A Lesson In Futility – that keeps on giving

A Lesson In Futility – that keeps on giving.

Today’s Lesson: First let’s look at two mentions from Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, [The Illustrated Edition] Sterling, 1975. You’d think [I thought] The Great War was World War II. No The Great War is a big heavy, heavily illustrated relook at World War 1 – and about as thorough a look as anybody is likely to take:

Albert today [a town in France] is one of the saddest places in France. It has all been restored to its original ugliness. The red-brick Basilica is as it was before the war, with the gilded virgin back up on top of the tower, quite erect. But despite an appearance of adequacy, everything human in Albert seems to have been permanently defeated. The inhabitants are dour. Everywhere there is an air of bitterness about being passed over by the modernity, sophistication, and affluence of modern France. Everywhere one senses a quiet fury at being condemned to live in this boneyard and backwater, where even the crops contend with soil once ruined by gas.

And boneyard it is. Every week bones come to light. Depending one’s mood one either quietly buries them again, or flings them into the nearby brush, or saves them to turn over to the employees of the Commonwealth (formerly “Imperial”) War Graves Commission, which supervises the 2500 British military cemeteries from offices in the main cities. The cemeteries are both pretty and bizarre, fertile with roses, projecting an almost unendurably ironic peacefulness. They memorialize not just the men buried in them, but the talents for weighty public rhetoric of Rudyard Kipling. He was called on to devise almost all the verbal formulas employed by the Imperial War Graves Commission, from “Their Name Liveth For Evermore,” carved on the large “Stone of Remembrance” in each cemetery, to the words incised on headstones over the bodies of the unidentified: “A Soldier of the Great War/Known unto God.” The unforgettable, infinitely pathetic inscriptions are not Kipling’s but those which the families of the dead were allowed—after long debate within the Commission about “uniformity”— to place on their stones. In addition to the still hopeful ones about dawn and fleeing shadows we find some which are more “modern,” that is, more personal, particular, and hopeless:

Our dear Ted. He died for us.
. . .

Our Dick.
If love could have saved him he would not have died.

And some read as if refusing to play the game of memorial language at all:

A sorrow too deep for words.

And a few more words about these places of the dead of The Great War:

“The notorious Butte of Warlencourt [in the Calais region of France], a fifty-foot knoll on the road to Bapaume from which the Germans strenuously held the British advance in the autumn and winter of 1916, is overgrown and silent. Crops grow right to its foot, dipping here and there to betray the persistent shapes of shell holes and mine craters. Tens of thousands of men simply disappeared here. The sticky Somme mud makes large unwieldy spheres of your shoes as you climb to the top through the thick undergrowth. At the top you can picnic, if you have the heart for it, and inspect the large weathered wooden cross erected by the Germans at the summit and apparently renewed at the end of the Second World War. On it is carved the Friede.” [translated from German – Peace.] pp 82-83]

All these young men: dead, dead, dead. And for what? So we could have another Great War and more young men (and women and children) would die.

Let’s now take a look as this author Paul Fussell himself, tells about how he became a soldier in the Second World War: [Read this and watch a boy turn into a battle-hardened man and skeptic. And writer I might add.]

“So it was as a tiny, significant part of the Seventh Army’s attack on March 15 that I found myself lying atop a German bunker in the woods next to Sergeant Hudson and Lieutenant Biedrzycki, listening inertly to the shells coming systematically closer and closer until one went off right above us. Its intolerably loud metallic clang! did more than deafen me. It sent red-hot metal tearing into my body. One piece went into my right thigh. Another entered my back. When I got my hearing and my senses back, the first thing I did was take a deep breath to see if my lung had been penetrated. When I found it had not, I felt less panic and, despite in indescribable pain, able to look about me. Hudson, lying a few inches to my left, let out a couple of s subdued groans and was silent. I saw his face turn from “flesh color” to white, and then to whitish green as his circulation stopped. . . . Juan the Medic patched me up, scissoring my trouser leg off and cutting a large hole in my jacket and shirt over the back wound. He shook in the sulfa power and injected morphine. When I asked him how Hudson and Biedrzycki were, he answered quietly, “Both dead.” I shouted! and felt a black fury flow over me. It has never entirely dissipated. . . . Fifty-five of us, virtually half our understrength company, were killed or wounded that memorable day in the woods. . . . When I came to, my wounds had been cleaned out, dead flesh had been cut away, and they had been loosely bandaged: it had been found that the way to lessen the risk of gangrene and infection was to leave wounds open for a while instead of suturing them direly. I now hurt, and badly, for the medics were very careful not to overly the delightful morphine. (Twenty years after the war, in a small Spanish town I come upon an American morphine junkie addicted during his wartime treatment for a ghastly stomach wound. There were many such.) . . . Poor Biedrycki! He’d been an officer no more than a month and his reward for the assiduity, skill, and loyalty that had earned him his field commission was to be killed instantly by shell fragments in a meaningless little forest in a trivial little battle in a war already won”

Paul Fussell: Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, Little, Brown and Company, 1996 pp 143-147.

Over and over and over and over I read and see the futility of war. What will it take? What can we do to help the lessons of the futility of war to be learned?

Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear: Essential Wisdom For Getting Through The Storm, Harper One, 2012.

“Since the so-called war on terror began, we have spent billions of dollars but have only created more violence, hate, and fear. We have not succeeded in removing fear, hatred, and resentment, either in their outward expressions such as terrorism or, most importantly, in the minds of the people. It’s time to contemplate and find a better way to bring peace to ourselves and the world. Only with the practice of deep listening and gentle communication can we help remove wrong perceptions that are at the foundation of fear, hatred, and violence. You cannot remove wrong perceptions with a gun,” p 107.

[My apologies: Reading, Writing currently consumes most of my dwindling energy.]
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