This is of course what he does. It is the obvious move. Everything in his background points him in this direction. How difficult it is to change a way of life, especially if it is successful. One thread pulled undoes a whole weave. It would not be simply a uniform taken off but a different bed to lie in, changed pathways through the mind, the nerves as they spread like streams and rivulets different, perhaps the whole body transformed, not the same language spoken, even the tone in the voices you hear every day altered, and how do you interpret the nuances? That his father is dying, his friend has died, his body is aging makes him more cautious. Yes, a change is needed. But let’s not be impetuous. Let us stay within certain boundaries. There has already been so much loss. One must stand one’s ground. He passes all the tests. Some just barely but the instruction has been rapid and scant. He is taken into the Royal Flying Corps.
Is he still thrilled by the ascent? He has always felt himself to be invincible. He is stolid, laconic. Yet there is a certain gleam to his eyes in some of the photographs which suggests perhaps he feels like a god in the air. Valleys, mountains, whole cities, the temptations of Salomé slip away as if they were nothing. But now, rising into the air with him, I feel certain he sequesters even in the darkest regions of his body another secret joy, lifting his hands from the wheel, throwing back his head, feeling even for an instant like a butterfly lifted by the wind. He submits to the sensation of floating. Yes, Major Trenchard is impeccably male. But even the most militantly masculine of men, the Futurist Marinetti, glancingly voices this feeling, a blossoming, azured flight, before he weds this image to a raised foot. On the march.
It is 1913. Minor movements of exception do not make the plot deviate from its course. In the spring of this year a series of experiments is carried out by the Royal Flying Corps. Several two-pound bags of flour wrapped in tissue paper are dropped from heights of 200, and then 500, and then 1,800 feet to see if they will hit the targets they are aimed at. At the same time, from an airship named Beta, a plumb line is suspended to determine when the plane is vertically over the target. After the bomb is released, the distance by which it has missed its mark is recorded. When the plumb line fails to record accurate measurements, the construction of a bombsight begins.
The waging of war calls for an accurate aim. Homer tells us how Patroclus drew Achilles’s borrowed chariot next to Thestor in his chariot and, from one moving station to another, thrust a well-aimed spear into the boy, plucking him out of life. All day, in the same battle where he would later meet his own death, he pinned one man after another with this skill.
Such a clearsighted aim can also describe a movement of the mind. Satyagraha. To perceive the truth. How is it an idea takes form and then moves unerringly to the heart? In 1913, Mohandas Gandhi, still in South Africa, reconsiders an earlier principle. In the early spring, while pilots in Britain are trying to hit their targets, a decision handed down by the Cape Supreme Court brings about a change in Gandhi’s thinking. Until this date the movement for Indian rights was restricted to men. Gandhi felt it unmanly to ask women to join this struggle fraught with conflict and hence suffering. But now the Cape Court has refused to honor Hindu, Muslim or Parsi marriages. Only Christian unions will be officially recognized. Seeing that this decision affects both men and women alike, Gandhi reverses the old policy. Now women, along with the poor, will make up the largest portion of the rank and file of the Satyagraha movement.
Over the ensuing years, in his own way Gandhi will continue to be an advocate for the improvement of women’s lives. Yet he will also continue to believe in the preservation of Hindu culture. The two aims will not be easy to reconcile. It is good to swim in the waters of tradition but to sink in them is suicide, he says. The current is nearly impossible to negotiate. Though in the end he realizes he has learned much from his wife, Kasturbai, he is not a woman. He has been raised as a man. Still, his empathy, and perhaps even his whole being, leans farther and farther away from the traditional mandates of his own sex.
I am looking at a photograph of Gandhi taken in 1913. For seven years now he has put aside the clothes of an English gentleman that he learned to wear in London. Now he is dressed in traditional Indian clothing, a silk dhoti flowing down to his knees, and a skirt. He has shaven off the mustache that can be seen in earlier photographs and this makes him look younger and nearly feminine.
The notion that men of other cultures, especially those with a darker hue of skin, are less masculine than Englishmen is common in the British Empire at this date. It has been a sore point with Indian men. Some, in the movement working for Indian independence, have suggested that Indian men ought to eat meat. “Behold the mighty Englishman/he rules the Indian small/Because being a meateater/He is five cubits tall,” has become a popular verse in India. But dominance is not what Gandhi seeks now. That an Indian laborer once removed his turban in Gandhi’s presence, a form of tribute Indian men are supposed to pay to Englishmen, troubled him deeply. He refuses to dress as an Englishman any longer.
But beneath the outer layer of the change in his appearance, another more subtle process ensues. He is shedding not only the clothing of colonists but the last vestiges of that frame of mind which belongs to Empire. Body and soul he is transforming, eschewing any form of aggression. For several years now he has been celibate. He has given up a sexuality that in him had been dominating and at times almost violently grasping. Still, he appears to be more sensual; his lips more full, his whole being delicately, readily present; he has a stunning, almost androgynous beauty. He is walking miles every day now and this makes him strong. But the boundaries that define him have softened. And he is entirely unhidden, almost translucent.
It is one year before the Great War. The heat of it can be felt, approaching. Reports have arrived in England that describe the growth of a German air force. Trenchard is promoted to lieutenant colonel, second in command of the Central Flying School. He is thinking along the lines of strategy. A training maneuver has convinced him of the value of airplanes used to watch the movements of enemy troops. The airplane, he says, will transform the battlefield.
The twenty-eighth of June 1914. Looking back, one feels it could have been any event. The nations are already armed and aligned. The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, simply accelerates what has already begun. But those who are there at this moment have difficulty seeing into the future. Phantom shapes obscure their vision. On the horizon they see other wars, other times. By now Francis Ferdinand is just a figurehead. But the feel and force of monarchy linger. And on the battlefield the ghosts of kings’ armies clash.
This is often the way one moves into the future. For what you begin to see, there is no ready language. If you were to remain silent, listen, perhaps in response you might be able to move in a new way. Glide into it slowly, aware of every slight difference, skin and cells intelligent, reading. But trained as you are in certain regimens, chances are you proceed directly according to the old patterns, trying again what was tried before.
Though they have finally grasped the significance of the aerial view, that the battlefield has changed fundamentally has not yet occurred to the generals. How did this happen? No one willed it to be so. The rifles used now have a longer range. Men in an advancing file no longer have a chance to rush their opponents if they can be sighted and shot at a thousand yards. And now the machine gun seals this possibility forever. Even lingering back out of the range of these guns, soldiers are targets for artillery, shells which fly over their heads, demolishing everyone, everything in a wide radius, leaving a depression in the earth into which, advancing or retreating, one stumbles, even falling at times into now dismembered flesh. They could not foresee this.
Nor the length of the line. Conscription swells the armies. So many more can be brought by rail than by foot or on horseback. So they must dig trenches and the trenches do not stop growing until they run continuously across France and Belgium, from the sea to the Swiss border.
The land around is scorched. Nothing lives. Not even, as Wilfred Owen writes home to his mother, an insect. Only the men and the rats, on either side of what is called no man’s land, in trenches, shelling opposing armies. At certain places the trenches thicken, like the keloid scars of those who survived Hiroshima, making by their profusion even minor movement impossible.
Attempt after attempt to advance fails. Europe convulsed in battle is now in a state of paralysis. All motion, forward or back, is constricted to a matter of yards. Ordered by their officers to move into the field, men move out of their trenches into a perilous sky, thickened with metal. They are quickly stopped. Death answered by death, the bodies lie everywhere unburied around them.
One reaches an impasse. Every effort fails. At the periphery of vision, the first signs of despair appear. There is no way out. Except perhaps a kind of grace, coming as if unbidden, in the instant when a descent has reached its nadir. The philosopher Simone Weil suggests that at this moment to taste the sweetness of defeat one must surrender. All effort ceases. Something softens in the field. One begins then, in the light of this changed focus, to see a different outline, moving just there, a dot on the horizon. And then suddenly the whole picture has changed. And it is by grace alone that one moves into a new landscape.
But, of course, there is no surrender here. There is instead a certitude. There will be a victory. Kitchener, who won in South Africa and the Sudan, will win again. If the war is already extending past the earliest predictions, the generals are launching an attack that will turn the tide. On the eve of this battle, the commander of Allied forces on the Western Front, General Haig, records in his diary, The wire has never been so well cut nor the artillery preparation so thorough. Writing to his wife, he confides, I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with divine help.
This is his plan. He still believes in the cavalry. To protect their advance, it will be necessary to silence the enemy guns. Preparations are undertaken. A town built to house and feed the hundreds of thousands of soldiers. A medical station established. The trenches have already been dug. They are improved, with more barbed wire, further lines of trenches behind the front, shellproof dugouts to compete with the enemy’s trenches, which have been fortified for over a year. Shells will be aimed at enemy artillery and machines. This barrage will cut the barbed wire protecting their trenches. Hundreds of guns are set up at sites as far as possible from enemy counterfire all along the fifteen-mile front. Placed in advance of these sites, observers will direct the fire of the guns. At a depth of six feet telephone lines are laid between gun site and observation post. Nearby fighter squadrons are readied to take command of the air.
Hugh Trenchard is there. It is June 1916. We have leaped precipitously over two years. In this period Trenchard has argued for the use of airplanes, fitted with machine guns and bombs. First he is in charge of training pilots and readying airplanes. Then he moves to France to command the first wing of airplanes, and finally he is made general officer commanding the Royal Flying Corps. He is a brigadier general now. His airplanes have machine guns. One week before the planned advance, he directs the flight of a makeshift bomber, escorted by fighter planes, as it drops a phosphorous bomb on a German balloon. His biographer tells us there is a huge explosion of the most impressive fireworks; everything blows into the air. He does not tell us the fate of the German soldier suspended from the balloon. Does he slip by rope safely to the ground? Does he attempt the fall unaided? Or does he, like Icarus, perish in the flames?
One cannot fault the biographer for failing to notice his passing. So many have already died. We are now nearly two years into a war which was supposed to be over in six months, as everyone said, in the naive beginning, by Christmas. That a war which seems to stretch out forever should speed by so quickly in narration is strange. Is it the monotony? It is not easy after all to distinguish one event from another in this territory. The landscape is monochromatic—graduating shades of charred darkness cover everything. Even the red of blood disappears as it dries. The cadavers of men and horses lying out in the sun sometimes for months blend in, except for their odor, with the rutted wreckage of earth. The dark rats which eat everything—cadavers, wounded men, supplies, tablecloths, operation orders—are matted with mud. The lice too blend in with everything that is earth-colored and cannot be seen. Everyone here is in and of the mud; the water in the trenches rises at least to the calves, more often to the knees, or waist high. Feet, always cold and wet, become infected. Must be amputated. Day after day one sees nothing but two mud walls, running as if infinitely and in an endless labyrinth, and the sky. The sky alone, in those moments when it is silent, recalls one to other possibilities.
Is there something then that I am missing here, an absence that truncates my narrative? I could tell you that in 1914 British naval fliers carried out four bombing attacks in German territory, the last against the zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven on Christmas Day. I know this will be of interest to a future generation. But now, on this page, in this paragraph, starting this sentence, I find myself knee deep, waist deep, in the mud of a trench. And what am I doing here? Because after all I am a woman. I am not cast in a soldierly mold. My childhood interest in uniforms and battles, being inappropriate, has waned. Yet even so, I must confess that there is something familiar here. Something I recognize. The feet for instance. Cold. Wet. What they feel like. I have some sense of this. Numb. You forget they exist. Except when you walk, the ground has become oddly removed, and distant as a friend who suddenly grows aloof. Your whole body, also cold, partakes of this numbness. Yes, there is danger. But the danger, oddly unreal as the feel of your own skin, comes to you only in brutal flashes in which you are taken as if into a nightmare self, a demonic, terrorized twin.
And now, as I speak, settling my gaze, and sinking more deeply into the atmosphere of this place, I begin to realize I am not the only woman here. She is, in fact, everywhere. Her great telluric body stretches the whole length of the trenches. That man who has to be removed now because he is trembling continually and weeping is possessed by her. At night, surreptitiously, she enters the dreams of even the most hardened soldiers, making them cry out with unwilled fear. And she is there in the throes of that horse whose whole body quivers, whose mouth arches open, whose eyes roll back and fog, who freezes then into a motionless motion.
She was there in the countryside before the shelling began, teasing the soldier who had fallen asleep under that apple tree just coming into blossom. She will be there in November with the lieutenant as the hole he is hiding in caves in over him, the weight of his tin hat pressing his chin into his chest, the soft earth yielding slightly to his struggles, slowly settling around him so that the movements of his ribs are more and more restricted, and the voices of the others recede. And she is there of course on July 1, at the start of the Battle of the Somme when the first lines of men advance in a slow, evenly spaced order toward the German trenches.
It is not as they had expected. The barbed wire in front of the German trenches has not been well cut. The German artillery positions have not been destroyed. Even the officers are confused. This new battle is foreign to them. Some of them, called up after years of inaction, veterans of the South African war, refer to these French fields as kopjes, though the terrain is entirely different. Whole lines of men are cut down by the machine guns as if a scythe had been run over a field of grass. The morale is broken. Wounded or frightened men cling to their officers’ knees as they wade through the mud and the fallen, trying to lead their regiments forward. But where are their regiments? Can this be? Only two men still stand past the barbed wire? Is it wise now to retreat? But to where? The sky full of explosion is opaque. The ground seems to roll and change its shape. The noise is deafening. Mingling with the burst of shells and the infinitely mindless report of the machine guns, one can hear the moans and occasional shrieks of the wounded. The drill formation has completely collapsed. No one is marching in synchronized step. No one is marching. The c
avalry never breaks through.
It is a species of death. The general’s plans belonged to an ancient tradition. As early as the Battle of Thermopylae, the cavalry have been the elite among soldiers, a symbol of all that is noble in battle. The splendid uniforms, feathered hats, gleaming weapons will be retired now. It is not easy to relinquish such glory. For a moment, the battlefield will be stripped of meaning. The loss is spiritual, unequivocal. Lance and sword ready, skillfully mounted, they wait in the wings for weeks. When they are finally called to battle they are easily defeated. An entire squadron of Indian cavalry shot down in one charge. Three thousand South African cavalrymen reduced to eight hundred in just six days.
I am thinking again about the nature of change. The old soldier cherishes tradition. Yet this is a paradox of history. The same passion for war creates new and ingenious weapons, each of which changes war forever. Everything is mechanized. Soldiers arrive by train. So that they can synchronize their movements precisely, and still hold up a rifle, the wristwatch is invented. A whole army is provided with form letters to send home, the first in existence. And in the midst of the battle a new armored creature arrives, cumbersome and heavy, pulling itself by caterpillar tracks over the rough land, blindly spewing bullets in its path.
The purpose of the cavalry, to ram through a line of defense, will be carried out by tanks now. And, yes, the men who operate the tanks are valorous. But their pursuit lacks the dignity of the soldier on horseback. Confined to a narrow, hellish space, the temperature rising above 110 degrees from the heat of the engine, blistering spent shell cases rolling about them, trying to hear each other over the roar of the engine, the artillery, unable to see anything in the darkness inside. It would be like a feverish body. Racked, heroic in a certain way but not inspiring.
A Chorus of Stones Page 23