Four Books on War

Got poor, old etc. Been workin'** A Review of 'Possible Worlds' by J.B....

Four Books on War

“ .. Belgium’s leading living poet whose life before 1914had been a flaming dedication to socialist and humanitarian ideals that werethen believed to erase national lines. He prefaced his account with thisdedication: “He who writes this book in which hate is not hidden was formerly apacifist … For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. Itstruck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man.And yet, as it seems to him that in this state of hatred his conscience becomesdiminished, he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.”– Tuchman quoting Emile Verhaeren in ‘The Guns of August’.

…..

It’s pretty quiet in the shop on a night shift. This leadme to fulfil a long-time promise to myself to finally read Barbara Tuchmans‘The Guns of August’, her celebrated history of the opening weeks of World WarOne.

At the time I also had two books of WW1 poetry on theshelf, both from less currently-popular poets, which I had picked up because Iwanted to find out what the actual man-on-the-street/jingo poetry of the warwas like.

At about the same time a friend online mentioned theManga ‘Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths’, which I grabbed a copy of.

· Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by ShigeruMizuki.

· The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.

· The Poetry of Jesse Pope.

· Rough Rhymes of a Padre by ‘Woodbine Willie’.

So, with one very long book and three quite short ones,having finished ‘Guns of August’ why not add the rest and make an event out ofit? (Because its stressful and depressing as hell but, being in idiot, I hadnot fully processed that.)

The Guns of August

(Tuchman is actually a character in her own book too. She is the little girl interviewed by the American Ambassador about the British hunt for a German Battleship in the Med.)

Reading this book was like having a low-level panicattack, at times I had to get up and walk about to de-stress. At times itdidn’t really matter who’s side I was on (the book is on the side of the Allies).I wouldn’t have thought a beat by beat breakdown of the days and hours beforethe second battle of Tannenberg, between Imperial Germans and Tsarists, wouldhave me biting my nails and shouting at the screen (in my mind) but it did.

Why?

The intensity, vividness, complexity and madness of thefog of war can, even when dealing with armies and factions I don't care muchabout, cause a kind of disaster-driven engagement.

The book is a kind of anti-procedural. Instead of a castof characters who are very good at things facing a big problem, working outwhat to do and coming together at the last minute against the odds, we have amassive spread of characters, all struggling against each other in big teams,arguing, perceiving and acting in different ways and coming togethercatastrophically, against the odds.

It is the tension of confusion, the agony of crippled ormisguided plans. Everyone has their own little section of reality and isstruggling to do what they think they should and absolutely everyone isdeluded, mistaken, or wrong.

We, as the minds-eye of Tuchman, fly and flow across thebattlefields, seeing more than any single person at that time ever could,simultaneously aware, as no-one living through those events ever could be, ofthe mutual, asynchronous and chaotic reality stuttering forth across thewestern front, an orchestra of staccato mistuned instruments, playing in blindopposition. Like two teams of Jazz musicians separated by a curtain, each grouptold to improvise and at the same time, to precisely counter the improvisationof the other side. Except no-one on either team actually likes each other.

It is one thing to be locked in a story with your heroespoint of view and to see thing going wrong. It is quite another to be slightlyabove that point of view, to see more of the situation than your protagonist,and to see why things are going wrong, in ways they can't. This is wherethe agony comes in, and yet another thing to zip across the scene, into thepoint of view of the antagonist, who is in fact the hero of their own story,and who’s enemy is the original hero, and to also see their schemesgoing wrong, and to see why they are going wrong.

double-agony

At the same time we are living in the future of theseevents and know that no-ones plans will go as expected and no-one (except maybethe Americans) will come out of this well - for all this striving we arewatching a continent take itself apart.

so really a poly-agony

a poly-agonist history

Irony, Readability and Satire

Oh, the Kaiser and his whacky schemes, his military-stylesleeping gown. The dithering-to-the-point-of-wooly-mania British Cabinet, thetop-down but extremely secret and authoritarian French plans,

or French Plan, which can only be executed byhaving one guy in charge, and that guy not really telling the government what’sgoing on - was nearly the Dictator of France during the opening parts of thewar, the SECRET DEALS, the French and their obsession with red pantaloons, Russiahaving the exact opposite of a Philosopher King - a guy genuinely dense but notquite dumb or weak willed enough to do a Coup against or just shuffleoff to a Palace somewhere, all of this is part of what makes the book so readableand such a good and complex synthesis of history.

But there is a danger to irony, in its distance, its easysynthesis and perhaps most in its argument-without-arguing. Tuchmans is anarrative history and, looking for the most interesting criticisms of the bookI found that it was easy to avoid many of the more broad and obvious statementsby claiming “well, Tuchman doesn’t really say that”.

But what does she say?

She makes few absolute and explicit value judgements, butthe whole thing is an intense and vivid value judgement, only communicatedthrough choice of detail, focus, method and rhythm of communication. Astoryteller is not making a specific argument, one can hardly counterpoint-by-point, but they are convincing you of a something more ably thansomeone making a more explicit, leaden, and less persuasive statement.

Hair-Thin Cracks In History

the Russians being so badly organised that they startsending their orders for the next day out in Clear radio signal instead of code- this having a massive effect on the next days pivotal battle.

Von Moltkes apprehension that the German line is tooextended and loose, communicated just a day too late.

The sheer and staggering number of times that personalityconflicts between generals leads to serious problems in the war effort - theyare as neurotic and sensitive as cats.

It feels like there were not just one but a whole rangeof time-travellers zipping about making sure a series of cataclysmicco-incidences did and did not take place.

Is this just the natural pixel-resolution of all history,made much more visible through this well-recorded super-crisis? Or were thingsgenuinely more utterly bollocked than ever before? It truly is a kind ofscience fictional 19th century war; radio’s, codes, rail plans, the Germansbring an actual super-gun. World War One seems to take place at a fringe ofcomplexity where nations and governments have just enough technological andorganisational power to organise truly insanely massive groups, plans and actionsbut just not enough experience, or rapid or subtle enough technology, decisionplans, structures, feedback systems or ideas to deal with the results of thatcomplexity.

Its curious how everyone seems to ‘play to type’. TheGermans are angry and somewhat autistic, the French have a cartesian top-downview of everything, the British are dithery and pull something out of theirarseholes at the last minute, the Russians are brutal, slow and fall apart. Isthis just a feature of Tuchmans re-telling? I recently finished Julian Jacksonsbiography of De Gaule and he had a somewhat tragic view of European history inwhich no-one ever really changes and nations are fated to play out theconflicts of their essential character again and again over time.

Criticisms Of Tuchman

What are the most coherent, specific and least-whineycriticisms of Tuchman?

The clearest is that for a book about the start of WorldWar One, there is relatively little about whatever was going on between Serbia,Austria, Germany and Russia around and after the assassination. Neither isthere a huge amount about the eastern front.

She goes on a lot about how awful the Germans were inBalgium, but they were.

Sir John French comes out as a borderline treasonousjumbled coward. His general reputation in history doesn’t seem anywhere nearlyas bad as in this book, has anyone written about that?

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

A manga by a sweet old man; Shigeru Mizuki

This cute little guy! About the experiences of his youth!In east Asia. In the 1940s..

As part of the Imperial Japanese army....

Familiar Things

I have read a few soldier-autobiographies including,oddly enough, 'Quartered Safe Out Here' by George McDonald Frasier, which isabout some Cumbrian soldiers in the British army, fighting the JapaneseImperial Army, not in the same place, but in a similar environment.

A few things flow between them; hunger, boredom,incoherent orders, officers and sergeants ranging from stupid to decent, thejungle being beautiful yet horrible, being permanently sweaty, dirty, hungryand damp, accidents and disease taking people out more regularly than the enemy,"there are people hiding in the Jungle", people popping out of holesor shooting at you from trees and whatever, if you see a dot in the sky betterscatter till you know whose it is.

It’s just guys hanging out you know!

just some guys having a time.

It’s curious to see the 'villains' from Quartered SafeOut Here' from the other side. The main difference between the forces, from theperspective of a common soldier, seems to be that, in the Imperial JapaneseArmy, literally everything is worse in every conceivable way.

The Japanese soldiers are insanely hungry, on half a cupof rice a day, about 500 calories.

Instead of being shouted at and condescended to byofficers and sergeants the new boys are literally slapped repeatedly in theface and punched to the ground. This is when they do something wrong, or justfor existing. The end of a normal day is almost lining up to be repeatedlybrutally slapped in the face for no reason

Their officers, or at least some of them, or many of themmuch of the time, are in a death cult.

Their immediate commanding officer seems to fantasisepretty much continually about executing a Banzai charge and going to an'honourable death' to the extent that he has to be talked out of it whenever acrisis happens, and eventually they can't talk him out of it.

Re-Banzai

The central 'plot element' of the book is that the Lieutenantfinally manages to order the suicidal midnight jungle Banzai charge of hisdreams.

HQ finds out about this and valorises their noble sacrifice,making it a point of propaganda; the Japanese soldier never surrenders! Whenthey are finally doomed they do a mass Banzai! For the Emperor!

But because it was dark and the jungle a bunch of soldiersmanage not to get themselves killed and get lost. Come morning they meet up anddecide to go get some food before trying to Banzai themselves again.

When this gets back to HQ, that there are still guysalive from the suicide charge, it becomes a major problem and an officer issent down the river to re-Banzai them, at sword or gunpoint if necessary (he shouldn't join them of course).

The author was part of this outpost and either got ill orwas knocked out by bombs during the whole thing, went missing and only got backafter the remnants had been 're-Banzai'd'. This left him.. sceptical of war.

Hell in the Pacific

Looking into the war in the Pacific and the ImperialJapanese Army was definitely on a vibe.

The Imperial Army ate quite a lot of people, specificallythey ate quite a lot of Indians, often alive, carving out the flesh of theirthighs while they were still living and throwing them in a ditch to die whilethey ate them like steak. There are accusations that some officers ate theirown men.

I don't really know where to go from here..

The Poetry of Jesse Pope

I picked this up I think after hearing it referenced inan episode of 'In Our Time'.

I wanted to hear about the war poets who were not of thealienated faction, I wanted the Patriots and jingoists. WW1 has been re-writtenin our imagination, well perhaps not entirely re-written, but re-emphasised, reorganisedand reset around the 'sad victim soldier' stereotype and the 'vague cataclysm'tale.

These views have a lot of truth to them, they are notreally 'lies', there were a lot of sad victim soldiers and it was a vaguestumbling cataclysm, but the left likes to remember things a certain way

and the popular imagination of WW1 has essentially beentransmitted by the left; Siegfried Sassoon, Pat Barker, All Quiet on the WesternFront. I mean think of a WW1 tale and you know what you are going to get (inthe anglo/westosphere at least) Amilie, Blackadder, you know the scenes, thecharacters, the tone, the mud and the vague emotional tenor that hangs over itall.

Peter Jacksons documentary about WW1 ‘They Shall Not GrowOld’, had an interesting piece of editing which exemplified this. It’s based oninterviews with soldiers. The opening interviews are all have a relativelypositive view of the war, while the voices at the end all have a negative view.The way they are distributed creates the impression of the grieving 'sadsoldier' who went in with high spirits and was crushed and alienated by theexperience of the war. But, both of those strands, those interviews andrecordings, are taken from the same people, all recorded long after the war. Itis their dividing up and the way they are edited which creates the nice neatmoral story of the 'sad soldier', not the actual recordings themselves.

The views of a lot of WW1 soldiers, certainly of a lot ofAnglosphere soldiers (the ones I am familiar with) might well strike a modernear as not what they were expecting at all. many of those men were proud oftheir service and convinced they fought in a good cause, to save Europe and theworld from Prussian militarism.

Those recordings wouldn't be free of trauma and deadfriends but the moral view those men had of their own actions, the weight and colourthey placed on various parts, would be very different to that of latergenerations.

That is why I wanted to read the poetry of Jessie Pope,because it was the popular poetry of the Daily Mail, the actually-popularpoetry of the opening years of the war. The actual voice of the time ratherthan the remembered voice.

I also wanted to know if she was as utterly awful as thehistorians claim she was.

She was.. not *quite* as bad.. entirely

but still pretty bad

"A Humble Appeal

She was a pretty, nicely mannered mare,

The children's pet, the master's pride and care,

Until a man in khaki came one day,

Looked at her teeth, and hurried her away.

With other horses packed into a train

She hungered for her masters voice in vain;

And later, led 'twixt planks that scare and slip,

They slung her, terrified, on board a ship.

Next came, where thumps and throbbing filled the air,

Her first experience of mal de mare;

And when that oscillating trip was done

They hitched her up in traces to a gun.

She worked and pulled and sweated with the best;

A stranger now her glossy coat caressed

Till flashing thunderstorms came bursting round

And splitting leaden hail bestrewed the ground.

With quivering limbs, and silky ears laid back,

She feels a shock succeed a sharper crack,

And, whinnying her pitiful surprise,

Staggers and falls, and tries in vain to rise.

Alone, forsaken, on a foreign field

What moral does this little record yield?

Who tends the wounded horses in the war?

Well that is what the Blue Cross league is for."

Many of the poems are quite interesting. Not allthe rhymes are leaden or as faintly ridiculous as the one above. There is a lotof early stuff from 1914 to 1916 in praise of ANZACS, the soldiers, the war.She is not as bigoted or wrathful as a really hardcore blood and soil type butis more glib, positive, patriotic, a booster-upper cheering from the sides ofthe football match (a football match is one of the metaphors used in thepoems), there are fragments of sort-of feminist stuff about war-girls doing jobs.

I went in for Jesse Pope and what I got was pretty muchwhat I half expected, a very British Church-Hall type quite common before the1960’s. That she doesn’t seem to write much after 1916 means we don’t see anydevelopment. She is more shallow than evil and so tea-stained mildly bad a poetthat I would feel bad for making fun of her.

(The BBC of all people argues here that the Pope vs Owen match is a stitch-up).

Rough Rhymes of a Padre

Willie is G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, an Anglican Priest whoserved as a chaplain on the western front and gained the name ‘Woodbine Willie’for offering wounded and dying soldiers Woodbine cigarettes.

This book ‘Rough Rhymes’ was mainly written in and aroundthe front.

Its great virtue for this review is that it is a directand explicit search for meaning. Mizuki, with whom Willie would perhaps have hadsome things in common is, in ‘On Towards Our Noble Deaths’ seemingly detached,almost ironic, but possessed of a deeply buried rage. Tuchman is actuallydetached and ironic (apart from about Sir John French). Pope is patriotic,glib, 'keen', jolly.

‘Rugh Rhymes has a combination of emotions andexperience that was missing from every other book in this list. Even 'OnwardToward Our Noble Deaths' has little of hatred for the enemy, they barely playmuch part directly and are rarely depicted.

"Whats the Good?" [first two verses]

"Well, I've done my bit o' scrappin',

And I've done quite a lot;

Nicked 'em neatly with my bayonet,

So I needn't waste a shot.

'Twas my duty, and I done it,

But I 'opes the doctor's quick,

For I wish I 'adn't done it,

Gawd! it turns me shamed and sick.

There's a young 'un like our Richard,

And I bashed 'is 'ead in two,

And there's that ole grey 'aired geezer

Which I stuck 'is belly though.

Gawd, you women, wives and mothers,

It's sich waste of all your pain,

If you knowed what I'd been doin'

Could yer kiss me still, my Jane?”

Studdert-Kennedys post-war journey is quite a ride. He went into the war delivering stirringsermons about the virtues of the bayonet and came out a Christian Socialist. Hewrote a book called "Lies!",was 100 per cent behind Bismark being essentially the antichrist was deniedburial in a Cathedral for being too much of a leftie.

From his Wikipedia;

“"After the war, Studdert Kennedy was given chargeof St Edmund, King and Martyr in Lombard Street, London. Having been convertedto Christian socialism and pacifism during the war, he wrote Lies (1919),Democracy and the Dog-Collar (1921) (featuring such chapters as "TheChurch Is Not a Movement but a Mob", "Capitalism is Nothing ButGreed, Grab, and Profit-Mongering" and "So-Called Religious EducationWorse than Useless"), Food for the Fed Up (1921), The Wicket Gate (1923),and The Word and the Work (1925). He moved to work for the Industrial ChristianFellowship, for whom he went on speaking tours of Britain."

He was also capable of some rather spicy gothic verse;

“Truth [lines 34 to 45]

The shadows have departed,

And black night

Lies brooding over all the earth,

And hideous things find birth.

The world brings forth abortions,

And then weeps with bloody tears,

Because her womb is shamed,

Her children maimed,

And all her home become a wilderness of sin.

The sun is darkened,

And the moon turned into blood

And down upon us sweeps a flood

Of Lust and Cruelty.”

These are not really an accurate representation of thefull tone and weight of the poems but are some of the darker fragments which Ipersonally like and which I think will grab your attention and will also make vividthe contrast between Willie and Pope. The full range of the verse is morereligious, with much more seeking and finding of divine grace, and I thought ifI put that stuff in right away my audience would find it a bit twee.

“Thy Will Be Done [last verse]

And Bill, 'e were doin' 'is duty boys,

What e came on the earth to do,

And the answer what came to the prayers I prayed

Was 'is power to see it through.

To see it through to the very end,

And to die as my old pal died,

Wi' a thought for 'is pal and prayer for 'is gal,

And 'is brave 'eart satisfied."

Fundamentally ‘Rough Rhymes’ is a religious text aboutthe search for meaning in a crushing and annihilating place, with the centralpraxis or dichotomy being between deeply held faith and the martial virtues,and hatreds, of a soldier and a patriot. The two don’t mix but that hasn’tstopped Europeans, and Abrahamics generally, for a couple thousand years. Andyou get a lot of interesting thinking and reflection out of it.

For me G. A. Studdert-Kennedy is the most human of thesewriters, or the one who seems to exhibit the greatest humanity or the greatestand deepest range of feeling and questions. Tuchman comes close but the sheenof her irony, which aids her in gliding over great spans of history andsynthesising its details into a coherent and engaging story, also keeps her awindowglass' depth from the image.

Willie is also the person who seems most like a fullor real soldier, someone ready to stab crush and shoot his fellow man, sometimesfeeling bad about it after. Sentimental, patriotic, though not as thoughtlessor stupid as Pope who is just those things resigned, sometimes despairing,resolute, breaking down, wrathful at the war and at the enemy. Mizuki has this too but his war was so muchdarker and there are deep elisions in his telling. I don’t know if anyone couldgrapple with the whole thing head-on.

“Her Gift [lines 12 to 47]

"We’ve seen men die,

Not once, nor twice, but many times

In agony

A ghastly to behold as that.

We’ve seen men fall,

And rise, and staggering onward fall again,

Bedrenched in their own blood,

Fast flowing like a flood,

Of crimson sacrifice upon the snow.

We’ve seen and would forget.

Why then should there be set