Faces in the sand

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.

We will remember them

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:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them

We must remember them.

Paschal moon: easily reducible adolescences

It’s true that when we hear the words “Poets of World War I”, we typically don’t think of women. Partly, of course, because women were for the most part kept away from the front, so whatever they wrote about was de facto about their life waiting at home. But because that’s how they experienced the war, that perspective is still valid.

In past years I’ve given you examples from Eleanor Farjeon and Anna Akhmatova. Today I’ve got a little something from the poet-painter Mina Loy, born in 1882 in London, resident of most of the artistic centers of Europe before moving to the United States in 1916. Modernism, futurism, Dada, feminism, surrealism, post-modernism, conceptualism—Loy threw herself into all the major movements of the times.

Loy considered herself more a visual artist than a poet, but she knew her way around a page. “The Dead” was written in 1920, and for someone who didn’t have first-hand experience of the war, she certainly captured its aftermath, using all the modernist imagery then available.

“The Dead”

We have flowed out of ourselves  

Beginning on the outside 

That shrivable skin          

Where you leave off        

Of infinite elastic        

Walking the ceiling          

Our eyelashes polish stars            

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle             

Of a descendant

We spit up our passions in our grand-dams            

Fixing the extension of your reactions             

Our shadow lengthens    

In your fear        

You are so old   

Born in our immortality            

Stuck fast as Life             

In one impalpable            

Omniprevalent Dimension             

We are turned inside out 

Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs                     

Street lights footle in our ocular darkness            

Having swallowed your irate hungers             

Satisfied before bread-breaking    

To your dissolution          

We splinter into Wholes          

Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow             

Among the refuse of your unborn centuries            

In our busy ashbins         

Stink the melodies           

Of your         

So easily reducible          

Adolescences    

Our tissue is of that which escapes you             

Birth-Breaths and orgasms           

The shattering tremor of the static        

The far-shore of an instant            

The unsurpassable openness of the circle    

Legerdemain of God       

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums

Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves             

Break on our edgeless contours   

The mouthed echoes of what        

has exuded to our companionship

Is horrible to the ear        

Of the half that is left inside them.

Paschal moon: purgatorial shadows

One hundred years ago, Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen won his last victory—his 80^th—in the sky above Northern France. The erstwhile cavalry officer had become the most famous fighter pilot of the war since transferring to the air service in 1915, admired by combatants and non-combatants on both sides. Even today, kids who barely know there was a war fought in 1914-1918, would probably have a vague notion of the man known as The Red Baron, and his Flying Circus.

Because Snoopy. And Monty Python.

Richthofen and his ilk must have seemed like true knights-of-the-air to the men who fought semi-underground in the trenches of the Western Front. Airmen lived in fairly posh camps behind the lines, so were not generally in danger of artillery fire. As officers, they were catered to and waited on as befitted their class; outside of actual sorties, it was almost as though they were at a country house shooting party, with hot baths and cold Champagne.

In the air, make no mistake, it was not all cakes and ale; their aircraft were not exactly precision machines, they had no radio communications, they were on their own, with little training or support, just the adrenaline surge and the joy stick. Richthofen was extraordinarily skilled and lucky to survive as long as he did—a tribute to his gifts as a pilot.

But the luck ran out on 21 April 1918, and he was shot down over Vaux-sur-Somme.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month isn’t about Richthofen specifically, or even about World War I aces. I don’t know of any studies on PTSD for the knights-of- the-air, so I don’t know how they fared post-war in comparison to the trench-soldiers. Was the term lack of moral fiber applied to them? Dunno. Their war was fought in short, intense spurts, not the long, filthy war shared with rats, lice, mud and decomposing corpses. And their war often ended with the LMF diagnosis, and looks of disgust followed them the rest of their lives.

No, today’s entry is from my old comrade Wilfred Owen, whose war was in those trenches, and who experienced the mental breakdown he writes of here. He pulls no punches..

(As we continue engaging in warfare with all the technology at our disposal—because wars are always technological drivers—we continue to learn more about the aftereffects. Seems that much of what has been called over the century LMF, battle fatigue, PTSD is undiagnosed traumatic brain injury. And now that it’s not something that chickenhawks can dismiss as non-physiological, we may get around to finding treatments that will reduce the appalling post-combat suicide rate for our military members.)

“Mental Cases”

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jays that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain,- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hands' palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

-These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable, and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
-Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
-Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Paschal Moon: like a relic

The most common picture that comes to mind when we hear “First World War” is probably trenches snaking across Belgium and Northern France. We may have some vague notion of activities on the Eastern Front, or along the Dardanelles—or even Jerusalem and Damascus. But the war along the Italian Alps almost never makes the headlines (unless you’re a Hemingway fan).

And yet the Isonzo River was the scene of no fewer than twelve distinct, ghastly battles. Historian Mark Thompson sets the stage: “Imagine the flat or gently rolling horizon of Flanders tilting at 30 or 40 degrees, made of grey limestone that turns blinding white in summer.” And imagine the futility of launching attack after attack against entrenched fortifications across the seasons in that terrain.

From December 1915, Giuseppe Ungaretti served in the Brescia Brigade along the Isonzo—in his late 20s, he’d already absorbed the cultures of Egypt (where he was born to immigrants from Tuscany), Paris (where he went to study, and was influenced by Rimbaud, Apollinaire and other modernists) and Turin (where he’d trained to be a teacher). His poems are distilled down to the bare essence of his observations and experiences.

In today’s National Poetry Month entry, Ungaretti frames the confluence of the flow of his life in terms of the rivers symbolic of his experiences, converging on the Isonzo, which polishes him like a stone. It was written in August, 1916.

“Rivers”

I cling to this mangled tree

Left to lie in the crevasse

That has all the indolence

Of a circus

Before or after the show

And I watch

The tranquil passing

Of clouds across the moon.

This morning

I stretched out

In an urn of water

And like a relic

Rested.

The Isonzo rushing

Polished me

As one of its stones.

I pulled

My bones together

And off I went

On the water

Like an acrobat.

I squatted down

Beside my clothes

Filthy with war and like a Bedouin

I bowed to receive

The sun

This is the Isonzo

And here I best

Acknowledged myself

A pliant fiber

In the Universe.

My torment

Comes when

I think myself

Out of harmony. But those hidden Hands

That immerse me

Give me freely

An uncommon

Happiness.

I have gone

Through the stages

Of my life

These are my rivers.

This is the Serchio

From which perhaps two thousand

Years of my own country folk

And my father and my mother

Have drawn their water

This is the Nile

That saw me born

And saw me grow

In unawareness

On the expansive plains.

This is the Seine

And in its swirl I mingled

And I came to know myself

These are my rivers

Tallied in the Isonzo.

This is my nostalgia

That in each of them

It comes to me

Now that night has fallen

That my life to me seems

A flower

Of shadows.

The Bloody Fields of Flanders

It is the last day in July here in the District They Call Columbia. We had a break in the heat and humidity hell; yesterday as I was running errands I actually had to remind myself, “Self—it’s only 70 degrees. Roll your windows down.” And I could leave my patio door open most of the day and actually listen to the birds chowing down at the feeders.

But as the heat index rises to its customary triple digits, I’m casting my thoughts back to fields in Flanders, where one hundred years ago today, the Third Battle of Ypres began. Perhaps to distinguish it from the others, this one is known as Passchendaele, and it lasted from 31 July to 10 November, 1917.

By summer of 1917, the fields around Ypres were already a grotesque, ghastly charnel house. That part of Belgium is basically a thin strip of soil spread over clay. Nearly three years of artillery bombardment combined with repeated rain storms had churned Passchendaele into a god-awful potage of mud, in which the bodies and bones of men and animals churned to the surface and then roiled back into the soup. Trenches flooded, foodstuffs rotted and men and rats went mad.

Imagine, if you will, being one of those soldiers, peering warily over the top of your trench and seeing a vast expanse of that grey-brown churning mass, and knowing you were being ordered to climb over the parapet, in your woolen uniform and carrying your rifle, pack and other combat essentials (60 pounds' worth), and wondering how many yards you’d make it before the mud grasped your legs and pulled you down, making you an easy target for German machine guns. It is a fact that both men and horses drowned in it, although not always immediately. For more than three months.

In the end, the British had gained roughly five miles of territory, and suffered around 275,000 casualties. The math works out to just over ten men per foot of ground.

A few years ago I walked those fields around Ypres, and visited the endless cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They are beautiful places now, but even so, I was grateful to know that I had a hotel room with a bath and clean sheets to return to at night. If you think too hard about what it looked like a hundred years ago, you won’t sleep at all.

I’ve written before about the confluence of art and history, using artistic media to shorten the distance to the past. We’ve seen several instances of it during the centenary of the First World War: the Lights Out commemoration on 4 August 2014 of the declarations of war; the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London—one ceramic poppy for each British and Commonwealth soldier killed in the four years of war; the haunting appearance last year of men dressed in World War I kit at train stations in cities around England—each representing a British soldier who died on that first day, 1 July 1916.

This time, a Dutch artist sculpted a British soldier out of Passchendaele mud, and installed it in Trafalgar Square last week. You can see in his drooping shoulders and the expression on his face how bone-weary he is.

But then, through artificial rain, the soldier has been slowly disintegrating; in a few days, he’ll be just a pool of mud. It seems the most fitting depiction of this particular battle we could see.

A second artistic commemoration of Passchendaele is this pipers lament, known as “The Bloody Fields of Flanders”. “Bloody”, in this case, can be taken to mean both covered in blood, and as an intensive modifier, along the lines of “fucking”. Either way it would be accurate.

Lafayette, we are here

Hey-ho, it’s Independence Day and our ship of democracy is running perilously close to some dangerous shoals, so I think I’m just going to go back to a time when we were beginning to gain respect in the international community, instead of pissing it away, back when we understood the concept of alliances, of honor and of comity.

Because one hundred years ago today, troops of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), commanded by General John J. Pershing, marched through the streets of Paris on their way to the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette.

(Photos from the Washington Post, 6 April 2017.)

It was a symbolic gesture—we’d only declared war on Germany in April, and our troops were in absolutely no shape to enter combat. In fact, they’d spend months both here and in France, training before being deployed in the front lines. But the gesture brought hope and joy to the citizens of France, and to Britain and the other Allies, who were nearly three years into a war that had nearly brought all combatants to their knees.

There was a powerful personal link between France and the United States that dated to 1777, when the 19-year-old Lafayette arrived here to serve in the Continental Army (which, come to think of it, at that stage wasn’t even as well-organized as the AEF in 1917). The young Frenchman fought with us before his government lent its support, at Brandywine, Monmouth and Yorktown as a general in our army. He was an advocate for democracy and a friend of the United States throughout his life, a kind of bridge between our two countries. He retained the love and respect of Americans, and his grave in Paris is covered with soil from Bunker Hill.

The troops brought to Paris from Saint Nazaire in 1917 were a battalion of the 16^th Infantry. The unit was regular army, but more than half the men were recent recruits. So their marching was not up to military standards.

From contemporary reports, it might have been impossible for even the best-trained unit to have made a snappy march through the crowds that lined the way. They almost had to force their way through the throngs, hundreds of whom rushed from the sidewalks to shake their hands. They were joined by French troops direct from the battlefield, filthy, bandaged, but grateful for our presence. Flowers were tossed from every direction—from children running through the ranks, from the sidewalks, from balconies, and the Americans stuck the blooms in the muzzles of their rifles or tucked them in their belts. Pershing said, “The column looked like a moving flower garden.”

At Lafayette’s grave, there were several speeches by various personages of importance, and a wreath was laid. But the speech that caught the hearts of the Parisians was by Colonel Charles E. Stanton, Pershing’s representative. Stanton began by reminding everyone that “The fact cannot be forgotten that your nation was our friend when America was struggling for existence, when a handful of brave and patriotic people were determined to uphold the rights their Creator gave them—that France in the person of Lafayette came to our aid in words and deed. It would be ingratitude not to remember this, and America defaults no obligations.”

Stanton concluded, “America has joined forces with the allied powers, and what we have of blood and treasure is yours. Therefore, it is with loving pride that we drape the colors in tribute of respect to this citizen of your great Republic, and here and now, in the shadow of the illustrious dead, we pledge our heart and our honor in carrying this war to a successful issue.

“Lafayette, we are here!”

Ah, man—remember when honor meant something? As in, at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, the signers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor? When not everything was up for sale? When we as a nation recognized that to whom much is given, much is required—both domestically and internationally?

Here’s hoping we’ve still got those sensibilities. Happy Independence Day, y’all.