Gratitude Monday: A joke, a look, a word

Today being Veterans Day, I’m focusing my gratitude on the men and women who have ponied up to our nation’s defense and paid the highest price for it. And since today is also the 95^th anniversary of the event that triggered the holiday, I’m thinking in particular about that war, even though the generation that fought it has completely died out. (And the World War II generation is fast fading.)

Veterans Day started out as Armistice Day—marking the cessation of active hostilities of what at the time was called the Great War, but a couple of decades later came to be known as World War I. Just as we had to change the designation of the conflict, we retitled the holiday to take into account the fact that the wars—and the dead—just kept on coming.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice went into effect between the armed forces of the Central Powers and those of the Allied Nations. And thus ended, not with a bang but a whimper, the worst systematic slaughter the world had seen up until that time.

The First World War is the vortex of my historical studies, for a lot of reasons. But it didn’t make the big time in the American cultural conscience—outside of academic circles, you just never hear much about it. They call Korea the Forgotten War; but WWI just never seemed to take a place in our memory at all.

It was one of those appalling confluences of technology, politics, idiocy and willful refusal by those in positions of power to view the world as it really was and not as they expected or wanted it to be. Among the worst offenders were the military commanders, the generals, the field marshals, the planners and the strategists.

The First World War is a nightmare of pitched battles and wholesale slaughter, repeated again and again throughout a four-year night. It exhausted nations, natural resources, gene pools and national political and moral fiber. It left a legacy of broken men, broken dreams and broken faith, and I don’t think we’ve fully recovered from it nearly a hundred years on.

But—it’s Veterans Day, remember? I don’t intend to focus on the technology or the politics or the rest of that. I’ve got personal accounts (via the Imperial War Museum’s Book of the First World War) from two people who survived the war. (In general, the Brits have done a better job of documenting this sort of thing from that war; if I’d found anything equivalent from our own history, I’d have used it.)

Here’s Harold Clegg, former Rifleman, Liverpool Rifles, returning home in May 1919:

“I found I belonged to that generation of men who, even if they had escaped its shells, were destroyed by the War. The youths of 18-20 who were thrown back into civilisation whose only training had been that of musketry, bombing, killing and bloodshed; those who regarded carnage with complacency; whose conversation during the most impressionable period of their lives had been War, Women and Food.

“While men were being churned up by shell fire until there was nothing left of them but pieces of flesh adhering to the revetting on the trench, Army Contractors and Munition Makers at home had been waxing fat and greeted those returned from the Wars with a gross display of opulence.

“During our absence the old order had changed; the genteel of 1914 were gone; blatant riches reigned in their stead; money was the power in the land; money that had been reaped from the bodies of the dead.

“This was the Victory. The War to end War.”

And from Joyce Taylor, about her brother, Captain Norman Austin Taylor, 1/21^st Battalion, London Regiment, who died of wounds during the German offensive of March 1918:

“When he was hit he told the men to leave him but they carried him back in a blanket and put him into the hospital train. He died either in the train or at Étaples where he is buried. Five foot ten of a beautiful young Englishman under French soil. Never a joke, never a look, never a word more to add to my store of memories. The book is shut up for ever and as the years pass I shall remember less and less, till he becomes a vague personality; a stereotyped photograph.”

Yeah—I read these words, remark upon their universality and wonder how much we’ve really advanced since 1918. Clegg could have been getting off a plane from Iraq or Afghanistan (where we’ve had soldiers for ten years, people) last week and wondering how the hell he’s going to find a job or explain to his mother what it’s like to be looking out for IEDs everywhere you go. And how many families of the soldiers returning via Dover AFB are—like Taylor—trying to imprint their memories of their child who is headed to a VA cemetery?

So I’m grateful for the men and women who have suited up over the decades to do about the dirtiest job there is—for whatever their reasons, they put their lives on the line in service to the nation. Many never returned, and their jokes, their glances and their words are buried with them. Those who did were changed forever, and we haven’t done nearly a good enough job at welcoming them back and making them part of the community.

At least we can express our gratitude for them.