I decided, with the coming of the New Year,
2014, that it was time to start this blog.
I took its name from an incisive quote by the mensch of all wordsmiths,
Rudyard Kipling: “He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold
himself in the purple of emperors.” It should surprise no one that such
quotable a poet would offer such eloquent snark rebuffing the practice of
quoting others, and the irony sticks well to my writing here – as I enjoy the
words and works of Kipling, so too do I enjoy the expressiveness and profundity
that may come from the well placed quotation of my betters who afore me
writ. So, in the purple of emperors,
Kipling-affirmed or not, I will here wax poetic and splenetic as I like,
quoting away, and certainly quoting Kipling enough to trouble his grave’s
sleep, if not to send him fully spinning.
The thought of committing my ambient
musings to writing and airing them for the world’s judgment has been with me
for some time, but something about the crowning of my last year of course-based
education (now a research-only student 'till DPhil do I part studentship) left me feeling
as though it were time to begin, if only because my educative endeavour no
longer impresses upon me to write on myriad subjects (RIP breadth
requirements). My subject, zoology,
permits me to be more florid and effusive than say, molecular biology, but
nonetheless, all science has a tendency to constrain the writer to word counts
and convention, to speak nothing of the transcendent rarity of Kipling quote
opportunities. So here I stand, or
write, as it were.
I had considered naming this blog “The
Gripe and Grouse” or some petulant similar alliteration on the grounds that its
likely content will be dominated by my less than satisfied dissection of the
mores and maladies of modernity. Though
the name ended on a different gybe, it is safe to say that the topics will
remain in such curmudgeonly territory.
With that being the case, my mind turned to an approaching anniversary
of what may be the most important event in ushering our world and our human
experience form ‘history’ into ‘modernity’ - one of my very favourite topics –
World War I.
The Great War – so great that they threw an
encore by popular demand but a generation later – has always fascinated me far
more than its much more popular, younger sibling. Well, no, it hasn’t, because, product of the
American school system I, World War II was the one of which I had far more information
and grasp when my time in state mandated education ended. Modern Americans generally enjoy World War II
history – grand, unambiguous, valiant, and certainly impressive – it did such a
good job of being the ideal war we always wanted that our archetype of conflict
now centres itself on its otherwise unique model. If every war since had been cut of the cloth
of World War II, I very much doubt the Vietnam protests would have held much
traction. Yet precisely because of this,
World War II came to bore me. Take out
the great speeches of Churchill and the handful of heartwarming and/or badass
stories (all credit to them) and discussion of World War II in philosophical
and moral terms yields dilemmata about as stimulating as a freshman ethics
course. Quite simply: evil rose up
under good’s nose, good caught on, and defeated evil with tactics that made
good feel uneasy at times but were probably justified. This is gross simplification, and I am sure I
will delve further and more complexly into the miasma of the Second Great War
later, but a surface analysis (I’m not writing a book here, after all) leaves
me with much less fat to chew than World War I.
In the young throws of high school when one
first learns of the details of the Great War, the childish mind sees the
tragedy in a vast war conceived of a single assassination, but can almost
justify the reaction in its naiveté – of course the Austrians had to go to war
, someone killed their archduke; of
course. Of course the rest of Europe got involved, you have to honour your
treaties! To the bright, yet to
become jaded mind, the world still works like Age of Empires II – alliances are
to be honoured or else! But of course,
adult cynicism – born, some say, of WWI itself – knows better, and knows that
in matters of war (and love, so goes the adage), betrayal is the rule to the exception
that is stalwart commitment (reference: Britain and the CSA, Germany and Russia
in WWII, Italy in WWI – the list goes on).
In this regard, the circumstances surrounding the explosion of WWI can,
in an almost delightfully perverse way, warm the heart as a miracle of
constancy in alliances. Though this can
only be truly argued tongue firmly in cheek, it highlights the contrast that
initially drew me away from WWII buffery to WWI – WWII found its heartwarming
moments in victory and triumph of human decency over evil; blasé at best, if still one of the only movies that can make me tear up. WWI
pairs the valient optimism of the human spirit and tales of the benevolence
thereof with utter futility and desperation, all in a sea of pointlessness –
much more compelling, to my mind, and much more interesting as a study of human
conflict.
The Great War carries many a romantic
moniker (as if “The Great War” weren’t sufficient) – the war to end all wars,
the first total war, the last gentlemen’s war, the first modern war – and comes
with a lot of beautiful but inexpressive catch-all analyses – something along
the lines of ‘the outcome of a dramatic increase in technology outpacing
improvement of tactics’ being the most popular.
While all of these are true, the human touch of the implications of
these realities is often missed under the smug blanket statements – a forgivable
shortcoming in light of the profound anonymity of human suffering in a war that
produced nearly 60,000 casualties in a single army on a single day of groundfighting. It is often pointed out that,
at least on the Western Front, in the first third to half of the war (before
gas attacks stuck in the moral craw of the respective sides) the two sides
managed to nurse an unexpectedly ample empathy for their enemy; all other
unfortunate racial implications aside, the Germans and the British saw each
other as civilised western men fighting to keep their promises and honour,
fighting war as a business and a game, fighting like hell when told to do so,
and likely looking forward to sitting down for a drink and a grouse with their
surviving cousins on the other side once the higher ups were satisfied and
everyone was paid and discharged; or at least so the more honeyed mythos would have us believe. Though
this arrangement broke down as the war dragged on and less ‘gentlemanly’
tactics came to prominence, the early years of the war – with their Christmastruces and live and let live ideals – offer perhaps humanity’s last look into
war before mechanisation of attacking tactics, before widespread cynicism, and before modernity.
Those who know me well know that I am no
enthusiast of modernism, and that I am a wary watcher of modernity. Yet for all my preference of anachronism,
when it comes to the horror of war I am damned pleased to live in the
dissipated present that any time in the glorious, romantic past. This is largely due to the greater societal
outcomes of WWI. The utter destruction
of the best, brightest, and bravest of an entire generation of humans in the
historical epicentre of the time (Europe, not to be Eurocentric, but this being the simple reality) for a war so
very unnecessary and pointless in the clear, cool vision of hindsight birthed a
new stratum of cynicism and aloofness to human endeavour and purpose. And yet, in the hundred years that have
elapsed since the beginning of the war that demonstrated for the world to see
that whole swaths of promising humanity could be snuffed for next to nothing,
war deaths have plummeted, and the humanity of every soldier and civilian lost
in conflict – the attention to their stories, to their losses, to their
struggles, has grown immeasurably. When America
fought its revolution, the tactics used by the British (and American army, at
first) seem to the modern observer silly and wasteful of life – but were the
suitable tactics at the time, and weighed the value of soldiers’ lives and
health at parity with the function of the low accuracy cannon fodder that they
were. Indeed, from time immemorial until
WWI, war was entered on the expected and accepted reality that where X men
enter to carry out the violence for which they were contracted, Y men would die
or be injured as the cost of doing such business. Though significant chance of death or
catastrophic injury in war remained accepted and expected through WWII, Korea,
Vietnam and so on, the realities revealed in WWI and its trench warfare and "going-over-the-top" death sentence – that X could be so high, and Y so near to X –
slowly turned the hearts and minds of society to the point where now, at least
in the West, every death in war is a singular and personal tragedy – for the
public as much as the family and friends – where dying in battle seems the highly unlikely bad lottery draw of military service rather than a fully anticipatable
outcome. The great irony is that the war
that demonstrated the minuteness of one human’s death in modern battle set in motion
the modernisation of war and of its perception to the point where we now value each human life more. WWII has long worn the
label, but for perhaps this one reason, we can, in the long view, finally call
WWI a “good war.”
Cynicism, irony, dissatisfaction,
pointlessness – these are the idols of the vapid, dissipated aspects of modernity
that I so rue; the unfortunate modern mores that I can only imagine this venue
will see me railing against all too often, or at least deconstructing. Yet if the crucible of their foundation, the
Great War set in motion 100 years ago this June 28th, in engendering these seeds of
modernity, also made it infinitely more difficult and more personal for humans
to look into the eyes of our fellow men and kill them dead in the course of
routine, then perhaps even I can admit that the unfortunate mores are worth the
human empathy. With that I will close
what will likely be my longest post here, and present before the weighing
world, my blog.
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