Taunter Media

The First World War ended ninety-one years ago.

Tender is the Night has this fantastic passage:

“See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco—”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t—he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

No, it wasn’t.  The tragedy is that the Armistice was only the beginning, or at best the end of the first quarter.  It solved nothing and left an embittered population waiting for the next excuse to drop gloves and pick up where they left off.  A West that had more or less known peace from 1871 to 1914 – a lifetime in those pre-penicillin days – proceeded to tear itself apart in every disgusting way it could dream.  Communism, which almost literally was a weapon of war with the German delivery of Lenin to Petersburg, ravaged Russia.  Fascism hit Italy and spread to Germany, mutating into Nazism.  The war sparked by the Nazis enveloped the globe, running into the simmering fight between Japan and China.  It broke Chiang’s weak regime and gave us Mao and all the various conflicts of the Cold War.  Hell, the lines carelessly drawn on the conference room floor in Versailles set off two thirds of the world’s struggles for national liberation.

Maybe the Armistice can best be described as the funeral for the idea that man could fight a war to end wars.

On the other hand, the terror of war really does seem to have passed out of Western Europe.  On a beautiful day last fall in Frankfurt I decided to drive to Paris.  I ate lunch and got on the autobahn.  There was no border crossing – indeed, no traffic and barely a marker – when I moved onto the autoroute.  I got off the road to visit Verdun, and there I was, completely alone among the thousands of crosses at Douaumont.  Gorgeous day, color in the leaves, the trees long since swallowing up what had been a moonscape.  No trenches, no gas, just rolling hills at the edge of the vast plain of northern France.  It was very hard to believe men suffered agonizing deaths to push a few inches toward those trees.

I left, and road construction took me around town, where the signs for Verdun were joined by signs for Sedan, where the French Army surrendered in 1871.  Then it was back on the autoroute, and the sun began to set into the brown markers that flew by – the battles of the Marne and Chateau-Thierry, Patton’s Third Army, Napoleon’s Grande Armee – marked the bloodshed.  I was in Paris for dinner.

I am not a pacifist.  Nations need to defend themselves.  We are in a serious conflict and need to take serious measures.  What we cannot do is fail to take the fight seriously, and I fear that is what has happened with our military deployments.  We have had expeditionary forces in the field for so long – we still have 30,000 men on the DMZ – that we have gotten used to living our own lives and forgetting about the people we send off.  Actually, we don’t forget them – we have plenty of veteran’s events, and “support our troops” is a constant at speeches – so much as we stop thinking of them as people.  Our soldiers are cultural icons; we can hold bake sales and car washes for them, or pay for USO entertainment for them, we just cannot bring ourselves to think of their lives as real.

Some American soldier is going to die in Iraq before the year is out.  He will die from some unpredictable tactical situation: a good sniper, a lousy Humvee, assault from a fellow soldier, betrayal by an Iraqi.  And he will die from a completely predictable strategic situation: if you leave soldiers in harm’s way long enough, they will die.  Our Army is not moving forward in Iraq.  We have no objectives.  We will leave someday, and that day will be no different from today, except the guy whose number comes up next will never get a chance to see it.  He won’t have lunch in Frankfurt or dinner in Paris or a beautiful drive across Western Europe.  He won’t go home or see his friends.  He will lose all of this for us.  The least we can do is forget the care packages and get him home, where he can chase his dreams in his way.  To do otherwise is to be both selfish and tragically wasteful, and if we have learned anything in the past ninety-one years, I would hope it is just how valuable life is.