Memories, Memorials, and Poppies

For years now I have been buying a poppy on or around Memorial Day attaching it to the bike and removing one year later. For me, it is a symbol of the First World War in all its murderous fatuousness, silly stupid slaughter, and pointlessness and, consequently, a nearly perfect example of the misrule of the 1%, whether old school aristos or new  model plutocrats.

In that spirit some musical to contemplate the unnecessary misery imposed on most of us by a thoughtless, heedless, and  feckless minority:








Enjoy your weekend before the forces of reaction take it away.

Book Review

I got Peter Englund's The Beauty and The Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War for Christmas; he claims that the book is not "about what" WWI "was . . . its causes, course, conclusion and consequences" but rather "what it was like" (xi).  His "focus remains primarily on the everyday aspects of the war" because the text is "a work of anti-history" with an emphasis on "the individual, and his or her experiences" (xiii). I don't think his book supports this claim, for reasons I explain below, and I am not sure why someone who has invested as much time and effort would avoid providing explicit argument, interpretation, and analysis.

The text is based on his reading diaries and letters of some 20 participants from different fronts, armies, and occupations: former opera singer and American married into the transnational eastern European aristocracy, left-wing French man of letters, reluctant Danish/German soldier, courageous British upper-class Red Cross volunteer, and so on. Englund doesn't offer any principle for selection of characters. Some of them are hyper articulate, Belgian flyer Willy Coppens for example, while Elfriede Kuhl is far too young to understand and analyze her war.  Paolo Monelli comes across as an Italian alpine Rambo. It seems to me that Englund's actors and the various excerpts he selects, forwards three distinct arguments: the war was badly managed at the top, popular enthusiasm waned rapidly under the pressure of events, and no one really understood the war.

The book is divided into year long sections in which Englund selects excerpts or offers extended paraphrases of diaries and letters for different days of each month. There is a sort of summing up for the characters in the end and, finally, a cleverly selected coda that orients the reader toward the future. This selection, it is Hitler's alleged response to the Armistice, cements, for me in any event, the extent to which Englund is making an argument about the war's consequence as well as course, nature, and causes.

Altagsgeschicte, the history of everyday life, focuses on the everyday and makes no claim to be an "anti-history"; rather it is a history in another key. Englund's claim here, it seems to me, is defensive: an attempt to obscure the extent to which his selection of voices and the diary or letter excerpts is completely conventional. For example, while he doesn't provide citations for the letters and diaries, he does provide explanatory footnotes. By attending to these, the reader finds Englund's argument about the war, that its start was written in the passive voice, that the hopes for a moral cleansing were misplaced, that the was a case of donkeys leading lions, etc, that accepts the consensus view of 10 or 20 years ago.

I would recommend this book primarily because its well-written. It is not for novices in the world of WWI studies. For advanced students the bibliography is probably its nicest feature.

Armistice Day

Dulce et decorum est by Wilfred Owen Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime. - Dim through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, - My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Peace Through Arbitration

As I mentioned, I've been reading Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War. It's filled with all manner of brilliant arguments. For example, not only is war great fun and evidence of non-decadentness but it's morally right because of the laws of nature. Indeed, the only way to tell if one nation has the right to take over the territory and, as by the way, markets and natural resources, he really does say that, is to fight to the death. The winner has the right to take all the loser's  stuff. Call it the Donald Trump theory of international a relations.

As one of the institutions/attempts to stop so necessary and great an event as a war between the great powers from breaking out, Bernhardi, like TR and for the same reasons, finds President Taft's attempt to set up some kind of an international arbitration council to resolve any and all conflicts between nations beneath contempt and slander on the greatness of humanity as mass murderer. As it turns out, August 4th was the hundredth year of the anniversary of the signing of these treaties between Britain, France, and the US. What always surprises me when this sort of thing comes up, is how easy it is to forget not only Norman Angell and  Ivan Bloch but also the whole peace movement and its successes and failures.

But the thing that is most forgotten is the extent to which, in the USA and elsewhere, the peace movement was populated by businessmen and supported by the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotarians. The business men were the pantywaists Bernhardi warned against. Odd, that.