Where Wars Go to Die

by W. D. Wetherell

  From Old Junk, by H. M. Tomlinson; Alfred A. Knopf; New York, 1923.

  Andiamo a Casa

  —G. M. Trevelyan

  Let us take the case of an imaginary “Giuseppe,” and try to reconstruct in his person a type of the povero fante. Giuseppe comes from a farm in the Appenines, where, in the summer of 1915, he left a wife and five small children. His simple and intensely human thoughts and affections are all centred upon them, and upon his farm and a village made up of persons like himself. Outside that circle he has no experience, no knowledge, nor much interest in life beyond a good-natured but uninstructed curiosity in whatever may be going on under his eyes. Of politics he knows nothing. No one has attempted to instruct him in them, except the priest, who told him not to vote because the State was wicked, and the Socialist, who exhorted him to seize the land. He is silently suspicious, both of priest and of Socialist, as he is of every one pretending to authority. But their combined exhortations can have done little to fortify his sense of patriotism or of civic duty, which must in his case be instinctive, since they have never been inculcated. He has, indeed, heard of Garibaldi and knows that the Austrians are brutte bestie. Giuseppe can read, which is more than can be said of a quarter of his regiment, chiefly coming from the south. But he sets little store by the newspapers—they do not talk about things that interest him; besides, he regards them as being part of the system of authority, and, therefore, their statements are to be regarded with the respectful skepticism that he accords to all things official.

  Between battles there is little drill, training, or discipline. The life of the soldier seems to Giuseppe dull and purposeless. His officers, who expose themselves well in battle, are patriotic, and know all the reasons for the war, but they live by themselves. Sometimes the Colonel reads the regiment a manifesto about the Italian eagle perching on the highest summit of the Alps, but some of Giuseppe’s companions say under their breaths, “Porca Madonna! Vogliamo andare a casa.” The trenches are very wet and cold when they are not very hot, and they are always terribly dull; several times he has been left in them two months on end by some Staff muddle. And even when he is in riposo life is wet, dirty and dull. But “Pazienza,” Giuseppe says; that is his greatest peasant virtue, on which the ungrateful State is built.

  There are several Socialists in the regiment who conduct most of the discussions. Some of them are patriots, but Aristodemo talks them all down. Giuseppe does not understand all that Aristodemo says; it is vague, distant talk coming from the world outside the village. But it seems to have some relation to things that are real to him; the chief of these are his wife’s letters, saying that prices are so high that she can no longer feed the children on the separation allowance. She also writes that the priest says the Pope has declared there will be peace in a month, but that the chemist says they must go on fighting for another three months and then they will win. Giuseppe has just come off San Gabriele, and knows they will not win in three months. Half the regiment was killed there. He doubts if they will ever win at all. Russia has given in; he understands that much about world politics; also that the Inglesi are very stubborn.

  Aristodemo says the Russians are sensible fellows. Porca miseria! he says, what are we doing shivering and starving and dying here to win these barren mountains where no one lives at all except a few barbarians who cannot even talk Italian? What are we fighting for? The Inglesi pay our masters to go on with the war, says Aristodemo, but none of it comes our way, except fivepence a day in the front line and threepence behind! Giuseppe has had two leaves of ten days each since he joined in 1915, and each time he went back his wife was more depressed and thinner, and every one in the village had turned against the war except the chemist—but he is always against the aging priest anyhow.

  Oh yes, says Aristodemo, the Russians have got liberty, and so they have all gone home to their farms, and taken the land in the bargain! They have had a revolution, and so should we. All the “great guns,” he says, keep their sons and nephews imboscati; they sit in the retrovie, eating beefsteak, and give us poor soldiers in the trenches dry chestnuts. Giuseppe laughs at that, and sings a song about it, a forbidden song. One verse says—

  “A Cividale e Udine ci sono imboscati;

  Hanno le scarpe lucide e capelli profumati.”

  (“At Cividale and Udine the embuches live.

  They have shining boots and perfumed hair.”)

  Giuseppe has been two and a half years away from home, and here is a third winter coming on. When he gets away from Aristodemo he wishes he could talk about things to the young sub-lieutenant as he did one day last year, when the sub-lieutenant made it all so clear to him, and talked about Italia. But now the sub-lieutenant has gone. His arm was blown right off him on that accursed mountain, and he just said, “Viva l’Italia!” and then his skin grew like wax. But Giuseppe carried him away so that the brutte bestie never got him.

  On the top of all this came the news of Caporetto, and Cardona’s orders to retreat. So they trudged off, sad at first that it had all come to nothing, and sad to leave behind so many dead comrades on those barren hills. But as they went on they began to feel they were going home. The roads in the plain were so crowded that they soon began to pass the artillery and cars standing blocked in rows. It was raining like ruin. No one gave orders or made them keep rank. They just splashed on, getting more and more like a mob, in the mood of children coming back from school. “Andiamo a casa,” they said. Evidently Cardona had given it up, and the war was over. As there is going to be peace now, said Aristodemo, let us throw away our rifles, and then no fool of an officer can turn us back to fight when it is of no use. Well, says Giuseppe, the rifles are very heavy, and we have not eaten for two days.

  To me the thing that needs explaining is not why the Retreat occurred, but why it did not occur long before.

  From Scenes from Italy’s War, by G. M. Trevelyan; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919.

  What Manner of Man

  —John Dos Passos

  The woods all about him were a vast rubble-heap; the jagged, splintered boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brass shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind came in puffs laden with an odor as of dead rats in an attic. And this was what all the centuries of civilization had struggled for. For this had generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in fields and workshops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of their intelligence. For this!

  The German prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again, carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticulous steps of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks of a whip along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into the dugout.

  The prisoner wiped the sweat from his grime-streaked forehead, and started up the step of the dugout again, a closed stretcher on his shoulder. Something made Martin look after him as he strolled down the rutted road. He wished he knew German so that he might call after the man and ask him what manner of man he was.

  Again, like snapping of a whip, three shells flashed yellow as they exploded in the brilliant sunlight of the road. The slender figure of the prisoner bent suddenly double, like a pocket-knife closing, and lay still. Martin ran out, stumbling in the hard ruts. In a soft child’s voice the prisoner was babbling endlessly, contentedly. Martin kneeled beside him and tried to lift him, clasping him round the chest under the arms. He was very hard to lift, for his legs dragged limply in their soaked trousers, where the blood was beginning to saturate the muddy cloth. Sweat dripped from Martin’s face on the man’s face, and he felt the arm-muscles and the ribs pressed against his body as he clutched the wounded man tightly to him in the effort of carrying him toward the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange contentment. It was as if his body were taking part in the agony of the man’s body. At last they were washed out, all the hatreds, all the
lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of beings alike in every part, eternally alike.

  Two men with a stretcher came from the dugout, and Martin laid the man’s body, fast growing limper, less animated, down very carefully.

  As he stood by the car, wiping the blood off his hands with an oily rag, he could still feel the man’s ribs and the muscles of the man’s arm against his side. It made him strangely happy.

  From One Man’s Initiation: 1917, by John Dos Passos; George H. Doran; New York, 1922.

  Smashed in Some Complicated Manner

  —H. G. Wells

  Abruptly and shockingly, this malignity of warfare, which had been so far only a festering cluster of reports and stories and rumours and suspicions, stretched out its arms to Essex and struck a barb of grotesque cruelty into the very heart of Mr. Britling. Late one afternoon came a telegram from Filmington-on-Sea, where Aunt Wilshire had been recovering her temper in a boarding-house after a round of visits in Yorkshire and the moorlands. And she had been “very seriously” injured by an overnight Zeppelin air raid. It was a raid that had not been even mentioned in the morning’s papers. She had asked to see him.

  It was, ran the compressed telegraphic phrase, “advisable to come at once.”

  Hugh found her in the hospital very much hurt indeed. She had been smashed in some complicated manner that left the upper part of her body intact, and lying slantingly upon pillows. Over the horror of bandaged broken limbs and tormented flesh below sheets and a counterpane were drawn. Morphia had been injected, he understood, to save her from pain, but presently it might be necessary for her to suffer. She lay up in her bed with an effect of being enthroned, very white and still; her strong profile with its big nose and her straggling hair and a certain dignity gave her the appearance of some very important, very old man, of an aged pope for instance, rather than of an old woman.

  He was not sure at first that she knew of his presence.

  “Here I am, Aunt Wilshire,” he said. “Your nephew Hugh.”

  “Mean and preposterous,” she said very distinctly.

  But she was not thinking of Mr. Britling. She was talking of something else.

  She was saying: “It should not have been known I was here. There are spies everywhere. Everywhere. There is a spy now—or a lump very like a spy. They pretend it is a hot-water bottle. Pretext … Oh yes! I admit—absurd. But I have been pursued by spies. Endless spies. Endless, endless spies. Their devices are almost incredible … He has never forgiven me … All this on account of a carpet. A palace carpet. Over which I had no control. I spoke my mind. He knew I knew of it. I never concealed it. So I was hunted. For years he had mediated revenge. Now he has it. But at what cost! And they call him Emperor. Emperor! … His arm is withered; his son—imbecile. He will die—without dignity …”

  The story was like a page from some fantastic romance of Jules Verne’s; the peace of the little old town, the people going to bed, the quiet streets, the quiet starry sky, and then for ten minutes an uproar of breaking glass, and then a fire here, a fire there, a child’s voice pitched high by pain and terror, scared people going to and fro with lanterns, and the sky empty again, the Zeppelin raiders gone.

  Five minutes before, Aunt Wilshire had been sitting in the boarding-house playing Patience. Five minutes later she was a thing of elemental terror and agony, bleeding wounds and shattered bones, plunging about in the darkness amidst a heap of wreckage. And already the German airmen were buzzing away to sea like boys who have thrown a stone through a window.

  Her voice weakened, but it was evident she wanted to say something more.

  “I’m here,” said Mr. Britling. “Your nephew Hughie.”

  She listened.

  “Can you understand me?”

  She became suddenly an earnest, tender human being. “My dear!” she said and seemed to search for something in her mind and failed to find it.

  “You have always understood me,” she tried.

  “You have always been a good boy to me, Hughie,” she said, rather vacantly, and added after some moments of still reflection, “au fond.”

  After that she was silent for some minutes, and took no notice of his whispers.

  Then she recollected what had been in her mind. She put out a hand that sought for Mr. Britling’s sleeve.

  “Hughie!”

  “I’m here, Auntie,” said Mr. Britling. “I’m here.”

  “Don’t let him get at your Hughie … Too good for it, dear. Oh! much—much too good … People let these wars and excitements run away with them … They put too much into them … They aren’t—they aren’t worth it. Don’t let him get at your Hughie.”

  “No.”

  “You understand me, Hughie?”

  “Perfectly, Auntie.”

  “Then don’t forget it. Ever.”

  She had said what she wanted to say. She had made her testament. He was amazed to find this grotesque old creature had suddenly become beautiful, in that silvery vein of beauty one sometimes finds in very old men. She was exalted as great artists will sometimes exalt the portraits of the aged. He was moved to kiss her forehead.

  At about seven o’clock that evening she died.

  From Mr. Britling Sees It Through, by H. G. Wells; Macmillan; New York, 1917.

  Chapter Six:

  Protest

  Courage, martial courage, bravery in battle, was recognized and honored during the Great War. Medals, promotion, celebrity—all these were possible for those who killed or rescued under spectacular circumstances. The famous aces, fighter pilots like Georges Guynemer in France, Albert Ball in England, Eddie Rickenbacker in the United States, Hermann Goering in Germany, all became national heroes, as did soldiers like Captain Noel Chavasse, England’s double Victoria Cross winner, and Sergeant Alvin York, the Tennessee hill farmer turned soldier who took thirty-two German machine gun nests singlehandedly. (Though later, looking back on his wartime experience, he would admit, “I can’t see we did any good.”)

  Other forms of courage were taken for granted and honored only in platitudes. Women who feared at any moment the knock on the door with the dreaded war office telegram; mothers and fathers dealing with the same kind of anxiety; civilians, across a huge swath of Europe, whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed. They were expected to “soldier on” without the support of their husbands or sons and, in the worst cases, to mourn them quickly, then get on with the job of winning the war.

  Some of the greatest exemplars of courage during the war, those showing moral courage, were actively despised, and in some circumstances rigorously prosecuted: the very few writers who dared protest the war in print. They were rewarded with obloquy, loss of income, exile, or jail—the war-fighting establishment did not content itself with tsk-tsk shakes of the head. Yet—such are the ironies of literature and history—these are the very writers whose work can seem the most alive today, while the knee-jerk jingoism of their peers reads mostly as a curiosity. Antiwar writing from any war is always sadly relevant to contemporary conditions, and many of the specific arguments against World War I, so controversial in their day, have long since been accepted by historians as the truth.

  As has been seen, almost all the famous fiction writers, playwrights, and poets wholeheartedly supported the war while it was being fought. The protestors (with the notable exception of Romain Rolland), were not imaginative writers; they were essayists, philosophers, professors, and social workers, more directly focused on political and social issues than were novelists, and with much less to lose by going against the popular mood.

  Protest writing was a feature of the war right from the start, but it picked up in intensity as the war dragged on. In 1917, war weariness had settled over Europe—and not just over writers. One of the great myths of the war is that the average soldier just “took it,” serving stolidly on through the carnage without complaint or protest. The fact is, by 1917 many soldiers had had enough, and voted with their feet. After t
wenty-nine thousand poilus were butchered in the failed French offensive along the Chemin des Dames, soldiers in fifty-four divisions, half the French army, refused to take part in any more offensives. Italian soldiers deserted en masse before and after the disaster at Caporetto. After the October Revolution in Russia, the army immediately began to melt away, with four million of them offering themselves up to captivity rather than fighting on, and many others simply laying down their arms and heading home. Not every World War I soldier thought he was enlisted in a great cause.

  Since America dithered for three years before entering the war, there was more time and more opportunities for antiwar writing to be safely published there than in other Allied countries. One of dozens of hastily compiled books trying to cash in on the war, The Great War In Europe; Most Terrible Conflict in History, published in New York in 1915, could include an introduction by Bishop Samuel Fallows, “famous Civil War chaplain,” that included this passionate antiwar peroration.

  “I arraign war in the name of the ghastly armies of the mangled dead; of the countless devastated and desolate homes; of the millions of broken-hearted, wailing widows fighting a grim and losing battle for bread; of helpless orphans knowing no father’s providence and care; of aged parents without the strong hand of loving sons on which to lean. I arraign it in the name of our common Humanity; in the name of the christianity of the Prince of Peace.”

  Two years later this kind of writing could get you punished. The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 and the repressive Sedition Act the following year. Antiwar writers were persecuted with rigor, ostracized in some cases, censored and prosecuted in others. Jane Addams, the beloved founder of Hull House in Chicago, went from a saint to a pariah overnight, thanks to her leadership of the American Union Against Militarism, or, as the New York Times labeled it, “this little group of malcontents.”