Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  A steering committee of delegates drew up a declaration for the group condemning not only European hostilities but also the American program of preparedness. When it came time to attach signatures, a considerable number refused, requesting the striking out of several clauses and demilitarizing of rhetoric. “Thank heaven,” some gentlemen of the press were overheard to say. “At last a story has broken.”

  The world press had a holiday reporting the quarrel. Cartoons pictured two doves clawing each other, attempting to yank an olive branch out of the other’s mouth. Editorials suggested that the peace pilgrims, if they had set out to teach heads of state a lesson, were doing a fair job. The papers, milking the drama for its copy value, forgot to report that the Peace Ship delegates settled their debate without a single gassing, maiming, or amputation. Following the blowup and hoopla, Ford withdrew even more. As soon as the ship docked in Oslo, he was whisked, reportedly under doctors’ orders, back to the U.S. without the betrayed peace party knowing. But before this covert exit, he managed to give one press conference. In front of an incredulous band of journalists, he refused to talk of anything except his plans for a new tractor, then going into production.

  Deserted by Ford and a steady trickle of disillusioned delegates, the core party made its way through neutral nations, raising a meager commitment for continuous mediation. A whittled-down group passed into Holland and took up the long, boring, and invisible work of negotiation that had little to do with front-page coverage. The remaining pilgrims hoped they could be more obstinate than the mass obstinacy of national states. They could not. Two years later, they drifted apart, the project abandoned. When the armistice came, it was virtually identical to the very first peace proposal generated by this committee.

  The Peace Ship met the goals of its initial charter. It provided a high-profile forum for concerned individuals. It established an alternative peace channel for the belligerents, depriving them of yet another excuse for continuing an obviously hopeless struggle. Ford had only said that “a few of us” were going to see about getting the boys out of the trenches by Christmas. And a few did try. But in the eyes of the world, the Peace Ship was an anachronistic joke, a gesture of monstrous egotism that failed miserably. One encyclopedia after another refers to the Peace Ship as a bizarre side comment in Ford’s personal history.

  Only in the biographies and primary sources does the story of the Oscar II start to become interesting. One biographer suggests the whole mission was sabotaged by a hostile press corps, scuttled in Jersey Harbor by advocates of the inevitable. The ship sank, says this biographer, not from its own overweight idealism, but because the world refused to ballast it with belief.

  Ford himself held the press responsible for the failure. But when asked if he resented the coverage of the Peace Ship, he replied, “It suited me fine.” Ford the industrialist gained from the losses of Ford the ambassador of private will. The Oscar II succeeded, Ford was quick to point out, in taking war talk off the front page and putting peace talk in its place.

  As Ford left the initial press conference, reporters called after him for a final message. He responded, “Tell the people to cry peace and fight preparedness.” When asked what he would do if the expedition failed, he said, “I’ll start another.” But he did not start another ship. His subsequent campaigns were not so admirable.

  In an interview with Ford, John Reed, himself predisposed to events of conviction shaking the world, tried to get Ford to say he would do it all over again. Ford said he would leave the bigwigs on shore, sailing instead with the folks from his own village of Dearborn. And that indeed would have been something out of the ordinary: an obscure midwestern town adrift on the Gulf Stream, unsponsored, ready to intrude unasked between warring parties with ultimatums of humanity.

  Yet who but an obsessive narcissist could have initiated such a voyage in the first place? The plan may have been already ruined by the motive of its sponsor, his fixed need to force his fellow man to love him as he felt he deserved. This would explain Ford’s retrenchment following his humiliating return from Europe. In explaining the failure of his peace gospel, Ford hinted that he had discovered the real cause of the fighting. The Jews had started the war in order to profit from it. For the next decade, a gang of Ford news writers and history editors waged war against the “Hebrew network” with all the idealistic vigor with which the ship had waged peace.

  Frustrated narcissism also explains Ford’s complete reversal following America’s entry into the war. He became one of the country’s most committed armorers, transforming his River Rouge auto plant into a war machine. He swore he would not make a profit off the hostilities, promising to return every penny—in legal tender, “In God We Trust,” not “Help the Other Fellow”—to the government after the war. He did not. Such altruism easily seems the work of a man caught in the drain of self-love.

  These interpretations of the Peace Ship’s failure, however interesting, represent minority opinions. By far the largest body of comment holds that the mission failed for obvious reasons—anyone paying attention would see that the Great War was precisely the death kneel to actions like Ford’s. The Battle of the Frontiers had shown that something irreversible had happened to the scale of human events: certainly the man who had automated the Tin Lizzie should have known that.

  The change was everywhere—in warfare, industry, the arts: a sudden shift into numerical modernity, a new, mass scale. Quantitative change had become qualitative, and the war, with its seven thousand dead per day, set the standard. The newspapers had to laugh at 150 in a boat. It was the old joke of a mismatch in scale: a judge fines a criminal ten thousand dollars. The criminal reaches into his pocket and begins counting change. An astronomer says the sun will die out in a billion years. A terrified voice at the back of the hall asks the lecturer to repeat the prediction. “I said the sun will die out in a billion years.” “Thank God,” says the relieved voice. “I thought you said a million.”

  The vast majority of biographers—so numerous that the ingenious holdouts are as impotent as Ford was against the majority’s war—imply that Ford’s action belonged to another, lost time. Tilting at windmills may have been admirable once, but tilting at carbines, as the General Staffs repeatedly found out, cut nothing. In the words of Mies van der Rohe, whose homogeneous International Style would rebuild a decimated world, “The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.” Those ten million in a position to argue would not rise again from the cratered mud. Hereafter, only the Collective counted.

  Ford was an evolutionary backwater—a tonsil or an appendix—and the Peace Ship was his surgical corrective. He had acted as a nineteenth-century leading citizen voting his conscience, and had returned a shell-shocked creature of the new landscape, with theories of conspiracy to explain his helplessness. “Learned a lot from the Peace Ship,” he wrote in one of his journals. He did not think it necessary to spell out what.

  BUT OUT OF all this Us comes a We. At the office Christmas party, Mrs. Schreck, the cleaning woman, explained in thick accent that she left chocolate bonbons on my desk in the evenings because she had seen my photo in the New Employees section of the company newsletter and had vowed to save me from terminal thinness. She spoke while massaging the shell tear in the ambulance driver’s cap, one of our host’s collectible artifacts from the First War. I identified the insignia on the cap, having come across it in my random search for the 1914 photo. She was delightedly surprised.

  —So many of the young live in this year alone.

  She spoke of her childhood. And it was from Mrs. Schreck that I first learned of the incredible story of the Oscar II. She spoke of how, as a child in her early teens, she had dined each evening to her father’s lectures on current events and world politics. She learned from him to equate the word “German” with destruction. Her father wept openly for the burning of the library at Louvain, and swore lifelong hatred against everything German. One winter’s evening in the wa
r’s second year, he announced with the first trace of hope since the invasion of Belgium that a great American inventor was coming to Europe to put an end to the fighting. Her entire family, in awe of anyone who could understand the new machinery, let alone make it perform on command, at once believed that this foreigner could do the miraculous.

  At first I attributed the odd, moving story to the elaborate embroidery of memory. But I was the more deceived, finding in time every detail she had carried around inside of her for three quarters of a century to have its counterpart in documentary fact. I would even find an equivalent to her girlish hope. Mary Alden Hopkins, a magazine writer and Peace Ship passenger, temporarily abandoning objective journalism, wrote:

  One hundred and fifty everyday people have been brought face to face with a great idea—the thought of world disarmament. There’s no escaping it, short of jumping in the sea. . . . At times, the vision comes to all of us—mystic, veiled, and wonderful. Then common sense revolts. Yet we dare not treat the vision with contempt. A ship of fools crossed the Atlantic in 1492. A ship of fools reached Plymouth in 1620. Can it be that in this ship of fools, we bear the Holy Grail to the helping of a wounded world?

  At the Christmas party—still another Christmas those ten million boys would not be out of the trenches by—Mrs. Schreck’s story gave me a clue to finally identifying those fellows in the photograph, giving them the names I had been trying to recall ever since my stop in Detroit. But I was not quick enough to pick up the clue, and had still a long route to trace before circling back to it. Without knowing how much she had revealed to me, Mrs. Schreck asked:

  —How does so thin a jonge mannetje know so much of the long before?

  In a scattered recounting, several times losing the thread, I retraced for Mrs. Schreck my haphazard research. I described, poorly, the photo I had sought, curious, even as I spoke, over what it was I had been so anxious about. Between her weak English and my poor description of what I only partially recalled, I was not surprised on coming to the end of my story to find her sitting very still. But it was not bored politeness that had ossified her.

  —I know your photo many years now.

  She spoke as if admitting something under duress. The fellow I was looking for, she said, tapping the shrapneled cap as if it stood for nationality, as if it alone could explain the pathetic coincidence, all the pathetic collisions of hope and ridicule and horror and joy, the memory of a place long ago lost but even, at this distant decade, never too far from hand,

  —Is German.

  Chapter Eleven

  Conspiracy of Equals

  From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.

  —Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

  Until the war broke out, life in the service had done little to stop the change in Adolphe that had begun when the two foreigners invaded his home and became Germans. Peter especially had infected him, an irresponsible child influencing an older boy prematurely set in his ways. Very early on, Adolphe’s adopted father had taught him that disorder and pleasure were forms of insanity. The daily routine of Westerwald farming, more poisonous in the boredom than in the physical strain, made the boy age directly from twelve to eighteen, skipping the years between. But when Peter and Hubert came to conquer the old world, Adolphe began making up for lost time.

  On the farm, his changes had all been covert. He would cock his hat to match the angle of Peter’s and snicker at an obscenity or two, but when put to the test, when called on by his parents to uphold Cross and Crown, he performed magnificently. The old spell of order still kept the aroma of otherliness under lock. If his mandatory conscription had not come just in time, Adolphe would have passed into adulthood having reached some more or less unsatisfactory compromise between the two. But war, by definition, removes the need for compromise.

  On first falling into the warmth of his battalion, Adolphe was pleasantly surprised. He found it much easier to disobey his superior officers than it had been to defy his parents. After all, his parents had given him everything; his section corporal, on the other hand, gave him only three bars of soap stinking of rotten animals, a mobile cot too heavy to be worth carrying, and a metal mess kit whose sheet-pressed plates, spoons, and cups stacked neatly inside one another, folding away compactly. For two hours after being issued it, Adolphe took the kit apart and reassembled it, delighting at the cleverness of the designer who could come up with such a marvel of economy.

  But Adolphe’s joy ended and his spite for the chubby corporal increased upon discovering, on looking over at the next bunk where another nineteen-year-old lay deep in concentration over his own mess kit, that he was missing a part—a four-inch soup bowl. Adolphe complained at once. The corporal said that the kits were always issued complete; Adolphe must have lost his bowl. He would not be able to get a new one short of dying, reincarnating, and reenlisting. Adolphe called him a pig, and was sent up for his first disciplinary review.

  Instead of having only one Peter and Hubert to provoke him, Adolphe now ate, washed, slept, drilled, and suffered with a hundred of both. Germany, unable to anticipate the implications of total war, committed the same error as the other major powers. Each nation lumped infantry together by place of origin. One wrong turn at the Somme and entire towns were lost. So Adolphe’s section was made up exclusively of nineteen-year-olds from the Westerwald, many of whom had been at the May dance only two months earlier. Basic training was their summer camp. Even rigorous drill beat farming; what boy wouldn’t choose bruises over boredom?

  Because all the boys knew one another, if only remotely, and because they were all away from home for the first time, the Westerwald section each evening transformed the barracks into a free-for-all, or what passed nicely for one. As soldiers in the world’s most disciplined army, their bashes were in fact extremely limited. But to these boys, and especially to Adolphe, just staying up evenings until ten, going into paper debt at cards, and singing softly and communally seemed the nearest, sweetest thing to anarchy on this overplanned earth.

  It was the last, the singing and toasting, that proved Adolphe’s true baptism into unchecked Peterism. Normally during the group singing and Teutonically restrained roughhousing, Adolphe sat on his cot, hiding his social ineptness and showing an imbecilic grin. Then one evening, about two weeks into his tour, a compulsion came on him, one irreconcilable with his basic character. A verse came into his head of its own accord, a parody of the battalion theme, an old Protestant hymn going:

  Oh My God, nothing will come to us

  Not the smallest harm

  Except through Thy will.

  Adolphe’s parody came to him spontaneously, a sign that it was for public enjoyment. He waited for a lull in the festivities, then grabbed the floor to everyone’s surprise. In what he thought to be a good Berlin concert-hall accent, but sounding more like a Munich sausage vendor, he announced:

  —Ladies, for your listening pleasure, express from Bayreuth . . .

  And in his clean, still high operatic tenor replete with stage vibrato, he belted out:

  Oh My God, what will become of us?

  The smallest balls

  Belong to our sergeant.

  The barracks exploded, beginning in beery German delight and ending in all-out French hysteria. Adolphe became an instant folk hero. The youths stamped and applauded, banged their mess kits and called for more. When the display continued, military police poured into the room and threatened to arrest the next man who spoke. In the ensuing silence, someone began humming the hymn. At once, the whole troop set to sea on four-part hummed chorale with ostinato giggling.

  The hilarity continued after the MPs left, if only on the reduced level of shared imagination. Every boy made the pilgrimage over to Adolphe’s cot to congratulate him on a fine piece of work. Each boy, therefore, committed an act of complicity with the deed. Yet one boy, never to reveal himself, practicing collective responsibility, in the light of the next day identified Adolphe for t
he authorities as the agent of the evening’s anarchy. This time, the discipline review sentenced him to a short confinement.

  In less time than he had known his brother Peter, Adolphe had already compiled a record worthy of an amateur political agitator. But Adolphe had no pretensions, political or otherwise. Nor was he growing cynical or losing the old working-class deference to authority. He was not trading respectful propriety for worldly nihilism. He had only learned from his Dutch half brother that foolishness went over better in public than gravity.

  Even Alicia’s having defrauded him into marriage did not shake his faith in the institution. He continued to write her in high formality and decorum. He always sent along the bulk of his army check, making no mention of the antics that were winning him fame. For he had become the Westerwald section’s Holy Clown: deliberately missing spots while shaving, pretending heart attacks, pantomiming the chaplain alone in the vestry with the communion wine, or drinking near beer through his nose. These harmless games passed the time of conscription. At tour’s end, he meant to give them up and return to the serious work of farming without any more hypocrisy than the devout Protestant who sets aside his whorehouse days on reaching maturity. But how could he explain this to his wife (now definitively pregnant) or family without undue alarm?

  Then came August. An abnormally hot summer reached peak heat. The Kaiser, through an infinite variety of commanding officers’ accents, announced Germany’s hour. He dissolved the Reichstag, ended domestic pettiness, and decreed that every German soldier must now be both a model of fighting efficiency and an example of Perfection of Will: go ye therefore and teach all nations, even unto the ends of the earth.