Over the Top, Boys!!!

In the summer after Law School my friend Mike and I spent a month wandering around Europe. One of the stops we made, at Mike’s urging, was Verdun. I probably would not have considered stopping there if he hadn’t suggested it. Battlefields are interesting to a certain extent, but I had never been to Europe before and there was so much to see. However, that stop started an obsession that continues to this day. 

Verdun just knocked me out. There was the sea of French graves, all of unknown soldiers. There were markers showing where villages had been before the war, but were no more. There was the town itself, which had been destroyed in 1870, 1914 and 1940. More than anything else, however, there was the pervasive sense of insanity. In the four years this area was contested, the front moved a less than ½ a football field at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Oy vey!!  

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World War I has largely faded from memory in the United States. It just doesn’t have the pizzaz of World War II. Our involvement was much shorter. We weren’t directly attacked. The venality of the enemy was not as obvious. It wasn’t fought by the “Greatest Generation” (whatever that means). Plus, and maybe most importantly, WWII played much better in the movies.   

Hollywood churned out a seemingly endless string of compelling, taut dramas covering all aspects of WWII, both during the war and after, that deftly combined a sympathetic view of the men (and occasionally of the women) fighting, tales of personal heroism, and a sense of the global conflict. Hollywood also had a ready-made bad guy in the Nazis, that it could fully exploit. In some way, albeit through tinted glasses, the home front lived this war with the soldiers.  

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The movie business was in its infancy during WWI, and not in a position to dramatize the war. It was left to writers to try and bring to life the reality of WWI to the American people. That wasn’t possible during the war because of censorship. Plus, Americans did not really experience the reality of the trenches the way the Europeans did.  

For Europeans WWI was much more immediate. From the euphoria of August 1914, through the grind of four years of unrelenting warfare, to an unstable peace. The endless clamor of the artillery. The self-defeating lunacy of gas attacks. The desolation of no-mans-land. For much of the war, on the Western front at least, the two sides were sitting a soccer pitch away from each other. Battles were an exercise in mass slaughter (British forces suffered more than 57,000 casualties—including more than 19,000 soldiers killed—on the first day of the five-month Somme offensive alone). Between battles was the looming possibility of sudden death through snipers, shelling, or small raids, all while living like moles.        

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But WWI also embraces an incredible heroism. I cannot envision what it took to clamor over a rampart and run full tilt across a muddy field through a hail of machine gun fire as your mates fell all around you. Or to volunteer as a nurse in a field hospital close to the line, facing a never-ending stream of wounded and dying, all looking for help. Incredibly, the memoirs make clear that even those who left with injuries were inexorably drawn back to the front, as if by a psychological magnet.  

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The war was integrated into the European home front as well. After all, the war was right on the doorstep, even for the Brits. The Somme battlefield was only 150 miles from London, approximately the same distance as between Abington, where I live, and Washington, D.C. Those on the coast of England could hear the guns. More importantly, soldiers could come home on a regular basis, either for leave or because they had been injured, constantly reminding those left behind of the nightmare in France, even if they couldn’t really understand it.   

After the war, writers like Erich Maria Remarque, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Henri Barbusse and Ford Madox Ford (what a great name!!) took readers into the trenches, depicting the war from the perspective of the individual soldier. Grand strategies were less important than the experience on the front line. More than that, the WWI writers expressed the absurdity of war in a way that had never been done before, forever changing our view of war generally. You can’t read Robert Graves “Goodbye to All That” (which I recently did prompting this post), or Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, without wondering what the point of all this was. 

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When the movies caught up, they were generally as cynical as the literature. The film version of “All Quiet at the Western Front”, “Paths of Glory” and “Grand Illusion” painted a grim picture of the conflict, and through that of war in general. (There were exceptions, like Wings and Sargeant York, both quintessentially American movies). War was not something to be celebrated, but a vehicle to look at the absurdity of man.     

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Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to WWI. It strikes me as the turning point in our view of the rationality of humans. Before the conflict people could believe that we Sapiens were inexorably moving forward to a better world. Progress was inevitable. War was a positive, necessary test of the metal of a nation. Afterwards, that just wasn’t possible. The modern became the postmodern. Truth was up for grabs. 

I admit that’s overly dramatic. The world does not turn on a dime that neatly. Plus, of course, it’s a very Western-centric view of history, which I find hard to escape. Yet I can’t envision anything like Picasso’s “Guernica”, Ginsberg’s “Howl”, Godard’s “Alphaville” or Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5” without WWI, and the literature that followed. 

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I continue to find in WWI an endless treasure trove of mass psychology, delusional judgment, individual bravery, disconnected leadership, and so much more. It remains, for me, a touchstone for the era we live in. A fascinating fulcrum when things could have gone differently, were it not for notions like national honor and the glorification of power. A trove of lessons that I am afraid we still have not learned.