mikegerber.com

Several Yale students enjoying lunch, and the fact that they are not dead.

In the fall of 1990, I had no interest in World War I; then as now, I studied history for the story of it, and there didn’t seem to be any narrative in that conflict. No personalities, no resolution, just four years of static, blood-drenched dress rehearsal for the much more satisfying sequel played out from 1939 to ‘45. But I had requirements for my major, a hole in my schedule, and a humor magazine to run. “History 417a: The First World War” was the only thing that could possibly fit. So I enrolled, without enthusiasm, resolving to sit in the back. Maybe I could prop a book up on its end and catch a few winks; The Record regularly kept me up until four am or later (other things did too).

Here I began to get lucky. First, Yale—or really any college—is the perfect place to study history. The setting and structure emphasizes continuity; on a college campus one can finally grasp what a self-flattering lie it is to think that there is anything new under the sun. Walking around Yale, it’s obvious that the glory of humanity (if indeed we have any) is in the slow and steady accrual of mundane virtues: less hunger, more knowledge, less disease, more compassion. Year on year, person by person this is accomplished, or it isn’t, and when you are in a place with lists of war dead carved into the walls—and bright, beautiful alive people eating lunch around you—which is the right path and which the wrong is obvious if you’re paying any attention.

"In England, we have a word for you guys, and that word is 'dicks.'"

History 417a was being taught by a slightly unusual instructor; that was my second stroke of luck. Sir Michael Howard was, at age 68, too old to teach at Sandhurst, Britain’s equivalent to West Point; and had consequently loaned himself out to us Americans. I am sure there were other professors cruising tweedily about New Haven who could have taught the subject as well as Professor Howard; but it wouldn’t have been the same. The First World War was primarily a European endeavor, and Europeans have a relationship to it that other countries do not. “The First World War” is, for example, a name that reflects the primacy of America; while Europeans had been marching and dying en masse for millennia, it was our first world war, and this perspective helped set the nomenclature. For Europeans, of course, it was the “Great War,” and the still greater war that followed simply a continuation. To be taught this period by a man who grew up in its shadow—who could not help but feel the trauma it had inflicted on literally everyone in his life—was a unique opportunity.

My third piece of good fortune was that I was in the middle of my first adult love affair. Until you are in love, you remain quite ignorant of life’s true scale, and the desire for that grandness is something we all feel, in our bones and other places. This sense of something unseen but terribly important, and a desire to participate in it, is why wars run on teenagers; it is also the tragedy of war, how it takes something positive and uses it for destructive ends. The romance of war only stands in for the real thing; love of country only satisfies until a person is in one’s arms. The moment one truly falls in love, war becomes what it is: a threat and a madness.

The scene of "History 417a: The First World War."

So for three months, Sir Michael Howard shepherded a hundred or so of us future leaders of the world (you’re welcome) through the sorry events of 1914 to 1918. As my friend Rob and I traded jokes in the shadows—he was a fellow Record E-Boarder, and just as punch-drunk as I—the facts and conclusions flew like shrapnel. What an unholy mess it had been, starting as a comic opera (if the Archduke’s driver hadn’t taken a wrong turn, and Princip hadn’t stopped for a sandwich, the assassination would’ve never happened), and ending like a Wagnerian tragedy. Then as now, it’s difficult to keep the facts in order. Ypres, Mons, Verdun, Chateaubriand—is that one, I forget? The battles are almost impossible to keep straight because they are all the same: stupid plans carried out with incredible bravery, unimaginable slaughter ending in utter stalemate.

“By the end of 1915, the French had lost 995,000 men.” That fact alone is enough to paralyze the imagination, or should be. A million men from one country? In three months? And they were just getting started. How many Einsteins, and Picassos bled their lives away into the dirt of Flanders? How many Alexander Flemings or Louis Armstrongs suffocated in a collapsed dugout, or froze to death on the Eastern Front? How many—and now I am speaking as my 21-year-old self—Thurbers or Benchleys or Groucho Marxes perished? What wars really destroy is potential, the future, and that is something simply too big to mourn. And so Rob and I kept joking, even going so far to pop “Sir Mike” into the magazine for an issue or two. He took it all in very good humor; somewhere I have a letter from him mock-failing us both.

There is no story in World War I, only suffering. There are no great heroes who triumph, nor villains who are vanquished; there is no cause thrumming underneath worth all the sacrifice, nor any final victory redeeming it all. It is, to be blunt, some of the most depressing, unsatisfying history one can study. That is its gift to us, and why everyone should have a passing familiarity with it. Especially citizens of countries who emerged from it relatively whole, and have a tendency to forget what they do not wish to remember—yes, I’m talking to you, United States.

"Well, chaps, at least this is the war to end all wars."

Though it could be seen in the American Civil War, it was the conflict of 1914-18 that demonstrated beyond any doubt that industrialization had rendered war obsolete. Not obsolete in an emotional sense—the human animal will always be aggressive—but obsolete in that it no longer served its stated purpose. To put it in modern terms, war is a faulty product. We are sold it is a means of resolving conflict; industrialized war does not do this.

I’d argue that it cannot. Industrialized war inflicts too much trauma on too many people, so that it changes from a set of events bounded by time, into a psychological disorder. Each conflict carries the emotional seeds of the next which, being fought by even more powerful technology, inflicts even more trauma on that generation. And so World War I led to World War II, as surely as a bruise follows a blow. And after that the so-called “Cold War,” which did not seem very cold to the Chinese dying in the 1940s, or in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Central America, Afghanistan, the Balkans…

Think about that. Seventy years and hundreds of millions of deaths later, we were back in the BALKANS. Could there be any stronger proof that this behavior does not work? Industrialized war serves no one but itself. On my gloomier days I feel certain that our current “War on Terror” is only something to distract us while they get the stage ready for the next big show.

It is said that the next war will be the last one, “The War to End All Wars,” but they’ve been saying that since 1918, so I suspect that is not the case. The next war will inflict incredible suffering upon humanity and the Earth, as far beyond our experience as the Great War would’ve been to someone raised in the time of Napoleon. Most appeals for peace invoke this nebulous future horror; and this is why the idea of peace exerts such a weak pull on our affairs. There is too much imagination required. Future suffering is abstract, while immediate maneuvers are fatally tangible. So the planners plan anew. “Will it really be so bad?” they whisper among themselves, and distribute their latest secret schemes for living in holes, or under the sea, or whatever other Hell they’re considering.

Gen. Curtis LeMay, lunatic

If our modern madness has a name, this is it. The only reason some members of the US military advocated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union was, obviously, they felt that they and theirs would come out all right. One always believes that one will survive, this is how human beings are constructed. In people like Curtis LeMay, that instinct was infinitely more powerful than their imagination; that’s the difference between him and say, Jackson Browne. I’d argue one cannot be Curtis LeMay—or indeed any part of the modern military—without killing that precise area of one’s imagination. If a neurotic sees death and decay everywhere, the modern military mind sees everything but death and decay, and must, or be unable to function.

This mental illness is transferred to the public at large via green-tinted film of “stealth bombers” delivering “smart bombs.” There is nothing stealthy about modern warfare and nothing smart about munitions, and only someone who considers warfare theoretical, or as a form of career advancement, could come up with such terms. There is no such thing as collateral damage; there is only damage. Beginning with World War I, conflicts between governments became wars against peoples, with the civilians coming in for more and more punishment. This trend has only increased. Yet we still perceive war as if it happens to other people—to the soldier, say, or the leader. When this was true—before 1914—most wars lasted weeks, and had casualties in the thousands. The leaders and generals grew tired of it quickly, and being the ones who could stop it, did so.

Beginning with World War I, human beings began conducting mechanized genocide, and calling it an affair of state. This, and not faulty morality on the part of a few bad apples, is what makes modern warfare slur so easily into genocide. Modern war is genocidal; there are no noncombatants. A Irishman on the Lusitania who drowns, a German baby who dies from lack of food, a Londoner who is killed by a bomb, a soldier who dies from gas—to cling to some sense of difference between any of these is to fatally injure one’s humanity, to adopt convenience and call it morality.

The scale of violence built in to industrialized warfare means that it cannot resolve conflict. This is what I learned in that dingy room smelling of chalk and floor polish almost twenty years ago. Modern war simply does not perform as advertised. It cannot do so—which means that its only possible reason for continuance is an emotional one. War persists due to the satisfaction of urges deep within the human psyche, urges which, if anything can be called this, are the darkest evil.

"We're fighting where? AGAIN?"

I am not a pacifist, nor do I hold out any great hope for the fundamental change of psychology that is necessary to consign modern war to what Sir Michael Howard probably called “the dustbin of History.” But I do believe that human beings will, if given the facts, move towards their own happiness and away from misery. And so if we can learn that modern war is a great evil that does not work, perhaps we can begin to move to other, less destructive methods of resolving conflict. We have a right to act as we wish, but we do not have a right to prevent others from living, either by poisoning the earth, or so poisoning our souls that they perpetuate our cycle of bitterness and revenge. Technology has taken the option of war away from us; and as the temptation towards war exists in our psychology, only 30,000 years removed from the trees, so too the solution must arise from inside each of us. We must feel that war is obsolete, and recognize the slick salesman’s pitch for what it is: a substitute for real romance, a life really worth living. A substitute that brings nothing but sorrow.

• • •

Some kind soul has uploaded most of the BBC’s wonderful documentary on World War I, “The Great War,” and I spent most of this last weekend digging through it. First broadcast in 1964, it is exhaustive, and somewhat exhausting, but well worth watching. Sixty-four, eh? As I watched, I couldn’t help but imagine the grim visuals being enlivened by muffled Beatles songs coming from the kid’s room upstairs. Beatlemania was a life-affirming reaction to the great European death-wish of the first half of the twentieth century, But that is a topic for another post. I’ve embedded the first installment of the first program, “On the Idle Hill of Summer.”