Still the animating ardor of the cavalry has not entirely vanished. It is into the air then that this spirit flies, heavenward but not to heaven, ready to live another life. Men on both sides of the line understand this transformation. Trenchard has exchanged his polo horse for a Sopwith. And if Ernst Jünger, his young enemy, stifled in his longing for Africa, miraculously carries on the heroic tradition in the trenches of the Somme, another young German soldier, Hermann Göring, leaves those trenches before the great battle even begins, and by his own route reaches the air. Had he been born a generation earlier he certainly would have ridden a horse into battle. The man he most admired as a child, not his father, but his mother’s lover, was a cavalry officer. Following the footsteps of this man, Göring is a brilliant cadet in the military academy. In the first few days of the war he does his best to emulate a past now quickly vanishing. He steals four horses from the retreating French. And the next day formulates a daring plan to ride into the center of a French occupied village to bodily steal the French commanding officer. But the plan fails. And soon his regiment moves to the trenches.
Here, he is disillusioned with the boring mud of the Somme. Is it possible then that this disillusionment might spread to war itself, and that, given a few more months in the trenches, he might turn his life in a different direction? But chance removes him from this ground. Stricken with rheumatic fever, he is sent to a hospital in Freiburg. And as he begins to get well, he discovers the flying school that is stationed there.
It is as if the spirit of the cavalry had risen like a phoenix from the flames. Far from disillusioned now, he is thrilled. He refuses to return to the front with his old battalion. Soon he will fly a white Fokker G7 over the same terrain.
He is a dashing figure in his leather, his goggles, a striped scarf wrapped about his neck, staring implacably from the cockpit of his airplane. He has a reputation for bravery. Beginning as a camera-observer, in order to get the best shots he grips the side of the cockpit with his legs and ankles and leans into the air as the airplane swoops over its target. He is known as the flying trapezist. It is not long before he becomes a pilot. Over the course of the war he will be wounded, seriously, and return to battle, shooting down fifteen enemy aircraft. He earns Germany’s highest medal: Pour le Mérite. And like the other fliers, Von Richthofen, Lowenhardt, Udet, Hawker, Rickenbacker, he becomes a public idol. Now he is the object of cameras. His picture posed in front of his airplane is published in the newspapers; feted, paraded, he enters a pantheon of military heroes.
The balloonist, who shared the air with him, is not so celebrated. Is it the shape of the balloon, rounded and womblike? This balloon is not brightly colored like its ancestors. It is a military shade and blends in with the battlefield. Still, there is a feeling of whimsy that cannot be denied. One wants to laugh in its presence, as one does with a butterfly or a cloud. It does not, like the airplane, move in any purposeful direction, but wafts above the battle, almost like a decoration. Must not the balloonist, then, partake somewhat of this mood? The tiny figures beneath him scurry about small as ants. He is not without feeling for them, but at this height he cannot really make out the different colors and markings of the uniform. A certain orientation thus eludes him. To be sure, he knows where the enemy territory is. He will be able to report correctly the movements of British troops. But for the moment he catches himself smiling. A heavy piece of artillery has fallen over and sinks into the mud. A line of men summoned by bugle arises and then scurries quickly backward. How can he ever explain this smile in his report? There is no necessity. For in this instant he ceases to exist. He explodes, along with the balloon, into a spectacular show of light.
Yet, uncelebrated as he is, the balloonist, dying this way, suddenly, violently, in the course of battle, still shares a certain bond with all other men at arms, even the famous fliers. It is a bond that stretches across enemy lines, especially among airmen. They read about each other in the press and learn to recognize one another by numbers painted on the planes they fly. They admire one another’s exploits. Göring is one of the fliers who is singled out by the British. He himself knows Trenchard. And between the wars the two men will write each other, confiding a mutual respect.
At the thought of this friendship my mind is brought back to a story I read from the life of a boy in a German military academy. It begins with the loneliness of a boy who is isolated from his family. He longs for touch, for intimacies, but he has not yet been accepted by the other boys. He is still a pledge, raw, uninitiated. Then one day when, under the pressure of a beating from his teachers, he has informed on another boy, he is surrounded by his fellow students. They lead him to a table where he is laid on his stomach and beaten by all of them at once with leather thongs. Just before he feels he will disintegrate, the boys cease their attack. As he rises slowly and with difficulty to his feet again, he is given a handshake by the eldest boy. This is the sign that from now on he will be welcome among them.
This acceptance is soon followed by a second rite of initiation. As part of his graduation to a full-fledged cadet, whatever baby teeth still remain in his mouth are now pulled out by the academy’s dentist. By these two ordeals, he is taken into the social body of masculinity.
And what a tyrannical body this is. Here on the ground again you can just make out this figure, standing booted and erect in the trenches, watching every move, vigilant lest there be a moment of cowardice, of shirking, of female weakness. One might imagine the woman in the trench simply disappearing beneath this harsh and penetrating gaze. But what a surprise. She is not as submissive as the Victorian mind suggests. How could one predict this? She puts up a fight. She is, in fact, fiercely, unremittingly present. So, to paraphrase Richard Aldington’s novel that will soon be written about this war, the would-be military hero is amazed and disturbed to discover how his body will not obey him. At the sight and sound of flying shrapnel, bullets, explosions, his flesh shrinks, his head ducks, his whole body cowers, even though he rails at himself, calling himself coward, poltroon, sissy.
Not the idea of death but a wall of flame, not the abstract notion of sacrifice but the bodily knowledge that just under your foot, as you take your next step, there may be a mine. Contrary to all your training, your body bends over as if to protect what is vital, your hands spring to catch your body as it falls, your eyes shut, as something flies into your face.
You are caught then between these two, forced into a no-man’s-land between the social body and the body you were born with which is too much like a woman’s body. If you turn in one direction you betray the honor of your gender. You are, as Homer said, unmanned. But your body of birth will not obey. Refuses movement. Produces paralysis. Becomes as immobile as the trenches themselves, the body frozen, as Elaine Showalter writes, in a silent complaint against masculinity. There is a word for it. It is called shell shock.
But your mind will not admit its complaint. You cannot put what you are feeling into words. You were among the bravest, after all. You went into battle believing yourself invincible. Bullets veered from their course as you advanced. Shellfire cannot break through the invisible shield of your confidence. You are cloaked by tradition and discipline. Then the unthinkable happens. A shell nearly misses you, or it gives you a slight wound, or the man standing next to you, your friend, has half his face blown away. And your shield is broken, the cloak rent to shreds. Something in your body suddenly knows death with an unmitigated certainty. And you simply cannot move your legs. Your head aches violently. You can no longer remember who you are, or at least the last two years have vanished. The last day you remember is the day before you enlisted.
At one moment you were home, eating a family dinner. You are especially fond for some reason of your mother and father or your girlfriend or the still green pasture just outside of town. And then, inexplicably, you are here, at the special wing of the hospital, it is explained to you, designed for your kind of case. You are questioned. After a while you learn that thos
e who do not answer the questions correctly are shot. For your loss of memory you are given an injection of sodium amytal. When your head still hurts you are given a lumbar puncture. If you are a German soldier you are given shock treatment. And you are returned to the front. If you come back in the same condition, weeping, disabled, the level of shock is increased. Soon the treatment you receive competes with your terror of the front. And you learn there are some who do not survive these treatments.
But perhaps it does not happen exactly like this. You are not shell-shocked. You are seriously wounded. You didn’t believe this possible, but now it has happened to you. Despite all your training you cry out for help. There are no stretcher-bearers here. The other men are instructed to leave you. You know this. But the pain, the loss of blood, makes you panic. Hour upon hour you wait. The pain settles deep into you, becomes you. You are not the man you once were. You are simply a man in pain. Someone appears quickly and then leaves, without uttering a word to you. You find you are longing for a word. Just a kind word. A moment of compassion. The bandages, the hospital, cease to matter. What you want even more than water, even more than the cessation of pain, is this small measure of kindness in a voice, a look. Finally a doctor comes. He administers morphia, applies a bandage. You will have to stay where you are for the night. But you are all right now. The doctor has listened. Someone has cared. Attended. Divine compassion has flowed over you.
Of course for many no one comes. It is impossible to retrieve all the wounded. The dead can go on unattended for days. There is pain that is unending and unanswerable. I have been near the edge of the circumstance. You are compelled finally to admit there is no reason for it. You have been caught in history. No effort will save you. Your once soft thigh against the stinging cold of the ice grows hard as the earth is hard. Tenderness and touch exist in a foreign country, forever inaccessible now. The unspent life still in you already eases into the charred remains of the field. Even practical reason, order, consequence, have left you. You do not cry out any longer. Silence no longer wounds you. You do not make plans or imagine a rescue. And then suddenly, there is no explaining why, you have not summoned this, but still, you are being held, held as if by ghostly arms and soothed by an invisible compassion.
Because there is a compassion here in the field where no one is standing. It is almost as if stray bits of energy belonging to souls that have passed, souls that have suffered as these men suffer now, linger, drawn by the memory of a shared ordeal. There are unseen forces. Charted in no laboratory as yet. Ghostlike presences. What a surprise then as I stare into the veils of space to discover among the others the shade of an outline I recognize, wandering empathetically along the trenches. Can it be Oscar Wilde?
One would not have guessed he knew anything of this ordeal. Unless you were to follow him into Reading Gaol, and to the several cells in the other prisons he occupied for two years. There was the senseless labor. Carrying heavy weights up and down a ramp for hours every day. The constant cold. Damp setting into his bones. The bed with no mattress. The thin gruel of a diet. The steadily wasting body. The floggings. Withheld food. Absence of light. A view of nothing but gray prison walls. The bucket, overflowing, filled with his own defecation, giving the air a sickening odor. No wonder the warden predicted that after this imprisonment his life would not last long.
But if Wilde’s spirit is anywhere in this region of suffering, it is not visible. At this particular moment in history the idea of such a presence on a battlefield is too absurd to imagine. No matter that some of the soldiers fall in love, become lovers. This fact hardly affects the popular image of the warrior. Even Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred, blames the defeat of British armies in Europe on the vice he once practiced with Wilde. And Rupert Brooke, heroic voice of his age, soon to die on his way to the battlefield, sees the war as a chance to slough off the demoralizing influence of feminism and hermaphroditism.
The look we cast back then must be softened, as it falls on any single man, by this sense of the social body. General Trenchard is caught up in a national mood. When he tries to discourage his pilots from wearing parachutes (which he takes as a sign of weakness), he is perhaps a modicum more extreme in his approach than is common in these crucial years of change. But certainly he is not without feeling for his men. The war was not his doing. An onerous duty has fallen to those who have to carry it out, especially the commanders.
It is with this in mind that General Trenchard speaks of the discipline and fortitude required of the officer who must order his men into death, who does not let his reluctance sway him from what is necessary. When he is criticized for incurring too many casualties after the 60th Squadron suffers heavy losses, his biographer tells us a less resolute commander might have changed his course. But this is a quality for which he has been decorated. He does not change his course. Instead, pleading with London for more men, more planes, he enlarges the formations of escorting bombers.
With so much death, he thinks, of course, about morale. In one month half the squadron has been killed or wounded. When his men wake in the morning, will they be daunted at the breakfast table by the sight of three more empty places? No seat must remain empty. The conversation would be desultory. Grow almost to a halt. In the back of everyone’s mind would be more than one death. And so replacements are always in the wings, ready to sit at the table. Instead of brooding then over friends who have gone forever, his men are taken up with welcoming newcomers and making them comfortable.
After the war’s end, in the year of the Spanish influenza, another side of Trenchard’s existence will emerge briefly, barely seen in its fluttering, transitory existence. Trenchard is among those stricken with illness, and because as usual he does not rest as his doctor orders, he veers precariously toward death. He has contracted pneumonia. It is then that Mrs. Boyle, the widow of a friend, arrives. He had called her earlier, but she was still in France. She comes still wearing her Red Cross uniform. Over several days as she nurses him, he lapses frequently into a restless sleep. And in that sleep another self, long sequestered, begins to speak. Telling her, but not telling her, confessing, but not hearing his own confession, a half-coherent speech expresses a terrible grief over all the men he has ordered into death.
She will take this grief with her, a memory, her private prize. Because now, she tells herself, she knows the real man. And though in a few months’ time she will be his wife, out of kindness she will never speak of it with him. The confession, then, remains a secret except in her mind, and if this second self has a place in the world, it is with her.
Who among these two selves is the real self, the one who makes decisions by day, or the other, who cries out at night?
I am reminded that nothing stands alone. Everything has something standing beside it. And the two are really one. Watching the wind blow through the field, it is as if two winds are blowing, each from a different direction. But after a moment, from a longer view, one can see that it is the same wind bending and turning its trajectory.
Is Trenchard accompanied on the battlefield by another softer and sorrowing self? This is not a question that can be answered. Sorrow and fear are thick in the atmosphere. But they must be avoided. Softness is all about; the softness of wounds, of deteriorating flesh, of the dead, and it cannot be abided. Grief must run to hardness, fury and cold calculation, for the clear line of motion in its planned trajectory can be lost in this wavering ocean of decay.
And unless victory is wrought from this pain, it will all seem senseless, stupid, debased.
It is a moving part of the tale. Achilles stands crying high on a hill. His battle cry is inspired by the death of his friend Patroclus. He has no armor. The lame god, god of injury and suffering, will forge it for him overnight. But just his presence here, the rage in his voice, the uncanny bareness of him without his armor, frightens the Trojan warriors and lends hope to the Achaeans. There is a shift in the battlefield clear as a shift in a symphony when the melody moves from one instru
ment to another. In this moment the Greeks succeed in winning Patroclus’s body back.
When the body returns, Achilles washes it and wraps it. But it is not enough to have the body back. Before Patroclus’s body goes into the ground, Achilles will return to battle, in his new armor. A life must be claimed for this life, the life of the slayer, Hector. And that is not all. This is Achilles’s glory. Should he die, death will not have the last word. Troy will fall. Long after his death, the name Achilles will be pronounced with awe.
The response, though, is not always the same. Achilles is the abstract form, the golden, unchanging standard against which the real, the living, are measured. The real do not always conform. Even in the Iliad, men whimper and tremble. Captain Arthur Agius, 3rd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, 56th Division, is shell-shocked on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. He huddles in a corner, his face to the wall. Though it makes him ashamed, he cannot stop crying. His legs will not support him. He has not been injured. But he has witnessed the death of several friends. His young subaltern, newly out, disappears in an explosion. So many gone, he will say later, before his squadron even reaches their own trench. They are treading on the dead.
Of course, soldiers are trained for another response. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Private Ernest Deighton, 8th Battalion, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, 8th Division, finds himself within twenty-five or thirty yards of the German trenches. But as he enters the space through which he must make his advance he finds the air is thick with machine-gun fire. A bullet strikes his friend, Clem Cummington. The wound is in his friend’s chest and is fatal. His friend is dead immediately. Private Deighton himself is wounded in the shoulder. But the sight of his friend’s death makes him wild. He advances just to the edge of a German dugout; looking directly at the men, and cursing them, he drops a Mills bomb in their midst. Turning from the explosion, he encounters another German soldier face to face, and thrusts his bayonet into this man, killing him. This is exactly what he has been taught to do.
A Chorus of Stones Page 24