Cratered like the moon

We are two years into one declared war and six months into another one, with probably dozens of undeclared border incursions, terror attacks and sundry “incidents” having gone on for more than a decade. Which is to say, we do not live in a peaceful world and—like global warning—that’s down to homo sapiens.

Poets have been writing about war for millennia; since before writing, actually, when their poems were passed down the generations via song. Most of them through the ages have played up the nobility and valor of the warrior and the glory and wealth to be acquired in the practice of combat. They became propaganda for the tribes, societies and states they depicted as noble and brave—playing to the common folk more than the soldiers, who knew the truth and didn’t have much time for the dressed-up version.

(Same thing in the visual arts—paintings and sculptures wreathed in testosterone: spectacular and inspiring, and almost antiseptically clean.)

This held true pretty much until about a year or two into the First World War. Moving pictures were in their infancy, television was decades away and if you’d told anyone about mobile phones and social media they’d have locked you up. People at home depended on newspapers for information on how it was going; interestingly, poetry was a fairly regular element in coverage. Governments had a vested interest in shaping how it was reported.

World War I was the first conflict where all of the armies were conscripted (although Britain didn’t introduce the draft until 1916), so governments had a vested interest in portraying the war as a noble venture, sanctified by God and with a guaranteed victory by Christmas. By 1916, two years in, this was becoming increasingly difficult. If you, as a soldier, published anything that didn’t support the official line, you would be locked up. In prison, if you were without connections; in a looney bin, if you did.

Of course, you could end up in the latter anyhow; that’s how what we now know as PTSD was addressed. (At the time, mental breakdowns among the military were charitably called “shellshock”. When they weren’t called “lack of moral fiber”. Research in the past decade or so into PTSD suggests that it’s cause may actually literally be shellshock—as in traumatic brain injury.) The job of the mental hospital (just as any other military healthcare facility) was to patch you up enough so you could return to the front.

One such patient, at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, was Wilfred Owen. He was suffering from severe headaches probably from concussion(s), having been blown literally into the air by artillery strikes, but was diagnosed with shellshock in June 1917. While there, he met Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged his interest in poetry as a means of expression. Most of Owen’s poems were written in the year between Summer 1917 and his death in November 1918. Only three were published while he was alive.

In past years of National Poetry Month, I’ve given you “Dulce et Decorum est”, “Dreamers” and “Strange Meeting”. This time around it’s “The Show”, whose images seem like they would resonate with anyone in Ukraine or Gaza (or Syria or Sudan or…). It’s not for the faint of heart.

“The Show”

My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.
Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,
There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.
It seemed they pushed themselves to be as plugs
Of ditches, where they writhed and shrivelled, killed.
By them had slimy paths been trailed and scraped
Round myriad warts that might be little hills.

From gloom's last dregs these long-strung creatures crept,
And vanished out of dawn down hidden holes.

(And smell came up from those foul openings
As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening.)

On dithering feet upgathered, more and more,
Brown strings towards strings of gray, with bristling spines,
All migrants from green fields, intent on mire.

Those that were gray, of more abundant spawns,
Ramped on the rest and ate them and were eaten.

I saw their bitten backs curve, loop, and straighten,
I watched those agonies curl, lift, and flatten.

Whereat, in terror what that sight might mean,
I reeled and shivered earthward like a feather.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,

Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Upsoaring wings: People did not like it here

I was introduced to Kurt Vonnegut by Chuck Mitchell, Joni’s ex-husband, at a performance by him at The Ice House in Pasadena. Mitchell spoke this passage from Slaughterhouse-Five as an introduction to one of his songs. I don’t recall the song, but this image has never left me:

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

“The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

Vonnegut drew on his own experiences in World War II—as a soldier and a prisoner of war—to describe the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 by British and American air forces. He lived through the bombing because the POWs had been herded into the eponymous slaughterhouse. The book is a bit of a challenge to read, because it’s non-linear; you have to focus on both nonsensical and heartbreaking topics.

You know—like life.

I was reminded of this when I read a piece by Alex Horton, a reporter for The Washington Post, this weekend. Horton used Vonnegut’s non-linear construct to frame his own experiences as a soldier in Iraq 12 years ago (nearly six years into America’s longest war). He weaves some research into his account to give context, and readers are left with the sense of fragmentation that combat veterans carry back into the world.

Like Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s a hard read. Here’s another (now more than ever), Vonnegut’s “Requiem”, published in 2005, two years before his death.

“Requiem”

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

Lost at sea

Twitter is like a box o’ choc’lates; you never know what you’re gonna find. This came across my feed yesterday, and even though it’s on the Internet and therefore de facto true, I did a bit of digging.

Also on the Internet, but still…

So, it turns out that, yes indeed, there was a ship’s cat named Red Lead serving on HMAS Perth at the start of WWII. This was not an unusual circumstance, as—aside from providing purrs and other morale emoluments—cats were often a very practical addition to a ship’s complement, because they kept the vermin down.

But evidently after his first foray into a battle on the light cruiser, off Java in February 1942, Red Lead rethought the seafaring life and tried several times to abandon ship when Perth pulled into port for resupply. He was put back aboard, as it was considered bad luck to lose your ship’s cat, but he definitely wasn’t happy about it.

The ship’s log noted, “Red Lead, ship’s kitten, endeavoured to desert, but was brought back on board, despite vigorous protests.”

Sadly, both the crew and Red Lead were right, because shortly after Perth put back out to sea in the company of USS Houston, the Allied ships engaged with the Japanese fleet off the coast of Java, and Perth was sunk. More than half the ship’s company went down with her, including poor little Red Lead.

Well, I don’t know if there are ship’s cats any more, in anyone’s navy. But I do like that the Aussies have added tributes to Red Lead on every ship that has borne the name HMAS Perth. Viz.:

So thanks for an interesting bonbon, Twitter. I’ll just have a poke around and see if you got any Bordeaux in that box.

Hope you are doing great!

I don’t know why I found it a little surprising that organizations like ISIL and Al Qaeda would document their operational processes. After all, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re killing people by running a McDonald’s franchise or by leveling half of Syria; you still have to pay your bills and your “team members”.

Unless they succeed in their suicide bombing the first time out. Then, of course, you have a serious turnover problem and need to up your recruitment efforts.

In any case, you have to keep records. We learned a few years ago how carefully Al Qaeda operatives have to track expenses. And now it turns out that there are records of ISIL recruitment efforts, including the usual personal details (age, date of birth, blood type) as well as job-specific data (experience with jihad, sectarian rigor, preference in post-mortem virgins, whatever).

They’re actually a little scary in their banality. But that is the nature of evil, isn’t it?

However, this realization that even these scumbags have to follow procedures that are scrutinized by those über terrorists, the bean counters, gave me an idea for their possible destruction: infiltrate their organizations with contract recruiters; those locusts that infest the tech industry. The ones I’ve been writing about for more than five years, who suck the blood out of candidates and hiring managers without ever delivering any recognizable value.

It won’t cost anything because you just outsource from where they are now, various call centres in India, and you use VoIP phone lines to save further. Let would-be jihadis start getting the rabid Islamist equivalent of these emails:

It won’t take any time at all for the recruitment pipeline for all those terrorist groups to dry up. Without a huge investment in blood and treasure in the form of our military.

You’re welcome.

Nous sommes tous Paris

I first saw Paris more than 35 years ago. Specifically, around 2100 of an October night, I tumbled out of a motor coach from Calais, boxed bicycle, panniers and a knapsack all my worldly goods. It was a rough arrival—figuring out how to stash my bike at the Consigné at the Gare du Nord, use a pay phone to call a down-market hotel in the Let’s Go France guide book, and managing to make it to the place.

I was so tired that I actually thought I’d forgotten how to speak French—I made the concierge spell out the directions and still I was convinced she was just making things up.

But that city still managed to grab my heart and hold on to it all this time. That first trip was an official pilgrimage—the starting point on the journey to Santiago de Compostela. Every visit since has been an unofficial one. I fell in love with the place, but with a love that sees the flaws and still forgives them.

I spent the next four nights at a student foyer and explored the city as much as you could without any money. I retrieved my bicycle (which later came to be known as l’Escargot Rouge) and some perfect stranger passing by at the Gare helped me set the handlebars straight. Somehow I came across the Tour Saint Jacques, all that remains of the church that was the embarkation place for medieval pilgrims headed to Santiago, so that’s where I officially set out on the 1100-mile trek.

On my return swing, six weeks later, I spent an…interesting night, completely unexpected. Paris has a way of doing that to you.

Months later I had a conversation with a very well-traveled woman who assured me that everyone has two “favorite” cities: whatever the other one is and Paris. As far as I’m concerned, she was right.

Yeah, I know—it’s not paradise, and it’s not for everyone. Parisians practically invented the term “attitude”; they certainly give it better than anyone else, including New Yorkers. I don’t care. I love the layers of history going all the way back to Lutetia, interwoven and expressed in a thousand ways. I love the medieval rabbit warren streets and the expansive boulevards (which were purpose-built to prevent the people from building barricades; sadly—or gloriously, depending on your point of view—this intent turned out to be unsuccessful). I love the grands magasins and hole-in-the-wall shops, the parks, the skyline, the sounds and the smells.

To this day, the scent of wet pavement mixed with diesel exhaust fumes sends me back to that first trip as fast as a madeleine evoked childhood for Proust.

The murders at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher grocery store in Paris last January broke my heart. I don’t know why I thought that was as bad as it would get, and yesterday showed me how pig ignorant I was in this regard. Synchronized attacks with explosives and assault weapons on restaurants, a concert, a soccer game; scores dead and hundreds wounded.

Sophisticated planning, ruthless execution; this is military-grade terror. It’s war, with my beloved Paris as the battlefield.

Le coeur est brisé.

Gratitude Monday: Not just a duty

On Memorial Day in previous years, I’ve written about how the Washington Post keeps the faces of the fallen before our eyes on a regular basis, and about Operation Homecoming, a stunning collection of writing about Iraq and Afghanistan  by service members and their families.

As our longest wars continue, this year two stories on NPR caught my attention, so I’m sharing them with you.

The first introduces us to the men and women at Dover Air Force Base who are responsible for the “dignified transfer” of the bodies of the fallen. There are no details on the actual process (you can refer to Operation Homecoming if you’d like to learn more); this is a glimpse into the people who perform this final service for those who served us.

The thing that struck me was that they all—military and civilian—feel they are performing more than a duty; they are answering a calling. And that amidst the grief that laps around them, they find joy in this purpose.

We are fortunate to have this look at Dover—then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ordered the base closed to news media in 1991 when the coffins began coming in from Desert Storm, and the ban wasn’t lifted until 2009.

Another side of this—perhaps the first step in the final journey of a serviceman or servicewoman—is the notification of the next of kin of their loved one’s death by the Casualty Assistance Calls Officer (CACO). On Friday, NPR’s StoryCorps brought us Leslie Hurt, 39, a hospital corpsman in the US Navy, and a CACO.

She spoke of a different kind of casualty, the appalling number of military suicides. Their families, after all, have to be notified, too. Listen to her talk about that.

Like the people at Dover, Hurt says, “It’s not just a duty. You’re there to take care of the family in their time of need and tragedy.”

I’m grateful that someone is doing this with gentleness and grace, and I’m grateful that we are now allowed to understand this process.

Sailing into history

When the Cunard liner Lusitania sailed from New York harbor on 1 May 1915 the passengers and crew were essentially spitting into the wind. Although not a warship—not even a merchant vessel—Lusitania was steaming into hostile waters, propelled not only by her four screws but also the sort of British arrogance that fostered the conviction that no one would attack a non-combatant flying the Union Jack, not even in on open seas in the middle of a war.

In one respect, you can sort of see that—there was something in effect called “Prize Rules” (sometimes referred to as “Cruiser Rules”), which dictated that warships could stop and search any merchant ship under any flag, and if contraband (war matériel, goods destined for an enemy, etc.) was found, the vessel could be seized or sunk—with provisions made for the rescue of any crew or passengers. Which seems very 18^th Century, quaint and rather gentlemanly. But submarines can’t operate like that—their effectiveness comes from striking unseen, and they have no capabilities for transporting either goods or persons not specifically useful to their mission.

That’s actually kind of the whole point of submarine warfare, um. Germany had declared unrestricted submarine warfare as of February, and made it quite clear that “unrestricted” included firing on suspect vessels—those flying flags of the Allied Nations (France and Britain, primarily, in the Atlantic), and those under neutral flag suspected of carrying contraband to the Allies. Although passenger ships weren’t really supposed to be on that list, it’s not always easy to distinguish a cargo vessel from a liner through a periscope.

Moreover—let’s understand that the Brits had on more than one occasion run up the Stars and Stripes on their ships as they navigated the waters around the British Isles. A violation of the rules of war, and a serious pisser to the Germans.

And Lusitania was basically the prime focus of both Britain and Germany. A thumping great four-funneled behemoth just screaming “Britannia rule the waves” steaming through open seas like it was 1910 sends messages, you know?

The British Admiralty (headed by one Winston Churchill) and Cunard management both knew that the Lusitania was in danger just because. And so did anyone reading US newspapers, where the German government ran advertisements warning passengers thinking of traveling on her that they were rolling the dice. In the New York Times, this notice ran in juxtaposition to the Cunard sailing schedule.

But—in the spirit of the arrogance I mentioned above—although proclaiming her purely commercial, non-military mission of transporting the mostly well-heeled back and forth between Liverpool and New York, on this voyage (and not for the first time) Lusitania was also carrying a substantial cargo of weapons (small arms) and ammunition destined for the Western Front. Which was spirited aboard and not mentioned to US Customs or on the original shipping manifestos.

Well, everyone basically shrugged their shoulders, crossed their fingers and held their breath. And you know the rest. On 7 May, about 11 miles off the Old Head of Kinsale (Ireland), the Lusitania’s path intersected that of U-20, which fired a single torpedo, hitting her on the starboard bow. A few moments later there was a second explosion, which has been attributed to various causes.

(The Admiralty insisted it must have been from a second torpedo, rather than open up the can of worms of all that ammunition in her hold. U-20 only fired the one torpedo, but this did not in any way alter the Admiralty’s focus. A boiler explosion has been ruled out, as has the notion that it was any gunpowder in the military consignment—the explosion came from nowhere near that hold. Recent scholarship leans toward the explanation that the single torpedo struck a coal bunker, which kicked up a lot of coal dust, which ignited and blew the second hole in the superstructure.)

At any rate, within a matter of minutes, Lusitania had sunk, with 1,191 of the 1,962 passengers and crew lost. Papers all over the world decried the barbarity (except in Germany, where there was a vast sense of triumph). There was even a push in resolutely neutral America to join the fight (128 Americans were among the dead), but President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan managed to keep that in check.

There was an Admiralty inquiry, which toyed with the notion of blaming the disaster on Lusitania’s captain, but in the end all responsibility and opprobrium was laid entirely at the feet of U-20, and the German High Command. No mention was made at this inquiry of the military cargo or failure to fully inform Lusitania’s captain that intercepted radio traffic had made it plain to the Admiralty that subs were in the area and that she was a named target. It was just Hun frightfulness, attacking a purely civilian target.

For a while—starting in September—the Germans rescinded the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. But in the face of the strangulation of the British naval blockade that was bringing the civilians of Germany close to starvation, the High Command recommenced it in early 1917. And in April, we entered the war.

Look—there’s a whole thing about Lusitania, as you’ll have noticed. It was an appalling choice to target passenger liners (which U-boats did), particularly one as distinctive as this one. Although there was a German attempt to bluster about mistaken identity, and then a claim that she was armed and therefore fair game, it was nothing but bluster and it conflicted with all the evidence that Lusitania was in fact a prized target for the U-boat fleet.

On the other hand, the Allies used passenger ships as auxiliary cruisers and troop transports, so not always so clear-cut a thing to distinguish legitimate targets. Mauretania and Aquitania, sister ships to Lusitania, served in the Gallipoli campaign. Olympic, sister ship to Titanic, was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1916, when she struck a mine while serving as a hospital ship.

Plus—see above about the Brits swapping flags as the occasion suited. Not the same thing as firing without warning, I know—chicanery as opposed to barbarism—but certainly indicative that everyone thought the rules of war were more guidelines than actual commitments.

It’s also indicative that already—nine months into the war—both sides were starting to get desperate to find ways to break the stalemate that had emerged from the confluence of technological advances and outdated tactics. The choices they made—deploying poison gas, Zeppelin attacks on civilian targets, running guns and munitions in the holds of passenger liners, unrestricted submarine warfare—were, in retrospect, bad ones. Bad because they not only didn’t achieve the hoped-for breakthroughs, but because they opened the floodgates for expanding total war in such a way that the lines between combatant and non-combatant just disappeared.

And that’s the way they are, even today, a hundred years later.