A Chorus of Stones

by Susan Griffin

  Private choices, embedded as they are in habitual response, are never isolated from the social atmosphere which surrounds them. In 1917 the British nation is forged into one body pledged to discipline and duty. There is thus a kind of public outcry over Trenchard’s temporary stillness. In the park he overhears a naval officer, who does not recognize him out of uniform, suggest that he should be shot for desertion. Is it shame that propels him in a certain direction? I can imagine him standing up from the park bench for the last time. When he steps into his apartment he goes directly to his closet. He removes the civilian jacket he has worn for days. As the familiar epaulets fall into place over his shoulders does he feel that his life has meaning once more? Within hours he calls the Home Office. Despite his misgivings about the usefulness of the tactic, he accepts the command of long-range bombing.

  It is then through an odd series of events mixing family and national history that Hugh Trenchard finds himself at the apex of history. He cannot know the distant consequences of what he does. Even the practical questions he once had are silenced now. As a soldier his duty is to serve. His task now is to prove the usefulness of long-range bombing. Given the strategic considerations, the logic is obvious. There is no way to inflict efficacious damage on factories and railways with so few planes and so few bombs and without a means to hit the targets more accurately.

  Does he hesitate before the only logical conclusion? His body tired beyond saying, I can imagine the slightest tremor of a wish passing before him. If there were any way out he might take it. But the tremor is imperceptible. Only the tangle of it all appears to him. All those dead bodies on either side. Has he gotten used to it, the dismemberment, the various colors of blood? And there is the other entanglement too, accruing as it has over so many years, all the coats with insignia he has worn, a history stretching back as far as he can remember, back several generations, past even his imagination. There is only one choice.

  Let it burn. The whole apparatus. Let his soldiers fly over those cities and drop their bombs. Let the cities disappear. Let there be empty space where once a way of life, a machinery of war, stood. This idea breathes life into his exhausted body once more. He will spread his raids over many cities, so that no one in any city will feel safe. It is clear what must be done. We must try, he says, to crush the spirit of the German people.

  If there is no joy in taking this course, the joy will be in the outcome. It is 1918. He is collecting evidence of success. By August he has dropped hundreds of tons of bombs over Cologne, Bonn, Kohlberg, Wiesbaden, Mainz, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Rheims, Metz, Saarbrücken. The new Minister of Air, Lord Weir, tells him not to be too scrupulous about the accuracy of his aim. To prove moral and physical damage, he takes photographs showing the bombs falling. As part of his case, he has retrieved a letter from a German citizen. One feels as if one were no longer a human being, the anonymous man writes. One air raid after another. Trenchard’s campaign of terror is working … one is daily, hourly prepared for the worst.

  For each event in history there are many possible narrations. General Trenchard is shaping the long-range bombing of Germany into an argument. The bombings slow the German offensive, he says. They are helping to turn the tide of the war. And the tide is turning. The steadily accruing attrition of hunger and short supplies caused by the Allied blockade of Germany is having an effect. It has been a year since America declared war, and now her armies are fighting in France. The troops are fresh and well armed. In the summer of 1918 they succeed in stopping the German advance on Paris. German troops retreat from Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry.

  I talked to a soldier who fought in the battles of Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry. He was twenty-two years old when he fought in those battles. Now, nearly a century had passed since his birth.

  The process of narration that creates an order of events can hardly be separated over time from the events themselves. Tom told me his story in studied manner. He began as he slowly climbed the stairs, wearing the faded Marine Corps hat he had worn in battle, by singing “The Halls of Montezuma” in a voice high and cracking with age. Spoken with an eloquence that belongs to an earlier age, each word he uttered carried a stentorian significance. I was born the middle child in a family of thirteen children on an isolated farm of illiterate parents in 1895. My people were an obscure people.

  His parents grew up in the South just after the Civil War. It was the period of reconstruction. Northern troops occupied the region. Because the schools still taught a Southern perspective on the war, the troops had closed them. And that was why his parents never learned to read. It was as if they had been placed outside the stream of history. A story was being told, and they were not in it. I have no idea what got me interested in the world, he said.

  As chance would have it, though he never graduated high school, Tom, a bright child interested in learning, was chosen to attend Mississippi College as part of a program for poor but intelligent children. He became a servant for the college president’s family, and in turn they gave him a home and paid for his education. His hunger for a larger world, though, was not satisfied. A few days after his graduation he boarded a train for New Orleans, a city he had heard of all his life but never seen. It was on this trip, while walking on the banks of the Mississippi, that he saw a Marine Corps recruiting station. America had already entered the war. His entire graduating class planned to enter officers’ training school in the next month. But he did not want to wait. The recruiting officer promised him that if he signed up immediately he would be on a train to Norfolk, Virginia, in two hours, and on a ship to France within the week.

  The story of his experience in the war, told over the years, on so many occasions, had taken on a formal structure, so that what I heard now was like the recitation of an old legend, handed down over generations. He went into the war without training. While he was at the top of the mast of the battleship Henderson, the ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. He would not leave the mast until he was ordered to do so. He spent the night in a lifeboat at sea. The most dreadful night of my life, he said, though it was excitement and not fear which threaded through his telling. He was thrilled, he told me, to be on a large ship, to land on foreign soil, to meet soldiers from New Zealand and Australia. And in a conspiratorial tone, as if imparting forbidden knowledge, he told me that the busiest road in France was the one between Toul and Brest. Toul was where the soldiers convened, and Brest was a prostitute town.

  He never fired a gun in the war. He was not trained to do so, and though he never said he was glad he had not caused another man’s death, the relief was evident in his voice. When I asked him if he was afraid standing on the mast, he said, no, he thought he was just half crazy. But though he would not admit to fear, his pride was not a pride in masculine prowess. When he said, We fought the Germans, he was quick to add that the German armies were poorly armed and worn out from years of battle, whereas the American troops were well armed and fresh. He meant something else when he told me, I had more experience in life in that war than I had had in all my twenty-two years.

  What moved him to cherish this year of his life was that during these months he felt his place in history. He was part of the Battle of Belleau Wood and the American advance on Château-Thierry. It was here that Pershing finally proved to the French commander of Allied forces, General Foch, that an independent American army could help to turn the tide of the war. It was in these battles that the German advance on Paris was first stopped. Did I know, he asked me, about these battles? They are a part of the public record, he said.

  He knew nothing, he told me, of why the war was fought. Even today the causes mystify him. There was no great justice he was trying to defend. No righteousness, except the righteousness of a young man called and answering the call with his life. He could imagine playing a part in history now, because he had done so. But he could not imagine deciding what the course of history ought to be.

  The shape he gave to his story had long been etched
in his mind. When I asked him what it was like to be under fire, he repeated a story he had already told me more than once: how he would feed ammunition to the machine gunner and then step away because the machine gun became a target. He had asked me to stop him if he repeated himself. He knew his short-term memory was failing. But because I hoped that some new insight might come to the surface, I let him tell me this story again. It was as if he were caught in an eddy of consciousness. He went on repeating the same story over and over, pausing at the end just briefly, only to begin again. It was with the fifth telling that a different version appeared. Once, just after he had fed the ammunition into the machine gun, he stepped back as he had been taught to do, and then the machine gun and the gunner were hit by a shell. One moment the gunner was there in front of his eyes, and in the next, after the burst of the shell, the noise, the fire, he had vanished. No trace of him was left to bury. His body was dispersed by the blast in pieces too small to recognize. Tom still remembered his name.

  Once while I was staying in a small pensione in Greece, the father of the owner woke a family of British tourists at dawn to tell them his war stories. He remained dressed throughout the day in his old uniform, saber at his side. He had fought in the war with the Turks, a history now dim to the rest of us who could barely grasp the outlines of his glory. We laughed at his constant telling. But now I am hearing the repetition of the old warrior in a new way. Is there perhaps a silent hope, buried along with inadmissible memories, that perhaps some fragment of what has been censored from the official story will be restored? And the pain and shock of that memory woven thus into a fabric of meaning, shared in the common arena of knowledge?

  Tom hesitated. The death of this man he had come to know in battle was unattached to his narrative, and floated as if part of a sea of all that is incomprehensible in life. Blinking, he returned to the plot. He was injured. A minor wound to the head. And damage to his heart from the strain and shock of battle that is still with him. His story, though, did not center on this injury. It was only that this disability conferred on him another honorific moment. A detachment of wounded men was sent home on a large passenger liner that had been used to bring Woodrow Wilson to France. This was a crowning moment in his telling, and confirmed his place in a history that from now on would give his life meaning.

  But there are others for whom the same war takes meaning away from life. The story breaks apart. Images pried loose from any structure of significance surround them like a host of demons. They themselves begin to resemble the half-dead monsters which haunt them. Drooping tongues from jars that slob their relish/ Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked. The poet Wilfred Owen describes ex-soldiers caught in perpetual horror. Always they must see things and hear them/ Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles. Everything they see recalls the war. Sunlight seems a blood smear; night comes blood-black; dawn breaks open like a wound.…

  I have some understanding of shell shock. Limbs numb. Disorientation. Loss of memory. These are the physical symptoms of the chronic disease I have. In the fifth year of writing this book I met a man who had been shell-shocked in the Vietnam War. I asked him to tell me his story, and he tried. But he had lost the capacity to make a meaning from the events of his life. He had difficulty speaking at all. It was as if his will had collapsed, or some connection between speech and the central spine of his existence had eroded. Whatever he said floated oddly away from him and into the room, unfinished, unanchored. The manner of his telling told me more than what he said. He was not fully present in the telling of his own history, but more disturbing than this absence was his visible and always failing effort to enter his own life.

  He was drafted at eighteen and served two years in Germany. His return to civilian life was not successful. He was young. His father, a laconic man who worked for the Union Carbide Company at Oak Ridge, convinced him to re-enlist. His father had fought in World War II, and his uncle was a career officer in the army. The choice seemed natural. Later, he would serve under his uncle in Vietnam.

  The war was not what he imagined. He was constantly under fire, even at the base camp. Shells exploded next to him. He saw the bodies of men he knew fly apart, detached, aimless. Everyone smoked weed. He too acquired the habit. He wanted to leave the army as a conscientious objector. But he was sent to an army psychiatrist and threatened with dishonorable discharge. Then he simply ceased to care. Some new officer would show up who had seen no action and start giving orders, he said. He has never been the same since. He flies off the handle with anyone in authority. His mind doesn’t seem to work well. He can’t hold down a job, or even at times put two and two together. He is one of the homeless.

  I began to suspect his lassitude concealed a state of paralysis, not of the body, but of the soul. He was as if suspended in the past, disbelieving the old values, yet unable to act on his own beliefs.

  He was not raised to speak about his feelings or his thoughts. His father spoke little to him, and of an interior life, not at all. Now, what he experienced in the war has sunk into an even deeper silence than his father’s.

  Once a nerve cell has been excited, reversing its charge, a chain reaction is created carrying the impulse from nerve cell to nerve cell until the impulse ends in movement.

  I have two photographs of my father as a child. The first photograph, the one my cousin sent me, is the one taken before the Great War. He is a baby. He leans forward and away from my grandfather, who holds him. You can see that my grandfather’s desolate mood has entered his body, but the cast of his face at this moment seems transitory. His face still bears an infant innocence, an openness. In the second photograph, taken sometime in the midst of the war, he sits without his father on the steps of a house, his arm around his dog. He is cloyingly dressed in a sunsuit with a sailor collar, and he holds a flower. But the expression on his face is not a child’s. His father’s sorrow has become his own. When was it then that another expression, an uncomfortable smile, was layered over this face?

  It is late in the day on November 10, 1918, when Hugh Trenchard, seated at his desk, receives a memo from the commanding officer of an Italian squadron stationed nearby. He has heard the rumor that a cease-fire has been arranged. Even now pilots under Trenchard’s command are dropping bombs over the valley of the Moselle. Trenchard waits through the night for their return. All the pilots return safely and by morning the rumor is confirmed.

  The war is over. Thirty-seven million have been wounded. Nine million have died. On the day of the Armistice, the parents of Wilfred Owen are informed that he died two weeks earlier. Other deaths, partial or invisible, the death of a state of mind, of a way of life, are slower to emerge. The land is ravaged. Bodies are disabled. Memories are entrenched. And if slowly a certain configuration begins to unravel, it does not vanish entirely but instead remains, like the ghost of a previous painting, lying just beneath the surface, giving all the colors a different cast.

  There are those who do not lay down their arms easily. On the day of the Armistice Hermann Göring, who has replaced Von Richthofen as commanding officer of the Flying Circus, has been ordered to fly his squadron to Strasbourg where he is to hand his airplanes over to the French. But on the day of the Armistice he disobeys this order. Sending just a few pilots to Strasbourg, he flies with the rest of the squadron to Germany where they destroy their planes on landing.

  From each fragmentation of the atom as many as eighty possible products are formed, each releasing ionizing radiation. The violence of this process also causes chemicals in the air or water nearby to absorb energy, change their substance and become radioactive.

  Among those who accept the end of the war, it continues in another form. The stories have already begun to be told. Now a transmutation will occur through language. On the day of the Armistice, Ernest Hemingway writes home from a hospital in Milan, I did come very close to the big adventure. He encloses an illustration of the medals he has received from the Italian army for his service in the me
dical corps. Over the next years he will embellish the story of his part in the war, expanding the image of his heroism. Ernst Jünger, one of fourteen infantrymen to have received the Pour le mérite, will continue for five years in military service, until he retires to write about the war. Through his novel, he will construct a mythic soldier, larger, stronger than life, with keen bloodthirsty nerves. Other lives are set now on an almost predictable course. George Patton has been awarded both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal. He returns home a colonel. Douglas MacArthur has been made a general. Are they swept along by history or do they make history? But the question perhaps arises from a certain frame of mind which is itself fixed to events as they have been remembered. For, in a different light, one can begin to perceive the edges of one shared movement in what we have called the private and the public worlds, one motion shaping and shaped by all that exists.

  All nerve cells have the same structure: a cell body holding the nucleus, dendrites which receive connections from other nerve cells, axons which connect to dendrites or cell bodies of other nerve cells.

  It is January 1919. The demobilization of British soldiers proceeds slowly. Several mutinies have broken out. General Trenchard complains that he is tired. He thinks of resigning from service. But he is needed. He is assigned to control a rebellion on the docks at Portsmouth. Does he remember his encounter with the Ibo warriors, the fireworks that sent them fleeing? Or is he thinking of his campaign of terror against German cities? He plans another dramatic explosion of light. First he cuts the electrical current to the enormous shed where the men are assembled. Then he appears in the shed with several men carrying rifles where, at his signal the men throw back the bolts of their rifles, and electricity is restored, shedding a glaring light on the mutineers. The tactic is successful.