The beginning of March is always a bittersweet thing. On the good side, it usually means that the weather is starting to turn. Sky dandruff falls less often (though we've had precious little snow the past few years). The lawn outside my office window begins to start the process of maybe even trying to think about changing its color from depression-yellow to tentative-green. I can crack my window for some fresh air and to better hear the grumbles of traffic. My brother's birthday shows up, as does my second child's. This year, Daylight Saving Time leaps into action mid-month, which means my homeward bound commute will no longer involve squinting against the rays of the setting sun. So there are some definite perks and positives.
The downside, however, is that my schedule almost always puts the beginning of my World War I unit at the beginning of March. And that is, in and of itself, a bittersweet thing--a confession I'm loathe to make, despite it being true. I'm not much of a historian. There's a very narrow subset of historical moments that I know extensively--perhaps to the level of having forgotten more than what most people will ever know--and the rest is expansive enough to cover what I teach in class. I have been steadily trying to increase that knowledge over the years, and while I certainly know what I'm teaching, I don't have a grasp on other aspects of the same time periods. For example, I couldn't tell you what was happening basically anywhere on the African continent during the 13-1800s, except maybe some Napoleonic fighting in Egypt. I'm pretty ignorant about China pre-19th century. The list could go on. My point is that I know what I need for my classes and then a bit more, except for in certain areas where I know more than is needed for my classes. Those areas tend to revolve around the Tudor/Stuart dynasty in England, and the World Wars. And that's the "sweet" part about starting the World War I unit: I'm going from something that I have some knowledge to something I have (comparatively) more knowledge. Feeling confident and comfortable and knowledgeable about something makes a big difference in the satisfaction of a unit. I won't say there's never a question I can't answer, but I can give a bit of an answer to most of them, and that's a good feeling. Not only that, but I'm pretty passionate about remembering and learning about World War I. I focus a lot on the Western Front (going beyond the trench warfare is one of the areas that I aim to improve my knowledge about as time goes on), yes. Nevertheless, I feel like what and how I teach is not only elucidating for the students, but is valuable for how they understand the world that we live in. I can't think of an event of equal importance in the past century than World War I. (And if you want to argue about World War II, you have a lot of explaining on how we would've ended up with fascism and despotism throughout Europe without the catastrophe of 1914-1918.) And, in a lot of ways, I view it this way because my students have a probably-unhealthy interest in WWII and view WWI with dim curiosity at best and outright apathy at worst. Not only do I get to change their understanding of history through this lengthy unit, but I also get to share some poetry by Wilfred Owen, one of my favorite poets, and that's always exciting. So I have some positive things about "starting the war" this week. But there's also some "bitter" mixed in there, and that's the reality that I'm about to embark on my annual trek through human misery, brutality, callousness, and horror. I know that there's a lot of hero-worship of the doughboys (just kidding; precious few people care about WWI vets; our national memorial to the 116,000 killed in the Great War won't be dedicated until 2024), and it can be hard to go against a received tradition of veneration. Teaching about what humans did to each other, and the hell unleashed upon the world is taxing and draining and depressing. I don't dwell long on the Armenian genocide, for example, but it's one of the things that really kicks me in the guts every time I have to explain it. The disgusting waste of life on 1 July 1916 at the Battle of the Somme is hardly something to relish describing, nor its French counterpart that started in February of the same year near Verdun. We read All Quiet on the Western Front to get a view from the German trenches, only to see that it's basically the same as the view from the British or French ones. We see black and white photos, maps, colorized film clips, and modern day images of century-old weapons. I try to give them a broad understanding about the conflict, because there's so much and one must be firm in cutting out details. But I also try to instill in them the understanding of what modern warfare looks like, the pains it can cause, the scars it leaves. Add to that the utter futility of the fight--the pointlessness of the conflict in the first place, to say nothing of the way in which it set up the world for greater misery and bloodshed just two decades later, and my World War I unit is a bleak prospect indeed. So that's why I find March to be a melancholic month, despite its manifest positives. This year, with the world "celebrating" the first anniversary of COVID-19, I'm reminded of how I taught this information last year--parked in my office, looking out at the world through my window, talking to my computer screen with a handful of dedicated students who "showed up" for the actual lecture, rather than relying on the recording. I get to teach in person now, albeit in a modified manner, and that has some positives. (Of course, it also led to me getting COVID and almost infecting my heart-warrior son, so on the whole I'd say it's mostly negative.) Here I sit, then, on the week when we "start World War I" (as I sometimes accidentally say before correcting myself and say "start our study of World War I"), I hope you can forgive me for feeling a mixture of bittersweet emotions. Despite the flaws, I really enjoyed Endgame back when I saw it in April. Ever since I saw it, I felt like 1) I wanted to watch it after a refresher viewing of the previous movies, and 2) I wanted to see it with my boys.
The second impulse came (in part) because of what happened when I was at Infinity War, which, if you still haven't seen it, I'm going to be rather spoiling the film for a quick sec. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, the Snappening transpires, which totally shocked me because I had been so well conditioned by Marvel movies to see the heroes pull off the big win at the end of it all (additionally, I purposefully don't pay attention to announced movies as much as possible, preferring to be surprised by when they show up, rather than anticipating them). The ending to that movie is powerful, raw, and surprising. Gayle and I sat in the theater, waiting for the end of the credits (again, conditioned), only to hear the heart-rending wailing of a kid a few rows in front of us. He had just seen some of his most beloved heroes get dissolved in front of his eyes. Methinks the price of that family's tickets will increase with therapy bills later on. I didn't want that to happen; I didn't want my youngest (he's six at the moment), who has seen some Marvel movies, jump ahead to Infinity War and see so many characters get Snapped. That was not a parental-trial I wanted to face. So I decided that we would get around to rewatching all of the Marvel movies together as a family--yes, there's some uncomfortable content, and I'm not going to sweat that too much (I saw Batman Returns in the theater--you know, the one with the Penguine trying to bite a guy's nose off? Yeah, that one--and I'm only slightly permanently scarred)--before I hit Endgame again. Then my kids would have a fuller experience with the emotions that the film is playing with. It's not quite the same with being in the moment, I know--there's a full third of my life in which Marvel movies have been made. Considering how I was very much the stereotypical nerd who yearned to see his favorite characters on the silver screen someday, the Marvel films really have been emotionally significant to me. I can't recapture that: My kids grow up in a Marvel-dominated world (and hurrah for that, says I). But I think this process will be worthwhile anyway. We've already knocked back Iron Man, Thor, Iron Man 2, and since I rewatched The Incredible Hulk only a few months ago, we're considering that one complete. That meant that, before Amazon Prime loses all of the Marvel movies to Disney+, I decided to watch Captain America: The First Avenger last night. And by saying that, I have now taken about 500 words to get to this particular point: I am still conflicted about that movie. There are a lot of things about the Marvel movies that are rightly criticized: The music is forgettable (good while you're in it, I suppose, but essentially without the ear-worm stylings of earlier superhero movies (think the John Williams Superman theme, or Danny Elfman's Batman theme, for example)), the colors are sometimes a touch bland, the character arcs are familiar, they always end with a swarm battle, the girlfriends are immaterial to most of the heroes…all of these are valid points, and there are some more, too. One of the more subtle critiques--and one that really just gnaws at me--is that it's a much more progressive world. I mean, don't get me wrong: I love the fact that Agent Carter and a couple of nameless (essentially; I didn't catch them, at least) Black guys are brought into Captain America's squad after he busts his best friend out of Hydra prison. I wish that Bucky had been Black just to drive that home a bit more: In this version of history, they weren't Buffalo Soldiers or a segregated unit like the 442nd Infantry Regiment. They have a San Diego-born Asian-American, a Brit, a guy I'm assuming is Irish, as well as a couple of White guys and the Black guys. We don't spend a lot of time in their presence, so we never get attached to them, but seeing that kind of rich diversity that America can have (if we let it) is awesome to see on the screen. So what's the problem? It's not historically accurate--and what I mean by that isn't "I want my superhero movie to only feature White people 'cuz that's what history says and the source material" kind of argument. It's the same problem as having Captain America focus on defeating Hydra instead of Hitler: The real-world, real-history problems were deep, damaging, and destructive, but the film vaults over them without so much as a hesitation. The Holocaust is pretty much one of the most wicked things that happened in Europe--World War II was pretty much one of the most wicked of things to have happened to the planet. No one walked away without sin. Our institutionalized racism was horrendous--so bad, in fact, that the Nazis used our racism as propaganda to try to influence Black soldiers to defect--and America is the only country in the world to drop two nuclear bombs on civilian populations. It isn't like we walked away from that conflict without some heavy stains on our souls. But the version of America that Steve Rogers represents isn't the one that we have. Maybe that's the biggest part that bothers me: He has a vision and understanding of America that we never got, though many of us believe it is the same one. There's nothing wrong with having a story with an alternate-timeline of how American history went. That's not the issue: It's the way that it feels like it's supposed to be interchangeable with our own timeline. I plan on talking to my kids about this very thing, especially since my oldest is studying The Hiding Place right now, so he's becoming exposed to the real terrors of that time period. This matters to me because so much of how we view the world is filtered by the media we consume. While I do think America was a force for good during World War II, I don't want my kids to think that Rogers' America is our America. Additionally, it still bothers me to think about how Captain America--the paragon and quintessence of Americanism--is used to charge a dumpy little fortress in the Alps when he could have been helping push through the German lines at Bastogne or liberating parts of France. The timeline of the movie, to me at least, was a bit murky. Obviously, it was post D-Day when Rogers arrives in Europe, but where he is and when is incomplete. I mean, when he attacks the Hydra headquarters, he literally rides his motorcycle in, as if it's just a matter of using the 1940s version of MapQuest to figure out the best route in. I know that there are a lot of cuts that a movie like this has to take in order to 1) hit the two-hour run-time, and 2) keep it simple enough to tell the portion of the bigger story (how Captain America came to be and ended up in the 21st century), so there had to be concessions. Nevertheless, I feel like their version of the war doesn't really show the sacrifice, danger, death, and suffering that transpired in the war. Nothing really shows that to me quite as strongly as the shift from Hitler to Hydra. Honestly, the easiest way for me to swallow what happens in Captain America: The First Avenger is to assume that the Holocaust doesn't happen in this timeline. I know that America didn't get involved in Europe because we wanted to stop a genocide. But by the time (again, it's not perfectly clear) Rogers was blocking blue disintegration blasts with his vibranium shield, the crimes of the Nazis was no longer whispers and rumors: We had been liberating camps as we marched eastward, and the Russians (non-entities in this film, which is not unusual for World War II narratives; why should we credit our future enemies with their due? They were communists, after all) had been doing the same as they raced toward Berlin. Steve's fixation on Hydra--which is flimsily cast as being even worse than the Nazis, though it's only through some hasty dialogue--honestly feels out of sync if there are death camps dotted throughout Europe. Look, he even thinks about diving into the water to save that young scamp during the foot-chase scene ("I can swim! Go get him!" the kid tells him). Are we seriously going to say that he understands the Hydra threat to be so large--this mystical, quasi-magical weaponization of Norse deities' power--that people being burned alive in ovens is immaterial to him? I'm not saying that I want Hydra to be more wicked than Nazis. That would require a lot of uncomfortable decisions that wouldn't make sense in the alternate-world that the Marvel movies work in. Instead, I wish that the Nazis were also considered a threat…maybe the threat of the story, only learning about Red Skull and the tesseract in the final moments. The thing is, masked soldiers who do a double-arm salute instead of the blonde-haired, blue eyed brownshirts doing a single-arm Nazi salute really doesn't feel like a legitimate threat to me. I feel like Hydra's dangerous because the movie says they are, while the historian in me is reminding me of all of the horrible things that happened to those who fought against the real-life villains. For me, it's a bridge-too-far to pretend like there was anything worse than Nazism's ideologies that were motivating the violence of the Second World War. I can't turn off my visceral reaction to that time period long enough to let a garishly-dressed supersoldier kill (and, boy, does Rogers do a lot of killing) his way through these faceless spearcarriers without feeling like something is really missing. "But, wait. Don't you love Wonder Woman? Isn't that doing the same thing, but during World War I?" Yes. Good question. And that has been grist for a lot of thinking on that front, too. In fact, I felt so strongly about how Wonder Woman treated the Great War that I took my son to see Wonder Woman as a way of getting him exposed to World War I. So, what's the difference? On the surface, it's basically the same story, isn't it? Superpowered person ends up in the theater of war and, through heroic efforts and immense self-sacrifice, manages to keep a plane loaded with deadly, world-ending weapons from being released, all while defeating an antagonist who isn't actually concerned with the historical motivations for why the war is being fought. But Wonder Woman does a lot of things differently. First of all, they picked a less-popular war (what a world we live in where wars have anything representing popularity), one that wasn't as pre-loaded in the minds of Americans. The 101st Armistice Day was observed just a couple of weeks ago, but what was the experience like for Americans--here and over there--during that time a century back? Do we remember any of the soldiers who survived the Great War--or are they only significant in the way that they came into play during the Second World War? How many battles can the average American name that happened during World War I? How many battles did the Americans fight in during World War I? These are massive gaps in our collective memories, and as a result, it allows a fictional version of the war to fit inside the superhero paradigm better. Having Diana Prince in this less familiar conflict allows the film's incongruities (like, how the H did they get close enough to the bad guys' headquarters that Diana could go incognito in a stunning blue dress without being noticed?) to be easier to swallow. More than that, however, is the trench scene. Not only is there the symbolism (which I absolutely love) of Wonder Woman being the only person who can get across No Man's Land, but there's an intimacy with the violence that makes it feel more significant. That is, Wonder Woman has to navigate the trenches, where we see the suffering of soldiers wounded, horses drowning in the mud (about 8 million pack animals served during World War I; the screams of dying men were echoed by equine death-throes), and families displaced by the violence of the war. All in about ten or fifteen minutes of screen time, we get a strong sense of the cost of the war, the effect it has on those surviving it, and the traumas it inflicts. Remember the sniper guy's PTSD being so bad that he becomes a liability? Shell-shock was a real problem, one that many--if not most, to one degree or another--soldiers experienced. In other words, Wonder Woman treats the war as a war--albeit a PG-13 version (which is fine; not everything needs to be Saving Private Ryan level of graphicness)--and allows there to be cost, danger, violence, and stakes. Wonder Woman has its own flaws--the third act is, in retrospect, a fairly large stumble--but in the area where it feels most important (to me), it really succeeds: It makes me feel like this is a real war in which Diana Prince is committed to doing her best to help end it. Captain America feels like Rogers is taking out some bad guys in a foreign country, a la the beginning of Black Panther. Couple final thoughts: All of that being said, I still really, really like the film version of Steve Rogers. The comic book version never really clicked with me--as a kid, the Man Out of Time trope wasn't very interesting (I don't know if I'm that way still; I haven't thought about it) and his costume always struck me as ridiculous. However, Chris Evans' work with the character is really enjoyable. Yeah, his pre-serum body is a bit distracting, but I positively love what they did with the character. He's committed, self-sacrificing, brave, and unwilling to compromise in the areas where conviction matters most. He's simply fantastic. In a lot of ways, Captain America: The First Avenger is less useful as an origin story, and more valuable as a character study of what makes Rogers so intriguing. Lastly: Watching Captain America and thinking about Wonder Woman and the portrayal of those films makes me--once again--deeply consider what I'm doing with my War Golem book. I've mentioned it on occasion before (like right here), but in case you've forgotten, I wrote a novel where a World War I-inspired war is fought, but with gigantic golems as an additional part of the war. If you take the dragons from Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern and their relationship with their riders, the scale of Michael Bay's Transformers, and dropped them into trench warfare, you have a sense of what I'm going for in the story. It has always gnawed at me that I chose to write a book (two, technically, though I haven't looked at the sequel since I wrote it) that uses the real-life suffering of men and women in order to tell an adventure tale. I don't normally watch war movies, as I take issue with the idea of profiting off of the death and misery of some of the worst moments in modern human history. I know that some people view them as homages and demonstrations of appreciation, and I don't disagree with that. However, as I mentioned earlier, the media we consume gives us our lenses, and viewing the wars the way that Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk do tends to push the narrative into a "my side is the heroic side; the other side is the evil side" kind of thinking. After all, there are only a couple of hours to tell the story, so shortcuts are required. But if a person watches Hacksaw Ridge (which I haven't seen, so I'm guessing here) and thinks, "Man, the Pacific War was crazy. Look how many people died! It was so bloody!", then the film has failed. Any story of Desmond Doss, I would argue, that doesn't inspire the audience to rethink what it means to serve a country and fight in a war is a failed telling of that man's story. (Again, I haven't seen it; I can almost guarantee, however, that some people left with those sentiments I just mentioned.) I haven't been able to come up with a way of squaring this circle. As I mentioned in my linked essay, I really do like War Golem. I think it's a pretty good book. Because it's a fantasy, I don't have to worry about things like the Armenian genocide or the British blockade that starved millions of Germans--I can have a Captain America style world where the terror is in the trenches alone. But I'm trying to make it feel like Wonder Woman in terms of giving the reader a sense of the trauma and fear, the worry and pain that war of that type creates. Is that enough? Is that what it takes to make a story with real-life suffering as its cornerstone? Care, consideration, and respect? I don't know. I really don't. But I wish I did. Getting to the Movie
I follow a lot of my interests on Twitter. When political dumpster-fires aren't eating up all the bandwidth, I find a lot of useful websites, thoughts, and conversations that have helped me become a better person. (Whether or not that balances out the frustration I feel almost every time I log on is still undecided.) One of the accounts I follow--which has been particularly interesting in the post-November tweets--is an account called "WWI Live", which regularly posts snippets of men's journals "on this day" back throughout the Great War. So, unsurprisingly, when Peter Jackson's documentary They Shall Not Grow Old was debuted back in October/November, WWI Live and other WWI related accounts shared the news article. If you don't know, They Shall Not Grow Old is a side-project by the famous director. The idea was to cull 100 hours of film and 600 hours of interviews the BBC did with WWI vets back in the sixties and seventies, assemble it into a type of narrative about the boys who went to France from 1914-1918, colorize it, and give the audience a chance to really feel as though they were as close to the trenches as we could possibly get. As soon as I learned about the movie, I immediately started trying to find if it was going to screen in Utah, but, at the time, it had some festivals it was showing at in London, and other than that, nothing. I mean, I did my due-diligence; I went to the Fathom Events website to see if there was anything pending, but…nope. Nothing. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I saw someone tweet that they'd seen the film--an American, speaking from a not-New York location--and that it was mesmerizing. I was with my wife, Gayle, on the way to run some errands, just the two of us. I immediately started looking at the Fathom Events website again--it had been a couple of months, after all, maybe it had updated?--and, sure enough, there were some screenings going on at the end of December. After that, maybe something would show up in February. I started to try to reserve some seats…only to see that every single screening in a 100 mile radius was completely sold out. I was frustrated; Gayle listened to me grouse about the injustice of me being unable to attend--a smaller version of the frustration I felt when I was unable to go to Verdun when I visited France a couple of Januarys back--because she knows how much learning about the World Wars means to me. Then, right at the top of my Winter Break, my little brother texted me, asking me if I knew about the movie. It's sold out, I texted back. Really? It looks like it's still there, he replied. I scurried online. Sure enough, a couple of tickets, on the very back row, tucked into the corner, were two available seats. Without hesitation, I threw in my credit card number and scooped them up, telling my brother he was going to come with me. He was down. I was relieved that, after all of that, I would finally get to see the movie. I had some trepidation: I get depressed and frustrated with war films--Dunkirk was perhaps an exception to this--and part of what always makes me unhappy with war films is that it's a recreation. No matter how hard they strive for accuracy, it isn't what truly happened, and all the people on the screen got to go home at the end of the day. It makes the real sacrifice of real people--even those who died over a century ago--feel…exploited. Well, that might be too strong of a word. Still, I don't normally go to see war films, and part of that is also because of the exceptional violence on screen. I know why it's happening, I get the process…but watching movies like that make me a little queasy and often glum. Nevertheless, I felt this was important for me to go to, so I was excited in a way that I don't normally feel for movies. Anyway, today is the day of the film, so I went by my brother's house, picked him up, and drove to the correct movie theater. We needed some food before the film, but when we tried to get some Chick-fil-A, the restaurant was packed. We decided to head to the theater and try to get something there. We only had twenty minutes before showing to get some food, eat it, and get to our seats. The food--over-priced, but still good--mostly eaten, we headed to the theater. "We're at the top left," I whispered, remembering what I saw when I bought the tickets. We hiked up…only to see that there wasn't anything approaching my seat numbers there. When I had ordered the tickets, I had misunderstood where the movie screen was in relation to the seats I was selecting…I had purchased the front row tickets, not the back. I didn't want to crane my neck at the screen for the next two hours, so I sat down in the empty seats at the back. A couple minutes later, the actual ticket holders came, surprised to see me and my brother parked in their spots. We moved. Another batch of people came. We moved again. I then spent the next fifteen minutes stressing out that the people whose seats we'd claimed were going to come in and kick us out of our seats again. (I really didn't want to move closer to the screen.) Fortunately, that was the last relocation, and my brother and I got to experience the film without further interruption. The Film Itself Where to start? Well, first of all, I can talk about the film pretty freely, as there isn't really any "spoiler" territory for a documentary: If you didn't know, the British fought in the Great War. They had horrible experiences. It ended on 11 November 1918. Many people died. I can also unequivocally and wholeheartedly recommend the movie. I would love to show it to my students--despite the R rating, which it deserves (as it's a documentary with many gruesome and graphic images), the film doesn't sensationalize the subject matter or make it overly grotesque*--though there are many reasons (the rating being one of them) that there's little possibility of that. I don't know how available it will be--I don't know if there will be country-wide distribution of the film later, or if it will become viewable online or through Blu-Ray sales. But if you get the opportunity to see the movie, you should take pains to see it. Of course, the question is, why? There have been plenty of colorized versions of the WWI footage available--and, though Jackson didn't address this in his after-credits, behind-the-scenes explanation of how the movie was made, there are sanitized versions of some of the filming from the war--to say nothing of the fact that there isn't as much interest in the Great War as its flashier, deadlier sequel. So why the Great War? Jackson obviously has a long-standing fascination with the First World War: His grandfather served throughout the entire four-year period, and he actually owns a fair number of WWI pieces, including artillery and uniforms and magazines. For him, it was a personal affair. Another thing is, there is a technological gap between the First and Second World Wars that allows the latter to be better documented and visualized. For us, the First is all about scratchy, silent, black-and-white, static images, where everyone moves at an exaggerated pace. The war is in black-and-white in our memories; whenever we study it, the slides and images feel too far removed. Jackson's idea was to tidy up the footage and coalesce on the experience of living in the trenches. What was it like to do the mundane things, like get hot water for some tea (they're British, after all)? Or the sound of lice popping when soldiers cooked them from the seams of their shirts? All of this minutiae strove to put the audience in what may be considered a "generic" version of events. Not about the big names--I think I heard Neville's name mentioned, but never French or De Gaulle or Von Kluck or anyone else--but just a ground-level experience. By adding carefully reconstructed lip-readings of the footage, there was a stronger sense of belonging--they were no longer silent films, but "talkies"--complete with carefully recorded explosions, marches, and other aspects that we take for granted in a movie. Jackson utilizes the techniques of modern filmmaking to allow us into a mindspace we're familiar with, then pushes that into a world we aren't: The trenches. The cumulative effect was absolutely stunning. The violence was surprisingly subdued--though having explosions on screen with enough volume to make the theater rattle gave a tiny taste of what it was like in 1915 France was one of the most striking moments for me--for the simple reason that no filmmaker, now or then, would want to rush along into the trenches to film the actual fighting. The choices they made were probably the best possible, and easily the part where I was least engaged. Not because there wasn't a lot going on, but because of the opposite: I couldn't keep track of the different voices who all narrated their own unique experiences below the sound of gunfire and explosions. There's one caveat to that: Jackson would put up a slow-motion portrait of a soldier, smiling at the camera, then, when the narration mentioned a death, do a shot of a soldier--dead and bloodied--to create the concept that the person we were looking at died in the way described. Because the narration was entirely done by those who were in the war, there was a personal veracity to it that added an air of realism that was immensely powerful. There are some conceptual flaws to the narrative that Jackson is telling, and this is an understandable (perhaps lamentable, I don't know yet) omission. It seems, when watching They Shall Not Grow Old, that the war simply ended and that was that. But suffering continued. As far as the Allies were concerned, yes, the fighting and dying was mostly over. The Americans--particularly Black Americans--were pressed into service of burying the nearly countless dead. The Germans continued to suffer beneath the crushing weight of the British blockade, their children starving until they became, perhaps, so mentally unhealthy that they would, when older, seek a Final Solution to a Jewish Question. The shattered lives of those in Verdun, Flanders, or Ypres had to be rebuilt, and though the British were done with it all, the ending of the war was only the beginning of the difficulties. Still, Jackson makes it clear (in his after-the-credits explanation of the process) that he had to focus on but one thing, or else it would spiral into a smorgasbord, rather than a singular meal. Because of that choice, there's still a sense of the futility of the entire war, and that was the final moments of the film. In the last few minutes of the run-time, many soldiers merely confessed that they were essentially ignored when they returned, almost as if nothing had happened. One man was asked by his boss, after having returned from the front, where he had been. "What, were you working nights?" The idea that the shells had scarcely stopped falling and people were already forgetting…well, that is condemnatory. This film is doing its best to push back against that, to resurrect, as it were, the voices, images, and lives of men who would never get the chance to grow old. Do yourself and the shades of those men an important favor: Try to see this movie. --- * The sad thing about the Great War is that it's already so grotesque that simply reporting it--without embellishments--is enough to shock any decent individual. Note: There is a small chance that I can convince the Normandy Institute to take me and one of my students to France so that we can study Operation Overlord. One of the things it requires is a personal statement about why I would be a good candidate. Since life is busy, I figured that I would share what I wrote to the institute. It's a bit of pandering, I have to admit, though I don't feel I was dishonest about any of it. At any rate, this is what I said:
Albert H. Small Normandy Institute Application As a history teacher, I do everything that I can to help my students make an emotional connection to what we’re learning. The more important an event, the more I want my students to find a way to connect with it. Few things in the course of human history have made as large an impact on the world as the Second World War, and it’s undeniable that Operation Overlord is the moment when the Allies began to turn that war firmly in the direction of victory. I feel that participating in your program would be the perfect way to improve my own emotional connection with the events of World War II--a connection that I could then share with my students and community. When students study World War II generally--and D-Day specifically--there’s a tendency to assume a fatalistic approach; that is, because we won, we were bound to win. Too often, history can be read with this deterministic assumption, as if the people involved didn’t have the capacity to choose the courses they would take. What helps to implode that assumption is interacting with historical artifacts--and, even more importantly, historical locations and people. Because I teach in Utah, the sense of historical scale tends to get warped. Unlike the East Coast, the deepest history we can see are buildings built by the first settlers, who arrived in 1847. In other words, state history is what has happened in the last century and a half. If a building was erected in 1899, we Utahns feel like it’s as old as the mountains. While there’s nothing wrong with this sense of local history, when it comes to the deeper time that the world--and, most specifically, Europe--has, the Utah-view needs expansion. Visiting France is a chance to step into an older world, one that is historical from its roots to its rooftops. I hope to attend the institute not only to gain a greater appreciation of what happened on Normandy in 1944, but what France was like because of that conflict--and even the great conflict that preceded it, World War I. Ideally, I would take all of my students, every year, to the hallowed ground of Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. Since I can’t, I would like to go there again and remind myself of the power of selfless sacrifice in the hopes of being able to transmit some of the spirit that’s felt there to my classes. This unique opportunity is one that I don’t want miss, if only because I recognize that memories fade all too easily. I teach the World Wars every year, and every year students express their gratitude at having been able to learn about the immense struggles our country went through. Many have grandparents and great-grandparents who fought in the Second World War, and hearing about the immense scope that their forebears participated in gives them a sense of connection to history that is lacking when talking about the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. For me as an instructor, I have to fill my well, as it were, of feeling and knowledge so that there’s a reservoir from which I can draw when I'm teaching my classes. This Institute will give me the chance to do that very thing. Not only do I want to return to Europe and visit important places there, I love research. I love to learn. The idea of having a valid, compelling reason to dedicate to learning more about a veteran--possibly even being able to talk to him in person--is an exciting prospect. Using the Institute's connections and program to improve my research and explanation skills is one that I don't want to miss. At my school, we strive to "better ourselves and our community", and I think the sort of education provided by the institute would be a perfect example of doing both. Teaching is very often modeling behavior--whether it's how to apply mathematics in one's daily life, or how to annotate a book--and I hope that, by attending this program, I can be a model of life-long learning. Lastly, though I do not have direct ancestry in the European Theater (one of my grandfathers helped the cleanup of the Pacific, while the other served later as a translator during the Korean War), it is a part of my family's history. Five of my seven maternal great-uncles fought in the Second World War; my grandmother, living near Oakland, California, celebrated her ninth birthday the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked. While that is not the same as having a family member storming the beaches, I feel that small pieces can feed into broader appreciations. If, through my own personal experiences on the beaches of Juno, Sword, Gold, Utah, and--most powerfully and importantly--Omaha, I am able to help convey the quality of sacrifice and what it truly meant to so many people "back home", then I think that the effort would be worth it. I believe that my attendance would benefit me, my classroom, and the future of our country--albeit in the small ways a teacher can expect--as I look for any way of improving my teaching techniques and filling my reservoir of knowledge. Personal experience in places that have made global differences are the best way I know of to do all of that. I would be deeply grateful for the opportunity to participate in your program. Thank you. Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War. I have a hard time putting my thoughts together on something like this. Maybe some personal history will help me unpack the volatile and wide-ranging emotions that I'm feeling right now.
Growing up, history was not My Thing™. I didn't mind my history classes, but I pretty much blew them off. English was the only course in which I felt I did well, and the only time I transferred out of a class after it had begun was when I abandoned my Honors History in favor of "regular" history class. High school history is, for me anyway, a complete blur. I can't really recall much of anything that was taught there--sorry, Mrs. Kelsch. I put in minimal effort to get an A in my required history courses in college, again dedicating all of my mental energy to English and the math/science course that was most kicking my butt at that moment. On the whole, I remember only slightly more from my college experience than I do my high school one. Then I got a job teaching World History II and Language Arts 10 at the school where I still work. For state-mandated reasons, I had to go to night school over the course of a couple of years to pick up the equivalent of a minor in history. As part of this endorsement, I had to select two electives. The first one available was a course on the Second World War with a Professor Winkler. I'd taken an ancient history class from Professor Winkler before and I knew I enjoyed his style. I understood what he was after from his students, I liked his lectures (something that I never thought would be the case when I was a kid--liking to listen to lectures), so I figured that, if nothing else, I'd get something from my time with him. My whole world changed. Professor Winkler walked us through an extremely complicated time in the history of the world, keeping us moving through the different battles, with descriptions of the highlights and explanations that helped me to understand the scope and scale of the largest armed conflict in history. Part of what impacted me the most was the passion with which he taught. He was furious at the decisions and behaviors of anyone who did an atrocity--"If we do it, it's necessity; if they do it, it's an atrocity"--and saved his greatest spleen for the architects of such destruction and cruelty. I still remember my surprise when tears leaked from his eyes during his explanation of the Rape of Nanking. In much the way Hamlet muses, shocked and a little ashamed, about an actor's ability to weep for Hecuba ("What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/That he should weep for her?") at the end of Act 2 scene 2, I was left stunned. How could the long-silenced cries of those killed under the brutality of Imperial Japan still affect a person in the twenty-first century? While Professor Winkler didn't teach about the Holocaust--he said that it was a semester course on its own, something worth studying separately--I was genuinely impressed and moved by his teaching. The next semester, this time in a course on World War I, saw me, front row, laptop open and ready to take in what he had to stay. I was not prepared for the amount of suffering that was to be described to me. As Professor Winkler laid the groundwork for the War to End All Wars, I found myself having a hard time coming to grips with just how bad World War I was. After all, I had "seen" what WWII was all about--understanding, of course, that one could study that conflict for an entire lifetime and still learn something new--and thought that we'd hit the apogee of human misery and suffering. Studying the First World War showed me that suffering can be wrought upon soldiers as well as civilians, and humans qua humans went through the nightmares of the first half of the twentieth century, regardless of whether they were armed, trained, or uniformed. To say the misery of the soldiers in World War I was somehow "less than" because they "signed up for it" (ignoring the propaganda and social pressures that essentially eradicated that possibility, and definitely setting aside the enforced enlistment of an entire empire, forcing those who would not be involved otherwise into the conflict) is a diminishment of the sacrifice of the men and women who died during that conflagration. Professor Winkler wept whilst describing the pleas of starving German children whose stomachs had been pinched by the British blockade which effectively starved Germany into submission. He wept at the idea of what the men in Verdun survived. He wept at the cold brutality of a war fought on erroneous assumptions. He wept at the genocide with which the twentieth century began. And he fumed at the waste of soldiers' lives that the generals seemed intent on pursuing. Professor Winkler showed me just how tragic a war can be. "Why study war?" he asked in the opening lecture. Then he answered his own question. "So that you can learn to hate it. Doctors study diseases not so that they can use them, but so that they can defeat them." I've taken few other lessons as deeply to heart as that one. So when I think of what World War I means--what it meant to those millions of men during the bleak years between June 1914 and November 1918--I have almost too much to say…so much, in fact, that it renders me mute. When it come so the First World War, Americans' cavalier attitude toward the conflict is something that silently infuriates me. The war is old--a century is a long time--and though I've spent the last four years thinking to myself, Today is the centenary of some battle or other in the Great War, I know that very few do the same. I guess there could be some blame assigned to this, but it's a diffused enough blame as to be rather immaterial. I do know that, as I have the rare privilege of being a voice for the dead ("We are the dead"*) in that conflict, I take the responsibility to impress on my students' minds the gravity of World War I. In other words, I refuse to let the almost sixty-a-year quantity of fifteen- and sixteen year olds pass through my class without having a taste of the despair and horror that their ancestors survived. So now we get to today. It's both Veterans' Day and the 100th anniversary of Armistice. Have you taken a full moment to silently contemplate it? Consider the poppies of the field, the blood-red reminders of the blood-letting. What have we done with the future that they fought to give us? A second world war--same people, similar causes, even worse destruction--and the second half of the century under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Cold wars. Genocides. Terrorism. Torture. Rape, rubble, and bones. Grim visaged war has not smoothed his front**, and peace is a word that is scorned by those with the power to make it happen. The cannon of the war have fallen silent--you can hear that for yourself--but the lands bear scars that five hundred years will not efface. What do we make of it? Like the French Revolution, it's far too soon to see the effects of World War I has had on history. What do we know of it? What do we care about it? One of the reasons that I finally went ahead and wrote my War Golem book in a quasi-World War I world was, in part, to try to communicate how that conflict matters. It's a way of me showing how the war affected me. But what do others care? What, to an American, is Armistice Day? These are questions that continue to haunt me. When I consider the basic nothing I know about World War I--with a recognition that it's a lot more than the average American--I can't help but ache with a sadness that I only get when I consider the first half of the twentieth century. I'm grateful that Veterans' Day will help raise awareness of the importance of this day. But I don't expect this to increase our cultural sensitivity to just how significant the Great War was and is. And that's a tragedy of a different kind. --- * Taken from the famous World War I poem, "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae. ** See Richard III 1.1. Despite earlier posts insisting that I was finally through my roadblocks on writing, I have to admit that I'm only now on to something that feels like it has potential. This relates to my post in April where I mentioned that I'd come up with a new idea for a direct sequel to War Golems. After only a small amount of trepidation and concern over my idea (and much combing through The Anatomy of Story) did I decide to indeed drop the then-current work in progress and pursue War Golems II.
As I mentioned in the previous post, it's about the daughter of the main character in War Golems, who gets wrapped up in the next big conflict. I want to talk about generational issues as they pertained to the Great War and the world it formed. I'm curious to see how Cori (the main character) reacts to the idea of seeing the world burn with war again, to see how her stories to her daughter are misunderstood, to watch the next generation try to make sense out of additional conflict. My biggest concerns about the story, though, have to do with the source material. I had some wiggle room, I felt, in writing War Golems because I knew that comparatively fewer people know much about World War I, and the areas where I could fudge it were known to me. I have enough knowledge about individual experiences in World War I that I could use them as starting points for the experiences of the characters in WG. The sequel, though? I know a bit about World War II. I've read a couple of books--okay, maybe more than just "a couple"--and I've watched some documentaries. Hecks, I took six weeks to walk my students through World War II this school year. But my understanding of that conflict is…different. There's a gap, a distance, I think, that makes it harder for me to understand. And here's the weird part: Because we have clear definitions of good and evil in that conflict, I have a harder time working with it. In other words, with such clear villains as Hirohito or Hitler, with such horrendous consequences of these men's decisions, it should be a clear story. It's not. This isn't a World War II post, so I'm not going into the difficulties I have with the war. Instead, it's that ambiguity that I feel--maybe even ambivalence?--that makes writing a sequel to a quasi-World War I novel so difficult. For me, the take away from the Great War (among others) is that both sides went through a horrible experience, and though the Germans lost, they weren't necessarily "the bad guys". And that allows me to have more sympathy and compassion for their plight. World War II doesn't give me that, and, as a result, I'm left with this ambiguity, which in turn affects my conception of WGII. In order to help break away from my own conflicted feelings, I pushed the setting of WGII into an island nation, emulating more of the Pacific Theater. This, I think, was a good move, as it gives me a lot of new locations to bring out, and provide a texture difference between the two books. Mom served in the "European" Theater, daughter serves in the "Pacific". If nothing else, it will keep me from repeating the similar descriptions that I think I'd happen across if I did it any other way. I'm also finding myself a bit overwhelmed with just how much continuity I have to worry about. While I have the plus of having not worked on War Golems at all save the reading of it--and, with that, a freedom to tweak the first novel to better fit the ideas of the sequel--it also means that there are so many tweaks and changes that I have to worry about as I'm going through a revision process. My goal with this book is that it be about the same length as the predecessor--about 88,000 words. Maybe as many as 90,000. Once I have both of them written, I'll essentially have a 180,000 word novel, give or take, to work through. Yes, they're technically different books, but, because of the editing (read: complete and utter lack of editing) I've done on War Golems, I essentially will have two good-sized novels that need my attention. Add to that the fact I haven't finished my edit of Ash and Fire, and I'm looking at over 250,000 words that I will (potentially) have to edit if I want to get anywhere in my submission process (as I've given up on the older things I've written, at this point). And maybe that's part of why I've been having so many false starts with getting another novel written. I slammed out 50,000 words during last November's NaNoWriMo, yeah, but other than that, I haven't really written anything consistently since June 2017. That's the longest drought I've been through in…well, years, probably. By this point, it's clear to me that writing novels is something I am programmed to do. But once it comes to the idea of rewriting novels…well, that's not so easy. I personally think that part of the reason I haven't settled on anything is because I haven't actually "finished" War Golems or Ash and Fire. I think, because I haven't edited them and completed that last bit of the process (heh: "last bit"), I haven't been able to purge them from my system. With them still "there", as it were, I can't move on the way I want to. So how does this pertain to War Golems II? Well, I'm not sure. Maybe, if the two books are really one in my head--that is, I'm working on them in a way that makes them consistent and continuous--then I can trick myself into thinking that I'm really writing something from before. No need to be fussy. Or maybe I'm deluding myself and I'm headed to catastrophe. I guess we'll find out. This year, I've tried to improve my understanding of the World Wars by doing something that is difficult for me to do: Additional research.
It isn't because I don't find the wars interesting; I do. It isn't because there aren't abundant resources; there are. I personally struggle to read history as a matter of course, and the dark stuff makes it particularly difficult. That's enough reason for me to hold off on a lot of extra research whenever the wars come around. For whatever reason, though, I've had the mental and emotional bandwidth to increase my knowledge. For World War I, I listened to the Hardcore History podcast as well as a book on the Battle of Verdun. For World War II, I listened to a book about Dunkirk, watched that film, and, today, finished Okinawa by Robert Leckie. Leckie was himself a veteran of the Pacific Theater, so his understanding of the battle is infused with a personal flavor in some of the areas. I really liked those parts, as it made the story feel more tangible and alive. It described the horrible conditions of the Marines during the months-long battle, and I even gained some insight into the behaviors of the Japanese government at the time. There was quite a bit of really good history sprinkled throughout the book, including some information about the pre-industrialized Japan, the thought process for many of the commanders in charge of the battle, and a straightforward way of telling the story. Kind of like in The Price of Glory, I found myself pulled forward more easily because of the shorter chapters. Barely over two hundred pages long, the book moves along at a fairly brisk clip, which is necessary for me. I've slogged through a book on the Ardennes campaign that went far, far too long for my poor tender head to handle. Both this and the one on Verdun kept me tightly tied into the experience because of its clarity and brevity. That isn't to say that Leckie isn't a good writer: He most definitely is. While I wouldn't say that he would render a phrase with unforgettable alacrity, his wordsmithing definitely made the book a more enjoyable experience--inasmuch as a story about the slaughter of tens of thousands of humans can be enjoyable. The areas, actually, where I would probably point to as, for me at least, problematic would have to come in the form of veneration. I don't wish to dismiss any of the brave sacrifices of the fighters on both sides of that horrendous conflict, but I couldn't connect to the cavalcade of names that rushed by on the pages. Leckie, in a desire to immortalize and memorialize his brothers in arms, dedicates a fair portion of the brave exploits to men whose names all blur together in my mind. I remember Desmond Doss specifically because of how much I value and appreciate his heroism (though I disagree with Leckie using Doss' story as a way of shaming conscientious objectors to war), but the rest? They fade away as soon as the page turns. This sounds callous, I know. I realize that there's a reason why Leckie wrote the way he did, and I'm not saying that his specific contribution of remembering certain men, the medals they received, and their services in the battle are inappropriate. I'm saying, instead, that for me, I couldn't keep enough of them straight long enough for their service to matter to me. And, though Leckie tried to keep his editorializing to a minimum, there was a definite disdain toward the Japanese and what they did there. And I get that. I definitely do. I don't know how I would be able to write dispassionately about, say, the 9/11 attackers. There's an emotional component that puts the personal experience in a particular light, and Leckie exemplifies that. In some ways, it shows the downside to the personal experience lens that men who lived through extraordinary events bring to the table. There's an accuracy and passion that armchair historians can't quite catch, but it isn't costless either. There are a couple of other nits to pick on this one: I ached for a map. It was so difficult for me to see how the topography matched the narrative, how anything related to the other, and I could have used additional photographs to round out the experience, too. This, for me, is one of the great values of books, because I can rely on their accuracy much more than a Google Images search. If I type in a specific battle, I can't 100% rely on the search engine to bring legitimate images from the battle. There are so many possibilities that often a weapon, a vehicle, or a grainy black-and-white picture stands in for the search query. I'm still enough of a neophyte to this that I can get easily suckered in. I need the guidance that authoritative photographs and maps bring to the able. One thing I really liked, though, was his forthright approach to the necessity of the atomic bomb, which he mulls over during the epilogue. I fully agree with Leckie's assessment that Okinawa was not an "unnecessary battle" because of what happened with Hiroshima and Nagasaki a couple of months deeper into 1945. I see it as the other way around. That he continues to point out the nuances of the choices on dropping the bomb, quoting those who were a part of it, and even looked at the broader, political implications with America and the USSR all made me feel as though my own ideas and assumptions were validated. And that's what I think I liked the most about this book. There were some problems (as I noted above) but I walked away feeling like I had been enhanced. I read some excerpts to my students so that they would get a bigger understanding of this important moment in American and military history. If you're in the mood to learn more about Okinawa, you could do worse than picking up this one. Because today is my birthday, I'm working on my daily essay early. This frees me up to enjoy my celebration tonight.
Because today is the day that I teach the Holocaust, I'm not really able to focus on writing my book during the time in which I normally write. Because today is a writing day during my Novel Writing class, I'm not skipping out on other work that I could be doing. Because I would rather keep the pieces of my life separate, I'm trying to make jokes and laugh and be happy with my students in the two classes I teach that aren't my history classes. Because I had to teach about the horrors of the past today, I chose to be more patient with my son, who had shoved an SD card backwards into his new camcorder, essentially breaking it. Because the waiting for the Holocaust lecture is worse than going through it--almost--I'm doing everything I can to recoil from that responsibility. Usually, when I have a large and complicated day in front of me, I find that I run through the motions the day before. I think this bothers my wife, as it means that I'm not as keen on setting things down and crossing things off of a list. If I'm headed to the cabin for three days, I'm going to pack everything up the night before, trying to figure the absolute bare minimum of what I need in order to make the trip successful. She's interested in getting it planned, organized, purchased, and packed in a timely manner. I guess that's why we get along so well? Or maybe she's just far too patient with a perpetually flawed person. Whatever the case may be in that instance, I have been trying hard to overcome this tendency to wait until the last minute to improve things. Notice I didn't say "do" things: I have my entire school year planned out--to the day, as a matter of fact--so that I'm rarely at a loss for what to do. Sure, curveballs come my way every once in a while, but it's nothing too big. So I have plans and things like that. It's just that when it's on me to get prepared early, I often forget about what I've done. A good example is an assignment that I've given out to my Shakespeare students: I asked them to bring food tomorrow because reasons. It was as I typed this paragraph that I remembered that I ought to remind them of their assignment. I haven't tried to secure extra utensils or serving equipment, ensure that everything goes according to plan…nothing. I set it so far in the future that my mind has already checked it off the list. What that means is that I don't start enhancing my knowledge about my school topics until I'm actually in the unit. So, for World War I, I wanted to read a book or two about the war before I jumped in with the students. Despite my attempt to do things early, I only finished Blueprint for Armageddon in the middle of the unit, and I didn't finish Price of Glory until after we were done discussing the Great War. And I'm only a third of the way through Okinawa. My point is that I still have this nasty habit of having to be "in the mood" to do something that I need to work on. This happens less often with writing these essays, as I've continually forced myself to write even when it was a blatant waste of time. But my novels? Yeah, I have, like, three of them languishing in the torpor of my apathy right now. And my personal improvement--what I need to know for my job--is the same. I don't want to read about imperialism until I'm studying imperialism. As a result, I don't have a greater well of knowledge to draw from. Sometimes that's laziness; other times, it's a coping mechanism. The Holocaust would have to be one of those. I don't study it carefully outside of this time of year. It's too painful, too familiar, too strange, too sad. The result is that I try to think and feel the Holocaust only on this one day, on this one week. I compartmentalize my emotion because I don't want to have to deal with it more than this one time. And, now that I'm halfway through the day, I am trying to do that again, to push away the responsibility I've given myself. My eyes are still hurting from the tears I've shed, and the ghosts of sadness haunt the fields about my heart…and so I try to shut it down, tuck it far from me. I make jokes. I work on my computer. I smile at my friends. I thank those students who wish me happy birthday. This leads me to wonder if I'm doing it right. How do we keep going on when faced with enormity? How do we grieve for something that is far beyond our control or even our time? Art Spiegelman says, in volume II of his graphic novel on the Holocaust Maus, "I don't know. Maybe everyone should feel guilty…forever!" I don't think he means it--or maybe he does--but I don't know if that is the right response. How do we remember? Sometimes I hear the argument, "We should live life to the fullest. It's what they would have wanted." I'm not so sure. If I had to guess, they would have wanted to have lived their own lives to the fullest. Yet depriving myself of whatever joy or happiness I can even feel, how does that help? Maybe it shows a solidarity to the sadness of the past, but as a symbol it has no one to accept its meaning. I have listened to a survivor of the Holocaust, sat at his feet as he wept thinking of his mother in a pile of corpses. If I harbor the sadness that's inside of me whenever I think of the Holocaust, do I help ease his suffering? I wrestle with this because of how I view the Holocaust as the touchstone for empathy in the face of the atrocities that we've seen unfold in the world. The sacrificial fires of Poland and Germany and Austria and Hungary are the most visible of the brutality of mankind, but they're hardly the only ones. Yet I don't weep when I talk about the Opium Wars. I shed no tears when talking about the Russian Revolution. And though I get some emotion into the Armenian genocide and even the way the soldiers of WWI died, I never aim for the same emotional resonance with, say, the starving peasants of France in 1788. But the pain and sadness of slaughter and callous treatment of human beings…it's all there. Every time. All of the time. In that sense, I guess, I use the Holocaust (and that's a horrible way to phrase it) as that moment that shows the suffering is widespread throughout history. It's almost as though I'm saying, "If you can understand why this hurts us so deeply, maybe you can look over at the scope of history and see why violence is so harmful, why war is so hateful, why hatred is so terrible. Maybe you can use this small piece of the much larger picture." It is, as it were, an entrance point into empathy. But does that diminish it? Does that make Holocaust "just one more horrid thing" that happened? The last thing I want to do is cheapen anyone's suffering. I take seriously the idea that I am required to "mourn with those who mourn" (Mosiah 18:9). So I'm leery of distracting from the unique horrors that must be understood, faced, comprehended, and remembered by saying, "Oh, and gulags were bad, too." Yet gulags were bad. The numbers of dead that come from those prison camps far exceeds what the Nazis were doing. Getting all of these pieces to fit together in a coherent way is taxing. It drains me to balance so much misery and try to make sense of it. I think that's why I just try to keep it compartmentalized*. --- * As I look at it, I can't help but see the word "mental" inside of compartmentalized. That not only conjures worries that I have of ableism, but the fact that some of this stuff really is enough to drive one crazy. It's a complicated word for a complicated subject…and that's about all I can handle at this point. In order to better myself and my craft (both of storytelling and teaching), I'm trying to read more about the Second World War and watch more movies. In the case of the miracle at Dunkirk, the Venn diagram is almost a circle.
The Book I finished listening to The Miracle at Dunkirk today, which walks through the nine-day ordeal in May and June of 1940. As with most war history books, Walter Lord jumps from person to person, giving name and rank before incorporating the detail of their contribution. I think this is why I prefer Erik Larsen's books, as most of the people he brings into the narrative are consistently important and incorporated. There isn't time beyond general human sympathy to care about the fates of many of the people, and those that do stand out only do so when Lord takes time to remind the reader of who the person is. (And example I'm thinking of: There's one soldier who was wounded enough that he couldn't walk. He was hauled around in a wheelbarrow--as, if I remember correctly, an eighteen year old, he was the only one who fit. Later, after the Germans arrive, he is still stuck in Dunkirk and becomes a POW.) There are bigger "characters", of course, but the overall story felt lacking in tension. This isn't because I already knew the story of the miracle at Dunkirk in the broad strokes, but because we don't see the German side of things hardly at all. (By the end of The Price of Glory, Horne somewhat fell victim to this problem, too; nevertheless, he managed to provide a more--not balanced, because that gives the wrong impression--nuanced approach to the events at Verdun by allowing the German experience to have ample page time.) There are, of course, moments that discuss the German point of view, including the way in which Göring insisted that the Luftwaffe could handle the escaping British, and some of the early fighting as the BEF retreated to the coast. Once the evacuation was underway, Lord's inclusion of German interactions were reactionary. "Stukas attacked" ended up being an almost out-of-nowhere explanation for rotten things to happen to some of the escaping soldiers. While that makes sense in the form of a fictional narrative, it feels frustrating as a history book. What was going on with the other side? I would have liked to see the German choices, how they mattered, and what they did in response throughout the book, rather than just in a few paragraphs at the end. This isn't to say that I didn't like the book. The events of Dunkirk are so fascinating and, in many ways, unbelievable that it's hard not to be interested in what's going on. And though I can't fault Walter Lord's scholarship, I ultimately felt slightly disappointed by the book. The Film My biggest problem with the book--not seeing enough of the Germans--had the opposite effect on me as I watched the recent Christopher Nolan film, Dunkirk. Plenty of people have commented on the effect that his choice has on the audience, so I don't have to really retread anything, necessarily. Suffice to say that, by keeping the focus so narrowly confined to the protagonist, never giving us a glimpse of the human face of the enemy, the terror of being in war is more convincingly wrought. I am not in favor of dehumanization, but I know that's what a soldier has to do when in war. This is why there are moments, like the one when Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front struggles so much when he stabs the Frenchman to death. The breaking down of the soldier as he recognizes that the guy on the other side was just a kid like him…that's a powerful moment in many war stories. And Nolan is keen to avoid doing these tropes. Now, I tend to avoid war movies--and almost always avoid war video games--for reasons that are in depth enough to warrant their own essay--so I was reluctant to pick up Dunkirk. I had heard a lot from friends and students about the quality of the film (as a Nolan film, that was never in doubt), but I remained skeptical. Honestly, I didn't see how a single story could be pulled out of the whole debacle without losing sense of its scope--the inverse being the other pitfall, of making the thing so broad that the story loses its relatability. I shouldn't have worried. Though there are flaws in all of Nolan's films (though they're often minor compared to other directors/screenwriters), one thing that he never fails to deliver on is solid storytelling. When I saw "1. The Mole: One Week" followed by "2. The Sea: One Day" and "3. The Air: One Hour", I immediately clued into what he was doing. By starting the stories where each thread began to be important, he gave the audience a way of anchoring the folding-in-on-itself narrative, as well as a purpose for the choices: It allows emotional endings of the three story-arcs to land simultaneously, heightening the catharsis of seeing the resolution unfold. Going back to Nolan's desire to avoid the familiar in a war film, I think he did a superb job. The drama skips over the generals tucked in the cliffs of Dover as they frantically organize Operation Dynamo; we don't see soldiers have a conversation about what it means to be in a war (a scene that I always like, from Henry V onward through time); we don't see endless streams of blood or hear countless profanities as body parts spray through the air. In other words, Nolan hits a solid PG-13 style movie that still manages to bring something new to say in the film genre. More than anything, there's a passion and care and desire to tell the story of Dunkirk--albeit fictionalized versions of real-life people--that really comes through. It's not a documentary, but it has a visceral accuracy to the entire thing that I really appreciated. I noticed a couple of gaps between history and Hollywood--where were the dogs? Where were the French?--but it wasn't egregious and it always was in favor of omissions: What didn't contribute to the film needed to be cut, and Nolan did that very thing. Despite the fact that I genuinely enjoyed the film, I despised the score. I am of the opinion that a good score is one that is iconic in its melodies, or invisible. I think of The Lord of the Rings. Certain motifs are integral to the way the story works--think of the theme of the One Ring--but there is plenty of music that does what non-diegetic scores are supposed to do: Support, not distract. Zimmerman's score did not do that. At all. The point was to ratchet up the tension, which it certainly did, but the ticking of the watch, the quasi-siren wail, the endless shimmer of violins…it was too much, too noticeable. I hated it. It actively distracted me from the story, and there were times when I had a hard time focusing on the movie because the score was so horrible. (The fact that a lot of critics praised the soundtrack goes to show that you can't please everyone.) The End Going through the history and the movie in a relatively short space of time gave me a solid understanding of what transpired during the late spring of 1940. I appreciated Christopher Nolan's commitment to practical effects and shots, particularly because he filmed at Dunkirk itself, including on the mole (a pontoon bridge jutting into the English Channel) that was used to save hundreds of thousand lives. It helped to meld the places I most likely will never get to and the history that I've studied for years in a way that felt authentic and powerful. I think there are probably better books out there on the evacuation than The Miracle of Dunkirk, but I don't think there's a better film, done with more genuine love and appreciation, than Dunkirk. For what it's worth. Explaining and recommending war history is a tricky thing. On one hand, there is the possibility of giving the impression that I'm a war-nut and I "love" the subject material. On the other is the idea that the quality of the book is a reflection on the quality of the history. Neither one of these possibilities really applies here--I don't love studying the war, but I'm good at it and need to remain commemorative of the deeds done so long ago; I also think that The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 is a good book and covers the history very well--though I'm always aware that, by recommending a book, I'm discussing the content as much as the delivery of it.
With that clumsy introduction in mind, I recommend Alistair Horne's seminal work on the Battle of Verdun without reservation, though I do have some quibbles. When thinking of whether a history book is "good" or not, part of the calculation--from my point of view, at least--comprises the ability of the author to move through the information in a logical way, ensuring that all of the moments in the battle (in the case of this book) are contingent on what came before. Leapfrogging can be done if done well, but for the most part, the book needs to move forward chronologically. The real difficulty in writing about either World War is that there is so much happening simultaneously that it's easy to lose track of what's going on. After all, at the same time that Falkenhayn was readying his attack, Joffre was denuding Verdun of its heavy artillery--yet the author has to convey those simultaneous events in a linear way. Additionally, it takes skill to make the reader--particularly this reader--feel empathy for the horrid conditions and mind-numbingly horrific experiences of the soldiers in the battle…the soldiers of both sides. This is something that becomes easier as the century-mark for World War I pulls onward: We're more willing to forgive the Kaiser and think of World War I as a giant, needless mistake in which the entire world suffered. And while that isn't wrong, there's still a piece inside of me that really wants to see the French pull off the victory, to see the Germans definitively lose the Battle of Verdun (which they technically do, though fighting, as Horne puts it on page 319, "over the corpse-ridden battlefield", goes on all the way up to 11 Nov 1918). The historian (of whatever caliber) within me knows that the bloodshed of June won't suffice, that the battle continues until day 299 from the beginning of the German attack. Yet I hoped, as I read of the unbelievable ways in which men died throughout the conflict, that it would just stop. Horne, being British (perhaps? I can't say for certain), focuses more on the French side of the story, though part of this is because of the German tendency to be more tight-lipped about the First War. Nevertheless, he saves any scorn or editorialization for the generals who made the decisions, heaping plenty of disdain on Haige and Joffre and Falkenhayn when their turns in the narrative arrived. And though he doesn't touch as heavily on the German experience, it's easy to realize that whatever was happening to the French was happening to the Germans, too. I knew quite a bit about the Battle of Verdun before starting this book, and by "quite a bit" I mean that I have taught about it for years and read about it within the broader view of the entire war. Yet I didn't have a full sense of the battle, in part because I don't think anyone who wasn't there could. There were additional pieces that helped make greater sense of other decisions--the timing of the Battle of the Somme and the catastrophic mutinies of 1917--that had seemed disjointed to me, and I love how Horne weaves quotes from the memoirs of the men who orchestrated and executed the battle gives a stronger sense of the bloody logic of the whole thing. In other words, Horne's book succeeds marvelously in sympathetically and gruesomely laying out the different realities that were seen in Verdun during that bloody year. I do have a couple of quibbles, however. One is that Horne assumes his readers are fluent in French, too. Longer passages are translated, but quips and comments from the occasional journal or letter home are left to my poor ability to track cognates. More than once I found myself mystified about the point he was trying to make, as only understanding French (and, once or twice, German) would have made the sentiment clear. Additionally, I am not as much of a fan of the generals and "big men of history" approach. Horne dwells on the careers, qualities, and even appearances of these men, giving them plenty of page time. Yet, I understand why he does this. It's a hard line to toe, as what is done in the trenches of a single person can't fill a book--not, at least, if you're trying to understand the whole movement of a battle. So it makes sense to incorporate a lot of the backstory in the egos and personalities of the men insisting the battle continue. And, frustratingly, I can now see that hundreds of thousands of lives were lost because of things like ego. A quick example: French General Nivelle manages to create a tactic that liberates Fort Douaumont, leading to the "victory" of the battle. So impressed was he with his own thinking that he tried to do the same thing a few months later in the Chemin-des-Dames. This catastrophic mistake led to 120,000 French casualties and the breaking of the French Army. As Horne writes, "Still Nivelle, as his ambitions collapsed in fragments around him, tried to persist with the hopeless offensive" (322). The last bit that's hard for me--and this is less of a critique against Horne than an explanation of my own inadequacies--is the description of tactics. I can never keep straight how big a battalion is, though I know a division is huge. I actually wrote down the approximate numbers of each unit in the Army in order to try to keep it straight, which marginally (and marginalia-ly) helped. But in terms of picturing how many men, how they were arrayed, or how they moved…it's all kind of fuzzy. As I said before, this is not Horne's problem, it's me. I struggle to understand the scope and scale, the way that the movements could have worked, and all of the other nitty-gritty. That's why maps can be so useful--and, fortunately for me, The Price of Glory has a handful of maps that really aided my reading--though those have their own problems, too. Despite my grousing, I thought that this book was really well crafted. Indeed, on the craft-level of writing, Horne does something that I think more historical writers ought to do: He breaks up his slender volume (clocking in at just over 360 pages) into twenty-eight chapters. He ends some of his chapters with emotional gut-punches (see, for instance, the end of chapter fifteen (189), where he writes, "[E]ven the blustering von Brandis…[writes] nowhere…not even on the Somme, was there anything to be found worse than the 'death ravines of Verdun'") while others conclude with cliffhangers worthy of a Crichton novel. By keeping the chapters quick and interspersing the horrors of the war with explanations of what was going on behind the scenes, there was enough variety that I wanted to keep reading, and not simply because of the charnel-house quality of the experience there. There were hundreds of new details in the book that I didn't know about, which makes me even sadder that I didn't have a chance to go to Verdun in person back in January 2017. Indeed, that is one of my greatest regrets about that Winterim. Now that I've finished The Price of Glory, visiting Verdun has become one of my life goals. I can't really express why going there means so much to me, save that there's an atmosphere of sanctity where so much sacrifice happened that I feel an urge to connect with. Perhaps that's part of why the Wars have such a pull on me. Maybe it's that I feel that great wickedness ought to be remembered, and I view so much of the twentieth century as wicked. Whatever the case may be, I wish I had something other than a handful of Google Images and a hand-drawn map to give me the visualization I ought to have when reading a book like this. Alas, for now, I have no path forward to Verdun…much like the Germans, I suppose. I do, however, highly recommend The Price of Glory if you wish to understand more about this most crucial--perhaps the most crucial--battle of the twentieth century. If you ever look about you and wonder, "How did the world get to this point?", start at the Battle of Verdun: It is the crucible in which the modern Western world was forged. |
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