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. Comments are closed.
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