A friend dies. Standing perhaps just in front of you. Or behind you. The wound gaping and spurting blood. The body suddenly not the one you knew, the life drained out, hardening quickly. You cannot stay there beside your friend trying, though you know it is useless, to stanch the blood. You cannot place your hand on the brow, and shudder as if the passage of his soul had made its way through your body too, the shuddering making a wail inside you, as you find yourself held at the edge of death, not dying yourself, but the full force of it rocking your body. You cannot. That is against all orders. It has been repeated again and again. Leave him. Leave the body. Continue your advance.
And all this must go on in the fog of battle. You are frightened of fear. But you are also disoriented. What should you do now? Where is the enemy? Where is your own trench? Where is the commanding officer? If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist around you everywhere. Who are you? You are perhaps among the living, but can you be certain?
It is of course understandable that the generals must be kept from battle. They cannot direct the movements of troops in this fog. They must have an overview. Both sides are so evenly matched. Strategy is crucial. It is 1917. The Battle of the Somme has failed. The French lose badly in the Nivelle offensive. Troops are in mutiny. If they are to stop the tide of death that threatens to sweep over and engulf them, they must think clearly now. Certainly there is some way to wrest control of fate. One must remain cool in the presence of this tide. Unmoved, the generals scrutinize the field for a point of weakness, a plan of attack.
It would be then like looking at the meadow, the field and forest around it, as a pattern; one that, a few decades into the future, might appear on a green screen in bright metallic colors, the repeated Y’s representing grass, the X’s standing for trees, mathematical coordinates creating dimension, an illusion of perspective, the diminishing background indicating a long view.
But there is more. Another element in the formula, entering like a stray particle perhaps predicted but not yet part of the equation. Since September 1915 German zeppelins have dropped fire bombs over London. At the Dolphin Pub on Red Lion Street seventeen men perish when the building collapses over them. Civilians are still dying. A wave of shock spreads over the screen. Something ephemeral, immeasurable. The spirit is daunted. And a certain boundary passed.
One can easily follow the train of logic. In its own fashion it is inexorable. The losses on the battlefield after all are massive. War is not what it was before. It is a perspective common to both sides of the battle. Modern warfare is total … Captain Peter Strasser, head of the German Navy’s Airship Division, writes. A soldier cannot function at the front without the factory worker, the farmer. He is writing to his mother. What we do is repugnant to us too but necessary. There is an odd courage in the logic; it is of course military courage: one must sacrifice lives to save lives. He addresses his mother. I know you understand what I say. My men are brave and honorable. Their cause is holy, and how can they sin while doing their duty? Does his mother accept his logic?
Or does she absent herself from the dialogue? Certain thoughts move to the periphery of her consciousness. It is an old habit of mind, shared by many women. Like the wife of the SS guard who, as she heard rumors of what, in the course of his day, her husband did, slept apart from him for a while but, with the erosion of time, returned. It has almost the feeling of a mass, this wave of convention and memory, making it seemingly impossible at certain moments to take a step. Does she put his letter in the drawer with all the other letters from her children? And the most recent photographs? When she writes in response it is then perhaps as if she never read his letter. She simply sends her good wishes, asking after him as she usually does, hinting that he should be careful to eat and rest as well as he can.
It is June 1917. The women’s suffrage bill condoned by an overwhelming majority finally passes out of committee in the House of Commons. Women have, after all, joined the war effort as equals. They have worked in munitions factories, coal yards, driven vans, carried messages at the front, even joined the land army. If there was a moment of doubt within the suffrage movement, a second thought that shadowed participation, early on in the war, this thought is gone now. The women who resist the war are in a minority faction, a voice repudiated, disowned by the rest.
Second thoughts, weak and wavering as they are, musings, ponderous reflections can be costly in a time of war. Particularly in the modern age. Everything moves so swiftly. A new technology must be noticed, and put to use quickly, if victory is to be won. One month earlier, Jan Smuts, now a general, arrives in London from South Africa to serve on the Imperial War Cabinet. He has come in time to witness an aerial attack on London. He grasps the implications of this new kind of warfare immediately. Civilians are terrorized by the attack, and this undermines the morale of the nation. The destruction of cities, he predicts, will soon become one of the principal operations of war.
In his homeland, South Africa, he is a distinguished statesman. His arrival in England is thus a significant social occasion. A banquet is held at the Savoy Hotel to celebrate his presence. Of course I was not there that night. But I have some idea. Seated at the side of my grandmother, I’ve attended banquets which were faded, less regal replicas of this one. A white linen tablecloth is spread over a long, long table. The finest bone china and heavy silver gleam in their rows. Bowls of cut flowers are spaced regularly three feet apart. Place cards, perhaps in white with embossed gold writing, announce each name. Men in black tie and tails, women in evening gowns, various silks, some sequins, in small embroidered shoes, flowers at their wrists, move familiarly into their seats and hardly look as cups of cold consommé are served from the left. A dessert, French perhaps and sweet, not entirely eaten, lies wrapped by the discarded linen. The host stands. Slowly the conversation makes a descent and then disappears.
Lord Selborne is proud to introduce Lieutenant General Jan Christian Smuts, South African statesman and soldier. General Smuts is proud to be here. He is an elegant and graceful speaker. Distinguished. The women imagine him in bed. We are all part of one race, he says. Cambridge bred, he knows his audience. The unity of the white race is essential. He peruses the table, taking in everyone, stopping only at a boundary placed discreetly at the service door. The white man’s task is to civilize Africa. Are there electric lights? Are the windows blacked out? The style of his speech connotes a certain largess. Years of education and tradition lie behind the vision that unfolds before him. A possible future. The white presence in Africa. Of course, it makes one smile, he says, that missionaries once took Africans as wives. We know better now. A strict separation is necessary. Separate regions. Separate houses. Separate governing principles. One cannot apply the same rules to this different race. Are the buttons on his shirt made of bone? Is the shirt perhaps hand-stitched? Does he casually finger the polished wood of the rostrum as he talks? The African mind is closer to an animal mind. One can teach only the simplest Christian morality. Once the white man is secure in South Africa, the white race can move north and civilize the whole continent. This is what he sees in the future.
I am of course in that future now, straining to listen back over the decades to this voice from a time before I was born. My mother is just five years old. My father is seven. As I cock my ear in the direction of the childhood of my parents, I can hear the faintest breath of a tone. It is low and pleasingly masculine like the voice of a doctor or a scientist, calm and assured.
As a child, I lost the power of my voice for several years. It was shyness. In between my voice and the other voices there was a vast gulf. The ease with which they participated in the ebb and flow of conversation was a mystery to me. I spoke seldom, and in a barely audible tone. After my parents’ divorce and my banishment to my grandmother’s house, the right of speech was no longer mine. I believed somehow I would be tolerated only in stillness.
; Many years after the Great War has ended, a stretcher-bearer in that war, whose name was Alfred Wolfsohn, will be famous for his knowledge of how to enlarge and enrich the capacity of the human voice. From what he hears in the voices of the dying, he understands that the power, the tone, the range of the voice reflect the life of the soul. This voice expands as the soul traverses its full range through life and death, fear of death, grief and joy. Conversely, as the human capacity for sound grows, a knowledge of heretofore hidden realms of being comes into consciousness.
Was Cassandra’s voice made beautiful by the power of prophecy? Or was it instead distorted by the bitter taste of denial? The chorus, as written by Aeschylus, tells her, You make music that is a mixture/ ugly cries of terror and high-pitched melodies. Perhaps the music grew ugly because no one heard. She was ridiculed. The terrible anguish of her vision was hers alone to bear. The less her warnings were heeded the more insistent she became. The silent reproval that met her voice threatened to close her throat. So, trying to force her voice past this closing, she let out strange shrieks, sounds perhaps not dissimilar to the sounds of those horrified and shocked on the battlefield by sights they had not predicted. Is it in such a voice that one should deliver the lines Euripides wrote for Cassandra, Only a madman depopulates and plunders cities.… He who does so creates a desert in which he’ll perish? Can such words be said calmly when the speaker herself is part of the plunder?
But we are in 1917. And our speaker is calm. He is used to being heard. It is no surprise then that on July 11 the Prime Minister appoints him as the only member besides himself to sit on a committee convened to study the war in the air. Smuts works prodigiously and well. The report the committee issues bears his name. One cannot tell the story of strategic bombing without invoking it now. The Smuts Report. His vision has become part of history.
Does he always enhance his predictions with a rosy glow? He promises that the bombing of cities will bring about a swifter cessation of this war, and then a lasting peace. If one has any doubts, these visions are nudged toward plausibility by a healthy aureole of optimism which is as if his birthright. Everything, he believes, has always turned out all right in the end.
There is none of this finesse in General Trenchard’s appearance. The many photographs taken of him at different stations along his rise to eminence show a man with blunt ruddy features, thick, large and somewhat ill at ease, his eyes alive with excitement but betraying no humor. His voice is said to be gruff. He is laconic when he speaks, either too brusque or difficult to follow, as if the place in the universe he occupies cannot easily be communicated. His rise to power is not smooth. He makes enemies. Loses his temper. Maneuvers clumsily.
The provenance of this graceless state is not hard to imagine. Early in life he lost his footing in the social world. The ground of the middle class is always tenuous; this ground collapsed for him with his father’s bankruptcy. Besides the loss of the family home, there was the humiliation of poverty. He was kept at school only through the generosity of the schoolmaster. One cannot help but suspect that this loss of financial power made a sad comment to the boy on his father’s manhood.
I know it is impossible. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer, descended from the Ibo, was not yet born when Hugh Trenchard was an administrator in Nigeria. This passage from Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart describes an Ibo man, not an Englishman. Still the resemblance is haunting. As a boy, the Ibo man was disturbed to learn that the word the village used for his father, agbala, had two meanings. The first meaning was man with no title. But it also meant woman. His whole life was dominated by fear, Achebe writes of his hero, an undaunted warrior and wrestler … the fear of himself lest he should be found to resemble his father.
Many years have passed since General Trenchard was a boy. He is forty-four years old now, as the war enters its last year. But old terrors felt earlier in life can return with a new force later. I myself have felt the cold chill of middle age at my back. You begin to think of time. The leaves inevitably turn color. The blaze is even past its peak. Winter is near. If once you thought you were impervious, you are shocked to discover that time does not stop for you either. So over the raw persistence of its advance you attempt to lay some structure of meaning. Perhaps you are aging, but nevertheless you are making an ascent. Your achievements accumulate. Each year you advance even higher. If shadows of former selves lie shed about you, still your name is followed by grander and greater titles.
There are of course those who amaze us with a different path. Life is embedded with meaning for them. But it is not dependent on social recognition. The meaning lies somewhere deeper, untouched by the worldly eventuation of success or loss.
The year is still 1917. Gandhi has taken up the cause of the mill workers in Ahmedabad, who seek a small but crucial increment in their modest wages. When the mill owners refuse to speak with them, they go on strike. Gandhi meets with them every day to encourage them. They assemble under a babul tree where he speaks to them of Satyagraha and joins them in prayer. The mill owners do not relent easily. As time passes, the strikers begin to lose heart. They and their families have had little or nothing to eat for weeks.
Is it because he feels at one with those who are starving that Gandhi begins his fast? In certain states of mind, meditation, trance and other moments difficult to name, the world appears to come into the self. The sight of a tree at the edge of the field, its leaves brightly yellow, its branches swaying slightly in the breeze, is suddenly inside your skin. You are not so much inhabited as aware. All along it has been like this. The movement of the tree, the joy, the suffering of the world is your own. Unbidden and all by themselves, he will write later of the pledge he makes, the words came to my lips. It is March 15 and he is standing under the tree when he promises he will not touch food until the strike is settled.
Hearing this, Anasuyabeha, the sister of a mill owner who has joined the workers, begins to weep. The workers themselves call out that it is they who should fast. No, Gandhi tells them, the fast is his to undertake.
It is not a simple matter for him. This will be the first of seventeen fasts he will undertake as part of his practice of Satyagraha. The fast must always be the last resort. And it must never be used to manipulate or exert power over others. Because of this he has some misgivings. The mill owners are friends. It is wrong to use force of any kind. He does not want them to capitulate simply because of their concern for him. Partaking in a fast, one must never be attached to the outcome. What arrives as a consequence cannot be predicted. Such an attachment would rob the fast of inner joy.
This is not a familiar approach to those who have learned to measure strength by outward signs. A man with no title. In the simplest of clothes. Whose manner is hardly commanding. Whose stature is small. Whose voice is strangely light, filled almost as if with air, a lilt, cajoling the listener through no willfulness except a quality of being able to laugh at some shared but forgotten, even ineluctable joke. Yet, and this is the mystery, despite this lightness that comes no doubt from detachment, the voice moves into you; smoothly a veil is parted, and someone inside you is revealed, immersed, merging, indistinguishable from your own secret suffering and the suffering you witness.
Can you really believe such a moment? Has it happened or is it just a part of your imagination? In any case miles and miles away another history continues. The heavy artillery is still in place, aligned on each side of the trenches. In countless cities throughout Europe factories work day and night to make shells which will burst, catch on fire, stun and maim flesh, bone.
In December 1917, Hugh Trenchard is named Chief of Staff of what will become the newly Independent Royal Air Force. But his command will not last long. The story will take another turn. Another smaller conflict moves in tandem with this great war. Trenchard will share his command with the Secretary of State for the Air Force, Lord Rothermere. The two men dislike each other. Trenchard is rude and blunt in his manner. There are even those who say he is arroga
nt and full of pride. On his part, he believes the Minister of Air is evasive and incompetent. Both men resign. The outcome is irreversible. A fall from power. Coming into the final year of the war, Trenchard has lost his place in the order of events.
For weeks he sits on a park bench. He is despondent, confused. He wants to think in solitude. He dresses in civilian clothes, staring for hours into the freshly budding trees of Green Park. What direction his life should take now is unclear to him.
Among the posts he has been offered is the command of long-range bombing in France. Could it be that at this moment, surrounded by the silent trees, he hears some faint echo of Cassandra’s cry, The agony, agony of the city utterly ruined? But even if he does, his waking mind is taken up with more practical problems. There are not enough airplanes, not enough pilots to assist in battle and to bomb German cities at the same time. So much weighs in the balance. There has been a revolution in Russia. The Germans will withdraw troops now from the east and advance on the Western Front. Even more airplanes will be needed to attend the battlefield. Will it help the war to bomb cities?
If this is a pivotal juncture in his life, what is his mood? I cannot imagine him thinking of inner joy. He would no doubt feel such a thought to be indulgent. I have no difficulty entering this state of mind. I am thinking of my grandmother. I can imagine her in April 1917, cleaning house. She carried out her daily work with a vengeance. She did not become an actress as she had dreamed. She did what was expected of her, her duty. Her joy was not in the doing but in the achievement.
It can be dangerous to live for experience itself. One might wander too far outside the predictable structures, confining as they are. No, Trenchard is not thinking of the insecurities of his childhood now, or even of his own aging body. Yet all that is oddly present in the nakedness he feels out of uniform. Just as strangers do not recognize him, he does not recognize himself. His body is amorphous. He cannot delineate himself, draw the boundaries properly. It is as if he has been given another body, another skin, strangely familiar, an earlier self, too frail, too revealed, unnerving.
A Chorus of Stones Page 25