., "An Identity of Opinion: Historians and July 1914," The Journal of Modern History , 79, June 2007, pp. 335–387):

Famously, when Moltke protested that it was too late to concentrate forces on the Russian front rather than in the west, the kaiser exclaimed: "Your illustrious uncle would not have given me such an answer. If I order it, it must be possible." (p. 361)

Compare this to the tepid legalism of Richard Nixon:

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

(interview with David Frost, aired on television on 19 May 1977)

Kaiser Wilhelm II was at least disjointed enough to think that he could mandate the possible, not merely the legal.

But thank goodness our leaders have gotten back into the business of denigrating reality in favor of will.

(six in picture, seventh behind camera)

S. and I spent the Thanksgiving weekend with the usual crew of regional friends, one toddler, three dogs a cat and an Aussie, this time in the Poconos. The stuffing wars between S. and I brewed on into another season (I make mine with thyme and raisins, she makes a more stripped down version). I tried to supplement my usual entry with an experimental roast fall vegetable stuffing, but owing to insufficient time-management on my part had to be turned over to another cook to be circumscribed into merely roast vegetables, sans cornbread.

The day after Thanksgiving we went on a day hike. We ended up driving all over creation trying to locate a trail where we wouldn't be imperiled by the stray slings and arrows of hunters. After driving past a number of trailheads, we arrived upon a national park, figuring that there wouldn't be any hunters allowed. We parked and as we were headed for the trailhead, two young men in full camouflage, one toting a bow and arrows, the other a rifle came off the trail and towards us. This put a pall on our hiking party and we stopped them for questioning. They explained that it was hunting to the right, no hunting to the left, and that the hunters would probably have hiked quite a ways off the trail anyway. So we decided to proceed. The hutch at the trailhead greeted us with a litany of yellow warning postings. "Warning: Hunting season in effect." "Warning: Beware of Bears," and all the usual instructions on what to do if attacked by a bear. The next one was a bonus danger: "Warning: Venture off the marked trail at your own risk. This park is a former military base and may contain unexploded ordinance." But the real kicker was a homemade bulletin with the row of tear-offs down one side listing the contact information for the nearest hospital and driving directions to get there. And two of the tear-offs had already been taken.

On Saturday we went horseback riding at Pleasant Valley Ranch. I don't like horses and the only time I have ever ridden one was in probably fourth grade when a classmate and her mother rode their horses over to my parents house. I was boosted up into the saddle, wrapped my arms around the waste of my classmate and she rode me one lap up and down the dirt road off of which my parents live.

Under most circumstances I would have been much less than enthusiastic about the prospect of riding horses, but as I am presently reading quite a bit of Nineteenth Century military and diplomatic history and as horsemanship plays a significant part in this tale and is major component of martial virtue in the period, I though I should get a visceral sense of it. The ranch is twenty-something acres and we rode through wooded hollows, over grassy hills and through recently harvested corn fields. The picture above is taken as we came out of a wood at the crest of a hill overlooking a valley and a ridge, along which ran a portion of the Appalachian Trail (please note the humorous expression on the face of my horse, Bogie, inset).

As horses' hooves rustled through the fallen leaves along the trails, I tried to imagine navigating the strange and uncharted byways of sparsely populated preindustrial Europe. I tried to imagine what it would be like to ride from Paris to Moscow in a column of 600,000 in the summer of 1812, happy and unaware. It was plenty cold out on Saturday, but I tried also to imagine what it would be like to be about as well dressed as I was this day, but in twenty-degree-below-zero weather on the retreat from Moscow. Where the road was boggy, I tried to imagine what it would be like for a team to pull a cannon through the mud.

My inspiration here is Adam Zamoyski's gruesome book, Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March. In a section of the book where he ponders the factors that determined who survived and who perished, Mr. Zamoyski proposes a number of possibilities. At the heading of one subsection of illustrative vignettes, he proposes, "Devotion to another could be a life-saver." It is a misleading introduction as most of what follows are actually stories about how people died together. The horses are the subject of some of the most brutal passages in Mr. Zamoyski's book, but of the devotion between soldier and horse he says,

Sergent Bourgogne tells of his friend Melet, a dragoon of the Guard. Melet was devoted to his horse, Cadet, with which he had been through several campaigns, in Spain, Austria and Prussia, and was determined to get it back to France with him. He always went in search of food for Cadet before thinking of himself, and when it became impossible to find any forage at all along the line of retreat of the Grand Armée he went in search of it among the Russians, donning the coat and helmet of a Russian dragoon he had killed in order to get past their pickets. Once inside the enemy's encampment he would help himself to enough hay and oats for a few days and then make his escape. Sometimes he was discovered, but he always got away, and he did return to France with Cadet. A Bavarian Chevau-Léger whose darling mare Lisette fell through the ice of a bog outside Krasny and could not get out simply lay down to die beside her. (p. 491)

It was just a little two hour ride around the lot, but by the time the horses started to anticipate the end of the road I was fretting that it was over so soon. If you are looking to do something equinePleasant Valley Ranch is a great experience. You couldn't ask for a more easygoing, intelligent and attentive host.

In May of 2005 The Economist chose as the subject for its obituary Albert Marshall, the last British cavalryman of the First World War, who had died on 16 May 2005 at the age of 108 ("The Last of the Mounted British Cavalry," smarties, 3 June 2005). Mr. Marshall is only one of a series of such last survivors of the First World War. This Armistice Day both The New York Times and The Washington Post (Rubin, Richard, "Over There — and Gone Forever," Kunkle, Fredrick, "World War I Veteran Reflects on Lessons," 12 November 2007, respectively) ran stories about Frank W. Buckles, at age 106 the last remaining U.S. veteran of the Great War. From The New York Times:

But even more significant than the remarkable details of Mr. Buckles's life is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one left.

This Veterans Day marked the 89th anniversary of the armistice that ended that war. The holiday [was] first proclaimed as Armistice Day by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and renamed in 1954 to honor veterans of all wars ... But there's a good chance that this Veterans Day will prove to be the last with a living American World War I veteran. (Mr. Buckles is one of only three left; the other two were still in basic training in the United States when the war ended.) Ten died in the last year. The youngest of them was 105.

...

Four years ago, I attended a Veterans Day observance in Orleans, Mass. Near the head of the parade, a 106-year-old named J. Laurence Moffitt rode in a Japanese sedan, waving to the small crowd of onlookers and sporting the same helmet he had been wearing in the Argonne Forest at the moment the armistice took effect, 85 years earlier.

I didn't know it then, but that was, in all likelihood, the last small-town American Veterans Day parade to feature a World War I veteran. The years since have seen the passing of one last after another — the last combat-wounded veteran, the last Marine, the last African-American, the last Yeomanette — until, now, we are down to the last of the last.

It's hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It's not that World War I will then become history; it's been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can't quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can't stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.

If I may quibble a little bit, the First World War is not "history": we live with its consequences every day. In fact, one might say that we still occupy its long shadow.

That aside, I concur that the notion of living memory and a direct lineage to events is significant, especially psychologically so. Plowing a field behind a team of animals, however primitive it may sound, is a part of our world owing to the presence of certain grey-hairs who will recount years of having performed such a labor. The Crimean War is something else entirely. It may as well be the Siege of Troy. The transition from living history to the history that is relegated to documents and artifacts and books and nothing else is dismaying. As Carl Sagan pointed out, we are all orphans abandoned on the doorstep of time. But we are not abandoned once. We are abandoned over and over again every time one of our own passes.