A few weeks ago the department operations
person sent me anemail informing me
that I was in danger of losing about 15 days of vacation. It’s company policy
that you can’t carry over more than a certain number of hours of unused
vacation into the new year; if you haven’t taken it, you lose it. They don’t
even give you the pay.
Well, I’m not really in the mood to give this
outfit fifteen free days, so I blocked off three weeks and started thinking how
to use it. It would be way too easy for me to just stay at home all that time,
at the end of which all I’d have to show for it would be two new tires on my
car.
I’ve not taken a vacation since long before I took
this job, so I’d been thinking about doing something, anyhow. But it’s hard for
me to do that because I just don’t feel confident about the viability of my
job. It was tenuous before, but now it’s clear that my manager is disinclined
to restrain two colleagues who—without any supporting evidence—think they can do
the job I was moved over to do: set up a sustainable business model that would keep
this project on its feet.
I mean—if she’s happy to let them crash about
the decks like untethered cannon, okay. But aside from the disrespect I face
daily from them, I can’t help but think that sooner or later someone’s going to
notice that they’re paying me to do something that these bozos are messing
with. (Also, I do not fancy having to go along after them with a broom like the
last guy in the elephants’ parade.)
So I don’t really think I’m going to be there
very long, and I should be saving all my pennies for the day.
But see above about just spending all the time
off at home. That’s not good, either.
So I hauled off and booked a trip to Prague,
Berlin and Paris. I’ve never been to either Prague or Berlin, and Paris is
always worth a return visit.
It started out okay, but has hit rather a snag
here in Prague, where I arrived yesterday afternoon. There’s something wrong
with the router serving the wi-fi in my room; it keeps throwing me off, and
when it lets me on, it’s about half an arc. If fancied putting up with that
crap, I’d have stayed home with Comcast.
I’ve had the concierge in and he claims their
IT person is “working” on it—but the IT person is obviously a contracted
company, and I don’t think anyone was particularly eager to work on Friday around
dinner time.
As a German-born colleague of mine (one who
actually knows what he’s doing and also knows enough to not mess with me) says:
“Yeah…service in Europe has a WHOLE different meaning.”
This was my supper last night; too tired after the michegoss of Terminal 2F at CDG:
The hotel waiter insisted that Pilsner Urquell here [in Czechia] is different/better than the stuff that goes to the USA, which I have had. My verdict: no. (Don't get me wrong; it was fine. But it tastes exactly the way it does in the States.)
Here’s a pro tip, which I give you for nothing:
never book into a hotel that’s hosting not one but two Viking Tour groups. I
suspect that the hotel is not particularly fussed about not delivering wi-fi to
my room as long as none of the besneakered seniors is having trouble with it in
their rooms.
Well, I’ll see what it’s like through today. If
it’s not fixed by midday, I’m going to agitate to be moved to a room where the
router hasn’t crapped out.
I’ve got eyes on you, Art Nouveau Palace Hotel.
Eyes. On. You.
One of the major social and economic stimulus programs that were
implemented after the Second World War was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of
1944, better known as the G.I. Bill. It was the country’s way of saying thank
you to veterans returning from the war by giving them access to academic and
vocational education (through tuition payments and living expense allowances), low-cost
mortgages and low-interest business loans.
The G.I. Bill (although not without its inequities) was one of the
true wonders of the post-war world. For many vets, it was their ticket into the
middle class for themselves and their children.
In 2008, Congress passed another bill, the Post-9/11 Veterans
Education Assistance Act, which was meant to update the G.I. Bill for the 21st
Century, with a focus on college education. But perhaps that bill should have
had some provision for also updating the Veterans Administration computer
system, because monies that should have been paid to veterans pursuing higher
education are not getting to them.
Because the 50-year-old
computer system…broke. The VA rejigged the formulas for payment
calculations, and the system couldn’t deal. There’s a lot of congressional and
VA hand-flapping going on. But no solutions.
Great way to close out the week of Veterans Day, eh?
As a New Military historian, I’m a big proponent of oral histories;
they flesh out the statistics, government documents and other components of learned
monographs. The Imperial War Museum in the UK has done an excellent job of interviewing
survivors of the First and Second World Wars, which means we now have an
invaluable repository of first-person accounts of experiences from men and
women who have since died.
In the United States, we have…the Veterans’ Voices project from NPR’s
StoryCorps.
I love listening to StoryCorps
on Friday mornings—a couple of minutes of two people chatting about some aspect
of their lives. A mother and son; two friends; survivors of a school shooting—it’s
a microcosm of life. VeteransVoices is a subset of StoryCorps, focused on life
filtered through military service.
One of my all-time favorites is the one from February this year
(around Valentine’s Day): Vietnam vet Jerry Nadeau and WWII vet John Banvard,
who were flying a little under the radar when eight years ago they moved
as a couple into a veterans’ home in Chula Vista. It’s just wonderful.
On Veterans Day this year the Google Doodle connected
to five #VeteransVoices stories. Turns out Google, YouTube and StoryCorps
are teaming up to help expand the collection of veterans’ stories. You can
download the #VeteransVoices app for iOS, Android and Kindle, and use the native
prompts to guide you in your interview.
Here’s an example:
StoryCorps recordings are archived with the Library of Congress,
where anyone can access them. That means that the stories of these vets are
available to everyone. I hope that—as with the IWM’s archive—these interviews
can help future generations understand the humanity of military services.
Here’s something else the Brits did to commemorate the centenary
of the World War I Armistice: they created huge portraits on beaches up and
down England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—portraits of people who’d left
their home shores and never returned. It’s a brilliant concept, from Danny Boyle,
the director/producer who brought Slumdog
Millionaire, Trainspotting and Steve Jobs to the screen, and who
orchestrated the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics.
You don’t need me to point out the powerful symbolism of faces
carved into sand below the highwater mark, which will be washed away by the
incoming tide. Once there, there’s no holding back the inexorable waves; the
human features are doomed.
This was a project that drew in all kinds of people, engaging them
in art, history and the environment in an extraordinary way, and it gets added
to my collection
of art installations that help us come to terms with grief and pain that
would otherwise crush us.
Drone footage of one of the beaches:
You can find the list of the portraits and their beaches here. I don’t
think you have to have known who they specifically were to feel the loss. I
certainly didn’t.
The Brits do a tremendous job of honoring the sacrifices made in
wars of the Twentieth Century. Not—generally—contemporaneously, or as a
long-term thing; it wasn’t until the social welfare state emerged from the
destruction of the Second World War that Britain’s veterans received help with
jobs, housing and healthcare. (This of course shrinks during Tory governments.)
But when it comes to putting on a ceremony to acknowledge those who gave their
full measure of devotion, there’s nothing like having a Royal Family oversee
the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph.
But around the country people also mark what’s known as
Remembrance Sunday (which coincided this year, fortuitously, with the actual anniversary
of Armistice), with ceremonies at village memorials (which started out listing
the names of the dead from 1914-1918, but then had to add on those lost
1939-1945) and local churches. On Remembrance Sunday church bells are
half-muffled in mourning, as in this ring from Remembrance Sunday six years
ago:
And in some churches, in the minutes before 1100, the tenor is
rung up, as in this clip from Exeter Cathedral:
At Holy Trinity Church in Cookham, Berkshire, my friend MLD and
her fellow ringers take this on as a solemn duty. MLD tolled the tenor by
herself for the fifteen minutes up to 1100, which is exhausting, being not only very heavy but for tolling you have to ring very slowly and hold the bell up—you see at Exeter they need three to do it. But
she’s glad to take it on.
This year, being the centenary, Holy Trinity augmented its
Remembrance service with some heartrending symbols.
As in many other parishes
and villages, people knitted poppies to be displayed—from John McCrae’s poem
that begins, “In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses row on
row.” HTC decorated the sanctuary with these:
In addition to the knitted ones, they displayed a poppy that was part
of the gut-wrenching Blood-swept
Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London from August to
November 2014, commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of war. This was one
of the nearly 900,000 ceramic poppies that filled the Tower’s moat like a gush
of blood.
But the piece that I absolutely cannot view except through tears
is the Perspex silhouette soldier “sitting” in the pew. There were five of
these, each representing a man from the parish who left for war and never
returned.
Had I been in that sanctuary in the presence of those ghosts, I’d
have been unable to sing or follow the service.
(Photos taken by one of MLD’s fellow ringers, who I hope will not
object to me appropriating them.)
I’ll leave you with one more brilliant evocation from our British brothers—a
stellar Twitter thread capturing the universal truth about how we Anglo-Americans view our militaries,
as voiced by Rudyard Kipling.
As you might imagine I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the
centenary of the end of World War I. After all, mass conflicts of the first
half of the Twentieth Century are my field, and I see so much of their influence—for
good or ill—in our daily lives, even this far on.
And I’ve been thinking about the events of the past week—more mass
shootings, catastrophic wildfires, midterm elections, somber commemorations of
unbelievable destruction—all framed by the utter lack of leadership in our
highest office, which is currently occupied by an ignorant, racist, pathetic
buffoon who panders to (and feeds on) the absolute worst in us. And I wondered
what I was going to be grateful for today.
But then—Saturday Night Live. Which I only watch via YouTube, in
bits and pieces when prompted by Twitter. I knew of the controversy SNL regular
Pete Davidson sparked a week ago with his on-air (and apparently approved by
everyone in the show’s and network’s chain of command) comments about
then-candidate Dan Crenshaw, who lost an eye amid other injuries sustained in
an IED attack in Afghanistan six years ago.
Well, Davidson—unlike some in the public eye—manned up and
apologized on air this past Saturday. “I’m a dick,” he admitted. And Crenshaw
appeared next to him to accept the apology, do a little piss-taking and then—then
he laid on a message that really gives me hope.
“But, seriously—there’s a lot of lessons to learn here. Not just
that the left and right can still agree on some things but also this: Americans
can forgive one another. We can remember what brings us together as a country
and still see the good in each other.
“This is Veterans Day weekend, which means that it’s a good time
for every American to connect with a veteran. Maybe say, ‘Thanks for your
service.’ But I would actually encourage you to say something else. Tell a
veteran ‘Never forget.’ When you say ‘never forget’ to a veteran, you are
implying that, as an American, you are in it with them, not separated by some
imaginary barrier between civilians and veterans, but connected together as
grateful fellow Americans who will never forget the sacrifices made by veterans
past and present. And never forget those we lost on 9/11; heroes like Pete’s
father.
“So I’ll just say: Pete—never forget.”
Crenshaw and Davidson shook hands on that note.
I’m grateful for this display of grace by both of them—the smart-ass
New York comedian who was enough of a mensch to apologize and the ex-SEAL Texas
Republican congressman-elect who stepped out of his comfort zone to join the
show, and for the teaching moment on how to express appreciation for sacrifices
that others make—military, civilian, first responder, teacher—in the cause of
the common good.
Crenshaw would probably be the first to note that he does not—cannot—speak
for all veterans. But the ones I know would concur heartily in bagging the knee-jerk
“thank you for your service”. “Never forget” draws us in, and draws us
together.
One hundred years ago today, representatives of
the Second German Reich—their armies exhausted, their Kaiser abdicated, their people
starving, their cities roiling with revolution—agreed to surrender terms
dictated by Allied leaders. At 0500 in a railroad car in the Compiègne forest,
they signed the Armistice, which went into effect six hours later.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month, guns fell silent across Europe, and after more than four years
of total war, the nations stood in stunned relief. World War I gave us chemical warfare (Germany
first, then the rest to keep up with the Huns), genocide (Armenians, by Turks),
aerial bombing of civilian targets (Germans on French and British cities), unrestricted
(meaning: shooting at everything in the water) submarine warfare (Germany),
introduction of tanks (Britain)—all the mod cons of Twentieth Century life.
They’d be amplified by technological advancements in the next global
conflagration, and then refined in the “smaller” wars of the past 60 years.
In
my opinion, it was started and fought for reasons of empire—acquiring,
defending, expanding what you had or thought you deserved to have. Military and
political leaders were ignorant (woefully or willfully? I don’t know; maybe
some of both) of what advances in technology were about to do to warfare, and
they were criminally slow in realizing what was happening and what it was
costing as the war wore on.
And
after they’d all been in it for a couple of years, and had been depleting their
treasuries, exhausting their citizens, consuming their resources, killing off
their young men in their tens of thousands on a daily basis—well, a surreal
stubbornness seemed to grip them all. Essentially, the argument was, “We’ve
already spent this much and lost that much, now we have to
stay in it until we win.”
Right
up until almost the very end, the Germans were still marking out territories on
maps of Western Europe that they intended to annex upon victory—parts of
France, Belgium, Luxembourg to which a noble and martial people like the
Teutons were entitled.
Meanwhile
the French and Brits had a slightly tighter grasp on the geopolitical
possibilities before them, and were secretly negotiating to carve up pieces of
the Middle East which they expected the Ottomans were going to lose control of.
They were haggling between themselves, you understand, not with any of the
peoples who actually, you know, lived in those areas. Oh, yeah, they were
making promises, to Arabs, to Jews, to Kurds; but those were measures of
expediency and not agreements between gentlemen such as the ones they made
among themselves. Meaning—not anything they really expected to have to honor.
And
so many, many of those imperial chickens have been coming home to roost ever
since those shots echoed through Sarajevo. World War I reverberated
throughout the Twentieth Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed
off much of the ruling-class youth in the nations of Western Europe, it
left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s
psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the
sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach
would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued.
But
we’re even now feeling the effects of what was known at the time as the Great
War. The nearly
farcical assassination that started the war laid a pretty straight
path to the collapse of the Russian government and the communist revolution.
Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and
his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and more than 70
years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.
The
viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the
dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations
payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more
ruinous indemnities from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of
Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Just think about that for a
minute: talk about sticking it to your defeated foe...) It was that whole
sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that settlement.
"Germany started it; the rest of us are victims."
The
Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary)
set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook
out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating
entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required
intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade. And if
they’re not actively committing acts of aggression against their neighbors at
the moment, they will be doing so as soon as they think they can get away with
it. This is not over.
The
Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire
along the lines that Britain and France had mapped out earlier in the war,
picking up choice parcels of real estate in the Middle East. As with the
Balkans, those arbitrary geographic divisions, ignorant or dismissive of
ethnic, religious or other loyalties of the resident peoples, are still
reverberating on the global stage.
Iran,
Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers
amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost
for more than 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being
produced.
Well, by 1918, German,
Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires were all shattered, although the
Soviet Union pretty well replaced the last one. (And since the break-up of the
Soviet empire in the 1990s, we see Putin attempting to rebuild the tsarist
holdings. If I were a Finn, a Latvian, an Estonian or a Lithuanian, I’d look at
Ukraine and be nervous.) The British
empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war.
And France—well, a steady retreat as well.
For the United States, it marked our emergence as a major
player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in
the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the
memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend
that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we
got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there
was no turning back.
For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off the First World
War. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the
20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a
movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched
on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert
Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal
obligations or of the actual cost of
wars) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to
storm the camps of the veterans of that war. But we still preferred to dismiss it from our collective memory.
Aside from emulating Britain and France in retrieving remains of an
unidentifiable soldier from the cemeteries of Northern France and interring
them at the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery (Britain’s
Unknown lies in Westminster Abbey; France’s beneath the Arc de Triomphe), we
scurried back and declined to join the League of Nations. America first, eh?
Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society,
however, although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that
was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to
call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months.
That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded
that all your people step up to the plate for a total war,
it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and send them back to the kitchen or
the rear of the bus forevermore.
The Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in
1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward
came in 1948 when Harry S Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981,
ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.
Truman had been an artillery captain with the American
Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.
This weekend in Europe, there are public and private commemorations
of the Armistice that was signed in Compiègne 100 years ago. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel
Macron unveiled a memorial there; Pierre Trudeau paid tribute to Canadian
soldiers at Vimy
Ridge. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly represented us at a ceremony
at the Aisne-Marne US military cemetery near the battlefield of Belleau Wood; Commander
Bone Spurs declined to venture out in the rain to honor the fallen. (Well, he is umbrella-challenged…)
It’s fortuitous that the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice
falls on Remembrance Sunday in Britain. The Royals and Commonwealth dignitaries
will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. There are no longer any survivors
from 1918, but veterans from World War II and subsequent wars will march (or be
wheeled) past. There will be two minutes of silence precisely at 1100, and then
half-muffled church bells around the country will toll for the fallen.
(Throughout the past four years, the Brits have done an amazing
job of honoring the war that broke the back of their empire. Starting in August
2014, with the Lights
Out campaign and the Blood-Swept
Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London, it progressed to
a poignant series of public and private commemorations of the centenary
of the opening of the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in 2016 that
included a performance art piece called We’re Here Because We’re Here of men in
WWI uniforms appearing at train stations across the country just as they would
have done on their way to Somme. And then there was the statue of the soldier sculpted
from Flanders mud, who melted under rain at Trafalgar Square a hundred
years on from the Battle of Passchendaele. Finally, for the past week there has
been a
light and sound installation in and around the Tower of 10,000 torches lit
each night by the Warders, accompanied by a new choral work.)
Also today there will be a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe at which
I hope to God that moral and physical coward 45 doesn’t shove any of the world
leaders out of his way as he impatiently waits for his meeting with Putin. At
least he’s not here desecrating Arlington.
Ah, well, perhaps I take these things too seriously. I’ve spent
too much time walking the battlefields and graveyards of Northern France and
Belgium internalizing the loss they represent. I can think of no more evocative
musical piece to commemorate this centenary than “Flowers of the Forest,” the
powerful centuries-old lament for Scots slain by Englishmen. But because
Highland regiments formed the backbone of the British army in so many wars, it
has been transmuted to a universal tune that accompanies the bodies of British
soldiers home to their final rest.
It has had rather a workout in recent years, in Afghanistan and
Iraq. But here it appears against the background of memorials to the losses of
the Somme. And if for no other reason, renders me a sobbing wreck.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
