It is 1900, the year Heinrich Himmler is born to a German schoolmaster in Bavaria, and Oscar Wilde, destitute and forgotten in a hotel in Paris, dies. The Boer War has been raging for several months. Captain Hugh Trenchard is among the soldiers posted there. Yet still he has not entered battle. He has been assigned to a backwater, as an aide to an ailing major at a rest camp. And this he cannot abide. Breaking rank, he jumps aboard a supply train headed for Johannesburg, where he will rejoin the Royal Scots Fusiliers in the thick of the fighting.
Now his skill at polo serves him well. That light in his eyes, the streak of rebelliousness, a certain ingenuity under pressure, qualities lying quiescent in his heart, will come into being at last. He has organized a cavalry of unruly Australians and soon finds himself galloping over the wild lands in pursuit of a Boer encampment. Does he think at this moment about death? But death seems impossible now. His body is quick with life. He is about to see his first fire. It is no wonder he does not pause as he approaches the farmhouse. Boer families are supposed to have been taken off the land, moved into concentration camps. He cannot afford any second thoughts. This is just one mansion in the larger house of the Empire. Quickly he leads a patrol to the building and, dismounting, moves around a wall and toward the door. Then it happens. A sudden flash, a report sounding even after he is stricken. Wounded, he pitches forward and falls.
Before 1943 radioactive elements existed only in traces, in a few rare places on the planet, where, for instance, hundreds of thousands of years ago a spontaneous chain reaction occurred.
Is it possible? The hands lifting the stretcher that carry Hugh Trenchard from battlefield to ambulance to hospital, can they be delicately brown, the hue of Indian skin, the hands perhaps, even, of Mohandas Gandhi himself? For he is there, somewhere in the same war, leading an ambulance corps of eleven hundred Indians who attend to many different battle fronts. At this time in his life Gandhi feels a loyalty to the British. He has recently garnered experience as a nurse, volunteering a few hours a week in a hospital for indentured laborers. His first offer to organize an ambulance corps among Indians is refused. But after heavy casualties the British reconsider. Gandhi hopes that this show of service will convince the Empire of the worthiness of its Indian subjects in South Africa.
Meanwhile, though his wounds are nearly fatal, Trenchard is to survive. Lying on a table, nearly unconscious, except for the vague sounds of voices that permeate the anesthesia of shock, he hears those who attend him discuss his death. Later he will insist that he was never afraid. He never doubted that he would live. He is that kind of soldier, often heroic in battle, who believes himself to be invincible.
I have some insight into this kind of bravado. During a recent attack of a chronic illness, I had many dreams of my own death, and woke more than once with the sensations of dying. In the daylight I felt no fear. It was only in the middle of the night that I experienced panic. The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
1901. Is it a bright day? Trenchard’s biographer does not tell us. But one might imagine that the snow blazes with light. Trenchard is on a toboggan hurtling on a downward course, once again approaching a sharp curve at high speed. He makes no effort to slow his progress. All day he has sped the same course, and each time, approaching the curve, he has been flung from the toboggan forward into the snow.
At the urging of his nurse, he has come to Switzerland to convalesce in the mountain air. He has survived his wounds but, one lung removed, lame, one leg paralyzed, he cannot return to battle. Feeling beaten, the sight of the toboggan lifts his spirits. Here is a challenge, even despite his injuries, he can engage. As he slides into the curve he is thrown once more, and this time, because of the trajectory of his flight, he bounces off the embankment and falls a second time. The others on the slope rush to his aid. But he surprises everyone, even himself. He rises and begins to walk, now without aid, without a limp, the movement of his left leg mysteriously restored.
Was a delicate nerve revitalized, a misplaced disc manipulated by this fortuitous accident? Whatever the cause, this recovery burnishes the image he has of himself as invincible. Like a phoenix risen from the flames, he has regained his health.
It is just as well. He is a man who abides neither weakness nor fear. He tells anyone who will listen, I hate sick people. And when several years into the future he will command the Allied bombing operations, he will ridicule the pilots who wish to wear parachutes. In part a reaction to his mother’s many illnesses, nevertheless, the thinking is not his alone. It is part of military philosophy. The soldier enters a territory which exists between life and death with the desire for victory not only over the enemy but also over his own fear. Whether or not he conquers that fear reflects on his manhood. The Greek word for courage in battle, used often in the Iliad, is andreia, a word that should more accurately be translated as virility or manliness. Throughout the battle of Troy men are unmanned by fear. It is a curious habit of mind that can imagine a man unmanned by the nature of his own feelings.
It is 1903. Daniel Schreber, released from years of incarceration, publishes an account of the life of his mind in this time. His Memoirs describe a fantastic process of transformation. He believes himself to have become a woman. In the beginning this development alarms him. He writes that he is being unmanned; his penis is vanishing; breasts grow. Voices assault him: fancy a person who was a Senatspräsident allowing himself to be f– – – – –. Trying to prove his virility, he fights with the male attendants. Finally he accepts his fate: he is the last human being on earth, and this is why he must be a woman, to deliver by divine impregnation a virgin birth. Dressing in ribbons and jewelry, he announces, I have wholeheartedly inscribed the cultivation of femininity on my banner.
In the same year two other events held so far apart in the imagination, it is as if they take place in different worlds, intersect in time. In October a small group of women interested in women’s suffrage gather at the home of Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester, for the purpose, in Mrs. Pankhurst’s words, of organization. Out of this meeting the Women’s Social and Political Union is formed. Two months later, on December 14 of the same year, Wilbur Wright attempts a sustained flight with an airplane powered by an engine. Though he fails, in just three days his brother Orville will succeed. He will fly first for twelve seconds and then for nearly a minute.
As I contemplate these events in proximity, a certain electricity ignites between them, a spark that might perhaps illuminate what was before obscure, and now only very slowly delineates against a larger background. In the haze I can just make out an outline of Blériot’s plane that will land, in 1909, on the cliffs of Dover, after the first crossing of the Channel.
But 1909 has not yet arrived. Though a new age of mechanical heroism is dawning, this is still 1903, the age of the horse, and Hugh Trenchard is back in the saddle again. Through a series of victorious tennis matches he has strived to convince the army of his prowess. Finally, circumventing bureaucracy, he re-enlists. Once more in Africa, for three months he virtually lives on his horse. Yet he lacks his earlier stamina. The old pathway of the bullet which destroyed his lung still bleeds. At the end of a day’s trek he is known to faint and must be carried bodily from his horse. Under the spur of such a will, his biographer writes, Trenchard’s body becomes acclimatized to pain.
The metaphor is unerring. Language conceals history, and ideas which on the surface may have vanished persist in habitual images. In this case to think of Trenchard’s body under the spur of his will is to recall the image of the knight and his steed. In this iconography the horse is a symbol of the animal instincts of the rider. And the knight mounting his horse becomes logos in a state of mastery over matter.
Certainly anyone who has ever been ill can understand the appeal of this idea. To conquer the wayward body, its pain, its fatigue, with reason. It is an old habit, deeply engendered. In the field, Trenchard would not let his thoughts wander n
ear the terrain of desire for a soft bed or a cup of tea. One can win this battle temporarily by evading the experience of flesh and focusing the mind elsewhere. But there is also a strange bliss to be discovered through surrender to physical limitation. After grieving the initial loss of control, one senses that another, more subtle grief has gone. The return of the body to consciousness has assuaged a loss so deep it had become familiar.
Does this explain the passionate love of the soldier for his horse? Warm and breathing beneath him, the animal reminds him of what he has perhaps forgotten. The body of the horse is like the body of a woman for him. In the heat of the ride, the horse draws the language of a lover from him. Klaus Theweileit records these endearments uttered in memories of dreams by the officers of the Freikorps: How warm you are, how full of life, how sweet your breathing.
It is 1905. Dressed in full military regalia, and emanating the strange beauty of power, Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany, rides a white horse through the streets of Tangier. The parade has ceremonial significance. Moroccan tribesmen line the pathway of his advance. He is followed by a retinue of German officers who are dressed just as he is dressed.
The Kaiser is here to pledge support for Moroccan independence. He has not traveled all this way, though, for the benefit of the Moroccans alone. He is trying to prevent Britain and France from gaining more territory. One can almost imagine them, the nation-states, moving like ritual dancers in an increasingly clear direction, as they seek more land in Africa, Asia and the New World. The Kaiser has fallen behind. Bit by bit parts of the globe are being claimed. Britain colors on her maps in red all the territories she has colonized. In the last decade four million square miles have turned crimson through her efforts. Competing with Britain since the turn of the century, Germany has expanded her navy. The other European nations have followed suit. They have begun an arms race.
It is 1907. Hoping to reach an agreement on arms reduction, a second international peace conference convenes at The Hague. But the participants fail to reach any agreement on this subject. They do, however, agree to modify the rules of war. Among the rules to be changed is a principle adopted just eight years earlier at the first peace conference prohibiting the dropping of projectiles and explosives from flying machines. Now that decision will be reversed. Without bombardment, it is argued, the aircraft would have no means of defense. The bombardment of undefended places, however, is still to be prohibited.
It will be many years before this second prohibition is removed but when it is, the bombardment of undefended places will gradually fade into a background of normalcy. With the passage of time certain ideas, including military strategies, begin to seem as if they have always existed. In this way they move outside the confines of doubt. Repetition of certain events, the duplication of the same choice, the founding of institutions and then buildings and then landmarks based on this choice accrue around an idea and give it the illusory sense of natural law.
A few years ago I traveled to Germany, hoping during that journey to visit Nordhausen, and whatever remains of concentration camp Dora, in the Harz Mountains, where the V-2 rockets were produced. But illness kept me from this visit. Yet in the first-class compartment of a train traveling from Freiburg, where I had been recuperating, to the airport at Frankfurt, I had an unexpected interview. Unable to sit up for long periods, I was stretched out over three seats when an older woman appeared, dressed with a certain flair, her face bright with expectation, as she stood in the doorway waiting for her seat. When a friend explained to her in German that I was ill, she insisted that I remain as I was. She suggested I put my feet in her lap. Telling me that her granddaughter had also been ill and liked to have her feet massaged, she stroked my feet. She told us she was a widow. Her husband had been dead for two years. But she was not unhappy. She believed in happiness and cheerfulness. She had the manner of a great actress, entertaining and charming. Her husband, she told us proudly, was the designer of Hitler’s most famous airplane, one that dropped countless bombs over Britain. From this statement, she moved, without a pause, but also without the hurried pace of one who wishes to avoid a certain topic, to the professions of her sons. The fabric of her life was as if uninterrupted by any questions.
Writing of the past in the present tense, as if it were unraveling now, one knows all along what the future will be and this produces an odd tension. I know that one day Major Hugh Trenchard will raise his voice against the prohibition of bombing undefended places. But he himself does not know this. In 1907, the year of the conference, he is still in Africa. At this date he has not even become interested in airplanes. This is, however, the year he becomes commandant of British regiments in southern Nigeria.
I am imagining him as he sits majestically still on his horse while he watches over the construction of the playing fields he has ordered. Does he switch back and forth on this animal trained for the quick turns of sport? I doubt the Ibo warriors summoned for this task understand its purpose. Trenchard will offer trophies for soccer, tennis, golf and, of course, polo. He takes these games seriously. Some years into the future he will recommend that Royal Air Force pilots be encouraged to engage in winter sports. He believes sport teaches manliness and team spirit. He is not alone in his belief. The use of sport to prepare young men for battle is an old tradition.
The agony of athletes at the first Olympic games was never far from the agony of the warrior. And the crown of glory belonged to both.
Glory. This is a word with many meanings, shaded by the wounds of battle, brushed by the wings of angels in their flight toward heaven. What is glorious is what is praised. But it is also that radiance surrounding a holy presence. And to go to glory means to die.
In this word one can begin to make out the limits of a field; it is here that a soldier faces death. What brings him glory is his courage, his virility. But there, just over the boundary, in a more female territory that begins at the edge of the field, a different landscape begins. It is the terrain of shame and I have been there. This is the shame that accompanies bodily weakness. So ingrained is this response to bodily failure in our learning that in moments of trembling or faintness shame can even precede, by hardly perceptible degrees, the awareness of frailty itself. Skirting the edge of the battlefield, this is the terrain of submission.
Trenchard, whose mother suffered from prolonged illness, has an open disdain for sickness, either in himself or others. He rarely admits to weakness of any kind. He presses himself and his regiment past the point of exhaustion, marching hundreds of miles in extreme heat through the jungle, urging his men to ignore their fear of poison arrows or full powder charges at close range.
Yet what makes a man a soldier is not only the ability to face hardship and danger but his willingness to inflict these on others as well. There are, for instance, Ibo tribespeople in the territory Trenchard commands who are resisting British rule. As commandant of the region he makes the decision to set the recalcitrant villages on fire.
I am thinking of him now at the site of one of these purgations. As he watches this community of homes go up in flames, is he thinking of the loss of his own birthplace? Yet there is a certain freedom in loss. And the idea that he caused this blaze must embolden him. He stands watching transfixed as the fire roars through all that has been standing before his eyes, transforming the old structures to empty space. Now that he is the master of it, this swift change excites him. The air is cleansed. What once existed, unquestioned substance, has dissolved before his eyes. Everything seems possible now.
Yes, of course, there is the suffering he sees on the faces of the Ibo whose village has been destroyed. But he is above this pain. He can see the longer view. The necessity of a British presence here. The righteousness of the judgment. After all, the Ibo because of their superstitions have been murdering twins just after birth, and they punish the mother who bore them. He is then, he reasons, bringing rationality to this world and, at the same time, protecting the women and children.
Look
ing back over a life, certain seemingly small events later take on the aura of prescience, as if pointing to what will come. One story of Trenchard’s military ingenuity under pressure can be read as a strange augury of a future as obscure to the present as the eventual fate of flying machines still is. Trenchard is marching through the Nigerian jungle when unexpectedly he meets with a force of Ibo warriors that far outnumber his own troops. Facing hand-to-hand combat with only fifty surviving soldiers against hundreds of Ibo, he orders his artillery officer to set off fireworks carried to signal other columns. As the star shells burst into red petals of light in the sky, the Ibo warriors, terrified and confused, retreat.
Had Hugh Trenchard known anything of Ibo cosmology, he might have turned at this moment of victory to see if any other pattern of events shadowed his path. For as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has written, in the Ibo way of thinking, nothing stands alone. There is always another thing standing beside it.
Isn’t it possible that for every event somewhere a double, inverted, mocking or answering, giving depth and perspective, exists as day does for night, summer for winter? Perhaps historians who search for sequence and causation miss the delicate dance in which events brush by, nod to and circle one another. For in the same year and on the same continent, as if mirroring Trenchard’s fireworks, an illumination of an entirely different kind is taking place. Mohandas Gandhi, still following his loyalty to the British Empire, has once again organized an ambulance corps, this time to accompany British soldiers in Natal. A conflict has broken out between the Zulu and the British administrators of Natal who have annexed their land. Gandhi is dismayed with what he sees; his loyalty is strained past the breaking point. The British attempt to control what they call a rebellion through public floggings and hangings. Gandhi’s corps tends mostly to the Zulu, whose festering wounds have been neglected by a European medical corps. The British have fired indiscriminately in villages, wounding men, women and children alike, many times attacking even those Zulu friendly to the Empire.
A Chorus of Stones Page 20