Where Wars Go to Die
Page 1
Other Books by W. D. Wetherell
Souvenirs (1981)
Vermont River (1984)
The Man Who Loved Levittown (1985)
Hyannis Boat and Other Stories (1989)
Chekhov’s Sister (1990)
Upland Stream (1991)
The Wisest Man in America (1995)
The Smithsonian Guide to Northern New England (1995)
Wherever That Great Heart May Be (1996)
North of Now (1998)
One River More (1998)
Small Mountains (2000)
Morning (2001)
This American River (2002)
A Century of November (2004)
Soccer Dad (2008)
Yellowstone Autumn (2009)
Hills Like White Hills (2009)
On Admiration (2010)
The Writing on the Wall (2012)
Summer of the Bass (2015)
Arrangement and Original Content Copyright © 2016 by Walter D. Wetherell
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Anthony Morais
Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-246-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0075-8
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
For Joe Medlicott
Corporal 82nd Airborne Division 1943–45
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Argue
Chapter Two: Moralize
Chapter Three: Witness
Chapter Four: Lie
Chapter Five: Pity
Chapter Six: Protest
Chapter Seven: Mourn
Chapter Eight: Entertain
Epilogue: Guide
Works and Writers Selected, Per Chapter
Notes
“Some men are trained to fight, and others to write.”
—Richard Harding Davis
Introduction
It’s the kind of bookstore where wars go to die, there on the lowest, dustiest, most morgue-like shelves—at least in this country. The books will rest on slightly higher, easier-to-reach shelves in Canada, Australia, Scotland, and England, where the Great War lasted longer, killed more, went deeper into the national memory. In the United States, World War I is a bottom-shelf memory, well below World War II and the Civil War, slightly below Korea and Vietnam, and only one shelf higher than the Spanish-American conflict, though the two collections often bleed into one.
A cranky, chain-smoking, opinionated old guy owns the bookstore, because that’s who owns good used bookstores—cranky old guys whose only virtue is their love of books. If you’re lucky, he’ll have a friendly, endearingly nerdish teenager manning the cash register, and he or she will point you to the basement when you ask about books on war. The light switch will be hard to locate, there will be piles of bound National Geographics to edge your way around, the sump pump will still struggle with last week’s soaking, and, when you do find the right shelf, you will have to get down on your knees in the muck and twist your head sideways to see what they have.
You’ll sometimes smell them before you see them—books published between 1914 and 1918 are a hundred years old now, and they’ve taken on a distinct aroma. Bananas gone soft is what you think of first, with hints of garlic and mildew, then something that somehow manages to combine a vulgar dampness with an acrid dust. A trench might have smelled that way—a flooded trench outside Ypres circa 1916, only in place of bananas would have been much worse smells.
A bookish boy, I spent a good part of my tenth and eleventh summers leafing through my grandparents’ encyclopedia, which had been passed on to my parents in the hope it would contribute to my and my sister’s educations. It was old and out of date even then; published in the 1920s, it had represented a serious investment on the part of a family with little in the way of disposable income. When I leafed through the volumes, they exuded the sweet, cloying smell characteristic of a book’s old age—and so the smell became forever linked in my mind with my favorite section, the one on the World War, with its old black-and-white illustrations of soldiers, cannon, tanks.
They didn’t look like any soldiers I’d ever seen pictures of, which confused me greatly. The only World War known to me was the one that ended ten years before, my parents’ war, the one I watched movies about, the war against Tojo and Hitler. You mean to tell me, I asked myself, there was an earlier World War? The soldiers in the encyclopedia wore helmets that looked like inverted pie plates and had their legs wrapped in what looked to be bandages; the tanks were rhomboid-shaped, as harmless-looking as hippos; the airplanes had doubled or even tripled wings. Fascinating—and when I pressed the pictures in toward my eyes, the pages smelled like bananas.
So it caught my attention early, World War I. I remember, a few years later, playing touch football with my pals in a grassy, doo-doo-covered park near the Long Island Rail Road station. We used jackets to mark one corner of the end zone and a twenty-foot-high monument mounted on a plinth for the other. I liked showing off my vocabulary in those days. “Go out to the plinth and cut right. Hut, two, three!” I told my receivers during the huddle, but none of them knew what I meant.
And none of them ever read what was written on the monument, much less pondered its implications—though, already the writer-in-embryo, I did both. It commemorated the 42nd Division, the famous “Rainbow” Division, which before going overseas in 1918 had been stationed in the camp that had once covered our little park. The division was called “Rainbow” because it was made up of National Guard units from thirty different states; among its famous members were Douglas MacArthur, Wild Bill Donovan, and Joyce Kilmer, who had not only written a famous two-line poem about trees but had a rest stop named after him on the New Jersey Turnpike. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald had been stationed there.
So, when our game finished and my pals all left, I scuffed my way through the fallen oak leaves and stood by the monument, peering up. It was carved out of something called “rainbow granite”—gray and smooth as it seemed from the distance, its graininess sparkled when you got up close. Engraved on the side was a tall, very grave-looking doughboy presenting arms with his rifle, his legs wrapped in what I prided myself on knowing were called “puttees.”
He seemed taller and straighter than the soldiers in my grandparents’ encyclopedia, or the ones in the World War II movies; he was wasp-waisted, as if the puttees continued under his uniform up his middle. I put my face up close to his legs, inhaled deeply. But no. He didn’t smell like old encyclopedias. He smelled like warm stone, with a bittersweet tincture of autumn.
(I read later that two out of three soldiers who served in the Rainbow Division were wounded or killed in France, so my senses weren’t making up the bitter half.)
Years later, visiting Edinburgh, still a young man, I happened upon a ceremony marking Remembrance S
unday, the British version of what in this country used to be called Armistice Day; this was 1976, so the Great War had ended fifty-eight years before. There in the square outside St. Giles Cathedral, the historic center of the Scots’ world, a vast congregation was assembled, one that was composed largely of the same aging men I had noticed walking up from the New Town beside me, many with decorations and campaign ribbons on their lapels, or shilling-sized red poppies.
They now formed themselves in three long ranks on the north side of the square; on my side, troops were lined up at parade rest, staring with fixed attention toward the distant cathedral steps, where men in black and scarlet robes moved in ways that made no sense to me, but obviously had something to do with the flags and battle flags gathered there, the honor guard of young soldiers, sailors and cadets who now, at a single barked command, went rigidly to attention.
A bit slow on the uptake, it took me a while to realize this was connected to the poppies, the medals, the fixed concentration on the faces of those aging men. Remembrance Sunday—well, here was the remembrance all right, the Brits at their ceremonial best, complete with an army band playing the slow march from Holst’s The Planets. No more poignantly martial music, given the echoes it had there, has ever been composed.
Just before the music became unbearable in that mingled note of victory and sorrow it so perfectly conveyed, it stopped, and in the silence where it had been came the high, lonely toll of the cathedral’s bells striking off the hour. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Again came that hoarse shouted command, again the hell’s drumming in two separate raps against the paving stones, the rifle butts slamming down as every soldier in the square came to attention.
The old soldiers stood at attention, too, trembling, they stood so still, trembling with the rusty skill of rigidity, trembling with what they remembered. Men in their sixties, most of them, but at least a dozen were much older—men who remembered being boys, not in the Western Desert or Dunkirk, but on the Somme, or at Loos, or Cambrai. Watching them, scanning their faces, I realized it wasn’t something old and vanished that was being commemorated here, as with the Rainbow Division monument—not the memory of the Great War, but the actual event still in progress … that the war’s pain, sorrow, and pride were right there in the square, as tangible and solid and alive as it’s possible for anything to be.
I studied them very carefully, these men, their expressions. These were the soldiers in my encyclopedia come to life. These were the soldiers on my monument come to life. In their eyes, in their postures, was a war, a world, a time, I must be very careful to remember and preserve.
And so, thirty-five years now from that Sunday morning, a hundred years now from their war, I spend many hours on my hands and knees in dark bookstore basements, searching for what I can find to bring it all back. Many stores will have nothing whatsoever on World War I; others, in the shelf marked WORLD WAR II, will have mistakenly stacked books from World War I, as indeed, in future generations, the two wars may come to be conflated. But some bookstores, the best ones, will have a dozen or more books on the Great War, though, even on these rare occasions, most of the volumes I only glance at and immediately put back.
It’s not because they’re bad. Quite the opposite—many of these are splendidly written accounts that combine original historical research with deep human insight, allowing us to understand the events of the war with a perspective totally impossible for participants at the time. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. Leon Woolf’s In Flanders Field. Death’s Men by Denis Winter. The Face of Battle by John Keegan. The Danger Tree by David Macfarlane. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme. Lyn Macdonald’s oral histories. Gene Smith’s small classic, Still Quiet on the Western Front. Written fifty years and more after the war ended, these are the famous secondary sources referenced in almost every new history that comes out. I’ve read them all, learned lots, but when I find them on the bookstore shelf, I respectfully put them back.
And books written for the buffs, the reenactors, the military enthusiasts. There’ll be two or three of these, regimental histories, or tactical analyses published quite recently, so it seems they went directly from the publisher to the remainder bin to the basement. I include in this category the memoirs, the justifications, the apologies (well, not apologies—no generals apologized) written by the primary actors in the immediate aftermath of the war. Ian Hamilton was among the most sensitive Great War generals, a skilled writer and classicist, and yet he butchered men through his incompetence at Gallipoli, and after leafing through the two fat volumes of his Gallipoli Diary, I respectfully put it back.
A third category holds the famous classics that form the canon of World War I literature; it will be a rare bookstore that doesn’t have a copy of at least one of these memoirs or novels, though you’ll be lucky to find a first edition.
Sassoon’s The Memoirs of George Sherston. Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek. E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grisha. David Jones’s In Parentheses. John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington. Her Privates We by Frederic Manning. Written by survivors of the trenches, published in the 1920s in the hangover of disenchantment left by the war, these are the books everyone knows, the books that are constantly reprinted, studied, and taught, the ones that form the literature of World War I, dwarfing by their power and influence almost all the books written earlier. I’ve read them all, been moved by their passion, surprised by their humor, amazed at their honesty—but when I find them on the shelf I respectfully put them back.
The books I’m searching for are so forgotten, so unknown, they can be easier to find than you would think. No one wants them—books published during the war, in the years 1914–18, not written with the hindsight that came later, but in the white heat of the conflict, when none of the authors knew which countries would be victorious or whether Western civilization would survive. These are the books I’m looking for, and when I find one, I take it to where the light is better so I can examine what I’ve got.
Much of it will be wretched. Blatant propaganda written by hacks, tales of Hun atrocities, books written for children where the Kaiser is shot down as he flies a Fokker across the Somme, war correspondent accounts where the Tommy, doughboy, or poilu (French soldier) is always cheerful, and a hundred-yard advance is scored as a great victory. Wretched—though I find even the worst to be interesting and evocative. This isn’t history written fifty years after the fact, but the actual event in progress, so what you’re holding in your hand has a lot more life in it than most hundred-year-old artifacts. For the time being, I’ll put anything with a publication date of 1914–18 into my box as a potential keeper.
For instance—this one.
Its color draws me first. It’s red, terra-cotta red—there’s an appealing earthiness about the tone. On the front, slightly embossed, is a shield with inter-draped flags, though it’s hard to say of which countries. But one must be of France, because, studying the spine (there is no dust cover to peel back; none of these books ever have surviving dust covers), the title becomes plain, Fighting France, and below that is the name “Wharton.”
Could this be Edith Wharton, the Edith Wharton? I open the covers. The endpapers are a map of the French countryside between Varennes and Verdun, and then, turning to the title page, all becomes clear.
The War on All Fronts
FIGHTING FRANCE
From Dunkerque to Belport
By
Edith Wharton
Chevalier of the Legion of Honor
Illustrated
New York
Charles Scribner’s Sons
1915
It’s her all right
, the famous American novelist, the pioneering woman writer, the pal of Henry James, the grande dame of American letters. What’s more, here’s her photo to the left of the title page, posing outside what the caption says is a “French palisade,” which, in the black-and-white fuzziness, looks like five or six wicker hampers piled on top of each other, with a protective hood through which two dapper French officers peer toward what you assume are the distant German trenches.
Mrs. Wharton ignores them and faces the camera, leaning on an umbrella. She wears a long black dress, furled around her legs as the umbrella is furled; around her neck is a white bib that makes her upper half look like a pilgrim; on her head is a rakish hat. It’s the kind of snapshot a husband or lover would take with his Brownie in the course of a Sunday drive—but there is that palisade behind her, those peering French officers, so it’s clear that this isn’t a pleasure jaunt, but a visit to the western front.
Edith Wharton—the author of Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth—wrote a book on World War I? How did that come about? How close did she get to the actual fighting? What did this woman of supreme sensibility and refinement, this novelist with real insight into the human condition, make of the tragedy?
Yes, definitely—a keeper, to be read as soon as I get home.
Here’s another, though the cover is funereal black and the lettering on the spine is hard to decipher. The German War by Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. “The German War”—is that what it was called at first? The book was printed in 1914, so it wasn’t “World War I” yet, nor even the “Great War,” but some bloody mess concocted by the Germans.
What was Doyle doing, publishing a book so early, when the fighting had barely started? A quick glance at the preface helps explain.
“These essays, upon different phases of the wonderful world-drama which has made our lifetime memorable, would be unworthy of publication were it not that at such a time every smallest thing which may help to clear up a doubt, to elucidate the justice of our cause, or to accentuate the desperate need of national effort, should be thrown into the scale.”