WWI: Smile, Boys, That's the Style!

 The title here is a line from the First World War song "Pack up Your Troubles" [Link].  "Style": it was an aspect of WWI that distinguished it from other wars.  Why?  That single word was one of the deadliest of the war.  "Style" was a distillation of the blind optimism defining the nations at that time, and it dressed the innocence of their younger generation as they marched off to die.

Picture in your mind what a World War I soldier looks like.  You might come up with an image of a soldier in a "battle bowler" -- the broad-brimmed tin hat that the English Tommy and, later, the American Doughboy wore. Or perhaps the steel coal-scuttle helmet the Germans wore and that you see in German recruitment posters of the day.

However, when the war started in August of 1914, and until well into 1915, the armies valued the previous centuries' sensibilities for style: brightly colored pants and coats, bright buttons, feathered helms, shiny swords, and long, shiny bayonets.

French Style: "Can You See Me NOW?"  (source: wikimedia)

Wartime novels made a point to satirize the naivete behind this deadly preference for style, as in All Quiet on the Western Front where the German sergeant Himmelstoss demands polished buttons among other stylish mandates. But he's never been to the front and has no practical sense of how to survive in the trenches.  Adhering strictly to the manual, he can't teach the young trainees to use a shovel instead of a bayonet in a hand-to-hand trench fight, something that would do much more in keeping them alive.

Only well into the war did the command come to understand that Style was at the center of one of the war's absurdities.  At the outset of the war, you would find the French in bright red pants, a blue coat, and a red cap. The British troops wore a cloth cap with a small leather bill.  And the Germans wore either a cloth cap or the pickelhaube, with its shiny spike atop the helmet made of leather imported from Argentina [Link].  The pickelhaube had, before the war, acquired a drab, cloth cover.  Why? Because the shine on the spike, like the French army's red cap, made an easy target for snipers.  But still: cloth and leather?  Both are easily penetrated in a metal maelstrom.

 British Cloth Caps (and One Head Wound): Nothing Bounces Off

 

German Pickelhaubes and Cloth Caps

None of these caps offered protection from the shrapnel shells.  Shrapnel were small (usually lead) balls that burst from a flying shell (an exploding container) just above the heads of soldiers. It would burst about thirty feet above ground by way of a "fuse cap" that timed the explosion to occur after the shell left the cannon.  When it exploded, its cargo of lead balls flashed out, penetrated the cloth and leather of the caps, and pierced the soldiers' flesh and smashed bones.

Shrapnel: Have a Ball! (Source: Metal Detecting World)

Also fierce were the steel fragments from high explosive shells.  The thicker walls of these hardened steel shells would fragment upon explosion and send razor-sharp shards, large and small, spinning through the air (and through anything in its way); as with shrapnel, fragments flew at about twice the speed of sound.

Of course, these shells simply added to the destruction that bullets and grenades could produce through a cloth cap.

So after 1915 and only after an inordinate number of casualties due to head wounds, the bright idea was to use metal helmets. Thinking of this plan over a year after the war began seems a bit late in the party.  I mean, think of it: the Greeks, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, medieval knights, the Spaniards -- and who not -- had used metal helmets in war.  There's a famous scene in the Iliad of Hecktor playing with his son, who, a moment before, whimpered in fright at the sight of his father in his helmet.  Every French, German, and English soldier had learned about helmets when they were school boys -- as did their generals.

In essence, soldiers of WWI were sent out in cloth caps, as to a playground outing, with the apparent aim to out-style one another. And this in confronting not broadswords, battle-axes, and arrows, but the new machines of war that outpaced the medical technology to put the poor, wounded Humpties back together again.

 

British Brodie Helmets at the Somme, left; German Helmets and Gas Masks, right.

The French also reviewed what expediency required to keep their Poilus ("hairy") soldiers alive and produced a helmet.

The French Adrian

This deadly and inane preference for style over practicalities showed itself in other aspects of the war, but none perhaps as profoundly as sending men to fight against flying bits of metal in cloth hats.

Undue attention for style can occur in current wars, but perhaps not quite to the degrees seen in WWI.  We seem, happily, to lack that too-innocent sense of style.

But one thing stands distinct and clear about the First World War: beyond the absence of plain common sense in using cloth caps from the very start of the war, beyond the crime of sending men to live and die in the spirit-sapping mud, beyond the homicidal blindness of sending men to crawl out of the earth and attack in a line across open ground without any cover, there was something morally disgusting about insisting that they do these things while giving undue attention to style.

Pierre: It Wasn't Paris

 Pierre

Pierre was one of my great uncles, brother to my grandfather.  It is said that he had restless feet, and after serving in the First World War, he would disappear for some years and then suddenly reappear.

I understand the question that troubled some people about this well-loved uncle (and about other young men who went to France during the war), but it was a relatively shallow question: "How you going to keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?" -- as the WWI song put it.  The real question was probably a bit deeper for Pierre as it was for other soldiers returning home.  It wasn't Paris, where they spent some leave time -- with the wine, women, and song -- that caused them to be unsettled when they returned home from war.

Pierre enlisted the day after the US declared war on Germany.  One record states that he was the first in his community to enlist and "probably the first in his county"(Pocahontas Record) -- and the day he enlisted was his birthday: 15 April 1917.  Certainly he was, like so many young men of the First World War, tied up with ambition, ardent dreams of "some desperate glory" as one poet said, and...he wanted adventure.  Adventure, he may have thought -- like most of us have thought -- would come easily to hand, light up life like a carnival, and then leave us to return home to settle down.

Then there were the trenches, the shelling, the machine guns, and the friends whom one saw fall -- the friends that one survived.  So Pierre didn't come home with the same fireworks in his mind that most Americans saw on the 4th of July.  The fireworks he saw recalled a different reality.

He was in the Vosges where the German army had long before established trenches in the mountains.  Pierre's unit, at this time under command of the French, was sent to hold the line in the Gerardmer sector, in the mountain pass of Schlucht (Col de la Schlucht).

 Col de la Schlucht: Now a Ski Resort.... (source: Michelin)

One unit history has it that, among many other things they did, the German artillery shelled the American field kitchens that had been set up by some fresh-water streams, knowing that they could kill their enemy as they came to get water and cook food for their men.  Dastardly -- but it was war as it is now or at any other time.... In a game of kill-or-be-killed, who has ever played nice?  War isn't like that despite the so-many rules of engagement set up by politicians well behind the lines.

French (red) and German (blue) Lines in the Schlucht (Pierreswesternfront)

His unit, Company C of the 11th Infantry Regiment, was pulled back briefly, put into further training, and then sent (now strictly under American instead of French command) into the Meuse-Argonne while that battle was raging.  He spent the last days of the war pursuing the Germans in their retreat, up to the 11th Nov., the Armistice.  One event during this time involved his company moving to the east, swimming the Loison river, and emerging to capture the French village of Jamtez from the Germans.

The French Village of Jametz, East of the Loison River (Google Maps)

 

Jametz, France August 2014 (Source: Author)

On 11 July 1918, Pierre had written to his mother (note: brackets indicate my editions/guesses to somewhat garbled text):

My last letter was written just before entering the trenches the first time. Since then we have been in the trenches most of the time. Our first trip was in a different sector than we now hold. We spent our first period there [and then] were relieved and brought directly here so we have really spent most of that time in the trenches. Will be glad when we are relieved and taken back for a rest.  Trench life is not so bad where there is lots going on to [provide] plenty of excitement. We have had a real time with rats in the dug out. They are braver than any Huns that ever lived and there is sure some army of them. There are a million things I would like to tell you about but will have to wait until I return. I hope that won't be long, for the sooner we lick the Germans and get back to the good old States the better we all will feel.  I hope Gen. Pershing ... is right when he said it was either "heaven, hell or Ho-boken by winter." (Pocahontas Record 10 Nov. 1938, p. 16)

 Pierre continued his description of events in another letter to his father:

Aug. 9, 1918  Dear Dad:  Am out of the ditches now for a few days. Was relieved the sixth. Twas an awful night raining and dark as hell. The artillery and machine guns were very active right at the time our relief came in. I could hardly talk loud enough to make the fellows relieving me understand the orders of the sector. But at last I got them straightened out, ...I got my platoon together and started out. Well I hadn't gone over three hundred yards before half of them were lost. It took some little time to find them. And when I got them back, I had every one take hold of hands and follow me one behind the other. That way we got along pretty well but t'was 2:30 a. m. before we made it out. We spent ten days in the trenches this trip.  Our worst trouble is going in and out and of course moving from place to place. I'll tell you it takes guts to put your old pack on your back which consists of all a man's belongings and hit out down the road. There has been times when I'd think I couldn't take another step but I'd always reach our destination and I suppose I could go much farther if necessary. There's no use telling if [it's as hard a life as we think. It's tough not to think of it all the time in war.]  And after we get a good meal and a little rest we forget it all and are ready to start again.  We get good treatment and good eats so that is all that a man can expect at a time and a place like this. In other words we are getting along fine. (ibid.)

Shifting men, who get lost in the maze of trenches at night under bombardment and machine gun fire....  Yes, well: the effects don't soon wear off.  It was the American author and WWI ambulance driver Malcolm Cowley who perhaps best described the lasting effects:

We didn't want to be slackers, embusques. The war created in young men a thirst for abstract danger, not suffered for a cause but courted for itself; if later they believed in the cause, it was partly in recognition of the danger it conferred on them. Danger was a relief from boredom, a stimulus to the emotions, a color mixed with all others to make them brighter.  There were moments in France when the senses were immeasurably sharpened by the thought of dying next day, or possibly next week.  The trees were green, not like ordinary trees, but like trees in the still moment before a hurricane; the sky was a special and ineffable blue; the grass smelled of life itself; the image of death mingled together into a keen, precarious delight. (Exile's Return p. 42).

"How you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?"  It's not Paris that made them restless.  It's what lies between you in Paris on leave and your buddies left dead in the fields.

Hemingway put it this way, using an old barn and a grove of hemlock as metaphors for lost innocence:

We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn.  The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been.  You could not go back. (Farewell to Arms, qtd in Cowley p. 46).

The beginning of next month, August 2014, marks the centenary of the beginning of WWI.  The more we understand about it, the more we will understand Pierre's -- and other veterans' -- seemingly odd behaviors, their silence about the war, their restless feet, their need to sit in a room facing the door, what they see sometimes when they stare, and their simple desire for normalcy.

Merci, Pierre.  You carried the weight of trying to set a portion of civilization right.  And you carried the loss of friends.  It was a lot of weight to carry in silence because no one -- other than another veteran -- could quite understand it.

Time and Again

Once upon a Doorstep....was a Room with a View (upper left)

Walking down the street the other day, I  passed this doorway -- 7 Bedford Place.  Looking up and thinking back, I calculated that it was exactly 30 years ago as a graduate student in London I stayed at this place.  What tranquil hours I spent absorbed in my books in the room, upper left.

Tall Georgian Windows at 7 Bedford Pl.

Beyond reading my books, I was writing in my journal to help crystallize my fuzzy ideas, researching, and writing papers on English history, art, architecture, literature, theatre....  Much time was spent over William Blake, and when an afternoon grew drowsy, I had only to step down the street toward Bloomsbury Square, round the corner to the British Museum, and there find -- among a million other objects of soul-inspiring interest -- originals of Blake's art.  Very handy, that, when writing on the relations between Blake's spiritual vision, his art, and his poetry.  But there were other writers, among them one who worked in Bloomsbury at Faber, whose door was just across Russell Square -- T. S. Eliot:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
.     .     .     .     .
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Indeed, there was time enough.  I value those idyllic days and hours even though I have come to realize that all along I had been preparing my answers to face the questions that I myself, as well as others, dropped on my plate over these past 30 years.

Bear with a little nostalgia?  There was Kurt -- a student/worker at Number 7: when he got free from work late at night, he and I would dash to Holborn tube station, head through two other underground lines to St. Paul's, rush round the back of St. Paul's through the churchyard, across roads dotted with traffic, to the Samuel Pepys' -- a pub in an old, Dickensian-age warehouse on the river -- arriving just in time for a pint or two of Bass Ale on the balcony and some talk over the glimmering lights on the Thames before the pub closed up for the night.

And there was the evening when Peter O'Toole played Professor Higgins to Jackie Smith-Wood's Eliza at the Shaftesbury Theatre.  A young woman-acquaintance joined me, and we delighted in the production -- a liquefied O'Toole nearly slopped himself off the edge of the stage, but was of course still brilliantly acting!

                             (Guardian)                                                (Getty)

(myfavoritepeterotoole.tumblr.com)

And the great John Thaw was playing Eliza's father long before he played Morse.  After the play, I well remember, there was meaningful conversation over pasta in Sicilian Avenue.

Another night there were two salesmen, Mr. Glasgow and Mr. Exeter -- and then a woman who, swaying to the cosmic forces, arrived at the Swan in Cosmo Place to lead us to an overwhelming answer...[Link].

And there was a pigeon (in London?!) who wandered from the balcony into my room through the floor-to-ceiling window while I was writing.  How long he'd been there, who knows?  Upon hearing a noise, I turned, spied him, and invited him to leave.  Deft was his turn and stately his gait as he sauntered out onto the balcony to look back but once and then fly off -- apparently a statue nearby hadn't quite enough poop on its head already.

And the Tube cars still had wooden slats on the floors.

Wooden Floor Slats on the Piccadilly Line (1984)

That was a time.  And again?

When, years later, I brought my students to London -- once, here, to 7 Bedford Place -- I hoped they might try to find their own London, begin finding a face to meet the faces that they'd meet -- if they hadn't already begun.  My hopes were they'd begin to ask and to answer questions for and of themselves, to see what's on the plate.  The poets offer some clues.  The painters offer some as well.  The theatre offers some help.  Studying history offers some direction.  Not least, the pub can offer some help -- if you've both good company and conversation.  Honesty about questions and answers is of the greatest help.

I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog that much of what London was in 1984 is gone -- but much more of it, I'm realizing, is still intact.  A great deal of it remains the same despite being some centuries old -- like Number 7.

It certainly remains, both as it was in 1984 and as it is now, deeply set within me.

Centenary: World War One -- The Start

 "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." -- Nietzsche

One hundred years ago a Great War began that was supposed to end all wars.  It simply became daily more horrific and more devastating than anyone -- soldiers, civilians, politicians, the whole world -- had imagined war could be.  But what made it distinct from either previous or later wars?  That's a question I've puzzled over for many years.

On the face of it, the sweeping changes in war's technologies and strategies made it different.  It was the first time aircraft were used with weapons; it was the first time chemical weapons were used on a mass scale, bringing soldiers to blindness or to coughing up parts of lungs.  It was the first time systematic genocide occurred.  It was the first time actual, automatic machine guns were used, that could literally cut across lines of men.  It was the first time armored tanks were developed and used.  It was the first time civilians were deliberately targeted by the newly developed, long-range cannons fired into Belgium and Paris from tens of miles away.  And it was the first time that cities, including London and other areas of England, were bombed from aircraft (dirigibles as well as airplanes).  It was the first time that underground rooms ("mines") were dug beneath enemy lines, crammed with high explosives, and detonated, sending acres of earth and blasted pieces of men thousands of feet in the air.  RAF pilot Cecil Lewis, flying over Hawthorn Ridge, measured earth flying to 4,000 feet by his altimeter.  In one case an entire village was, with a series of mines, blown into the air -- the Butte de Vauquois [Link].

Hawthorn Ridge, 1 July 1916 

Men were for periods living, often with the bodies of their dead pals along side, in a web of trenches and an underground mesh of tunnels that ran from the coast in Belgium, south through the entirety of France without stop to the border of Switzerland. There soldiers remained in the mud, blood, and filth until they, too, were smashed, wounded with a "cushy" that sent them home, or relieved by another unit, only to return to the trenches days later.

The Web of Trenches at Hawthorn Ridge, the Somme

Oxymoronically, many of the newly machined recoil cannons were mounted on the wooden wagon wheels -- a feature of previous eons -- still towed by animals and men.  But this new weaponry created carnage that outpaced the armies' strategies to repel attacks or to advance, and the carnage was far beyond medical technology's ability to heal.  If soldiers escaped with but a slight wound, gangrene easily set in (there were no antibiotics), and that would slowly finish the work the shells, bullets, and barbed wire had begun.

Another distinct feature of this war is found in its devastation of the earth: the Front became a moonscape of mud -- shell holes mixed with bodies and the junk of war that stretched across western and eastern Europe.  As Siegfried Sassoon, one soldier-poet from the First World War, expressed it, "...altogether, I found that Armageddon was too immense for my solitary imagination."  The earth along the Western Front still bears the marks of trenches, still yields some 200 tons of unexploded shells and grenades every year, and it still has the highest concentration of tetanus in the world.  All of this is beyond the human bones that continue to emerge from the ground.

We Are Making a New World. Paul Nash, 1918

But the most significant way that the Great War was different hinges upon what it did inside humans for the first time.  It obliterated an internal existence, a collective mode of reference held in common by people before the war.  As Paul Fussell put it in his minimalist way, 1914 was the last moment in time that "we could assume that people were nice."

After sending people into a living hell, our assumptions had changed: we could no longer be optimistic about history and the people who make it.  The world of optimistic assumptions described by Victorians like Charles Dickens was gone: gone was the belief that people were essentially good, that they had a sense of propriety, decency, decorum.  The Victorians assumed that, while there were, indeed, malevolent, greedy, and violent individuals out there, on the whole people were, like Oliver Twist, innately good and incorruptible -- or at least could agree on some common values to preserve life, society, civilization.

This sense can be seen even in the last moments of the war.  Emmet Johns, a WWI veteran, whom I interviewed when he was 103 years old, told me the story of the Armistice on the front -- the very moment when the fighting ceased.  His unit was in cover, waiting to attack a captured French village in order to push the Germans out of it.  It would mean a great number of casualties on both sides -- most certainly for Johns' unit as they would move into the open to attack.

Johns explained that the hope for a cease fire hovered over the troops in those long minutes.  But if the order to attack arrived, for many it would mean dying just moments before the war ended.  Johns told of the cannons firing at an immense rate, creating a din that was imaginable.  Historians tell us this furious barrage was done out of practical consideration: artillery units fired every shell they could so they would not have to load the heavy shells back on wagons and return them to ammunition depots if the cease-fire occurred.

Johns and his unit hunkered down in the midst of the continuous shelling when suddenly, as Johns described it,

Everything was quiet.  You could hear birds chirping.  And then a French soldier was running down the road shouting "La guerre est finie!  La guerre est finie!"

Not, that is, "We won!" but "The war is over!"  That was the Armistice on Nov. 11th 1918 at 11:00 a.m.  The war succeeded in setting the toe tag on the corpse of human optimism for -- among other things -- traditional politics, for traditional morality, for blind hope in technology, for human innocence.

At least it did so for those who attempted to understand just what had happened to the world.  Just read your Hemingway, your Vera Brittain, your Evelyn Waugh....  The disillusion and deep-seated cynicism (albeit with darkly ironic humor) is what we inherited from the Great War.

After the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919,  each allied nation created a "Victory" medal for its veterans.   On the back of these medals was printed -- in each nation's own language -- this phrase: "The Great War for Civilisation."

The Great War for Civilization

 

 Victory Medals: (Left) Belgian, Front; (Right) British, Back

Did it end all wars? No; it changed how wars would be fought in future and undermined our underlying "ethics" of war.  Did it save civilization?  No; it changed everything we could henceforth assume was "civilized" and what we could safely assume about human beings.

The most articulate question I believe anyone has ever asked about this war, or about any war, is one from Annette Becker and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau in their book Understanding the Great War: 1914-1918:

"What is the weight of the dead upon the living?"

Many people (excepting the politicians and industrialists who lead us into wars) have attempted to answer this question, including people like Eric Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back, like Joseph Heller in Catch 22, like Alan Alda in M.A.S.H., like Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried, or like Brian Turner in Here, Bullet!

The point is that we who survive war must carry the weight of our dead, and we may not put that weight down.  It remains with us.  That is precisely why we must understand the Great War.  Remembering with monuments, cenotaphs, and tombs of the unknown -- with poems, with annual remembrance days -- all that remembering is different from understanding.  It is rather imperative to understand how it changed us and what weight it left us with.

Footprints in a Rug

Footprints in a Rug source: thisnext.com

I knew a woman who kept a hair brush under her couch -- a white couch, before which lay a white rug. When a visitor got up from the couch, say, to visit the kitchen or the toilet, she would slip the brush out from under the edge of the couch, brush the person's footprints from the rug as they walked across the room, and before the person returned, she'd quickly slide the brush back into its hiding place -- all the while believing she would not be observed.

You felt easily, distinctly, correctly that she would rather dwell in a castle alone -- that your existence was messing up her ivory tower.  There was little-to-no room in her life for the footprints of others.

This all sounds, of course, like Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced "buck-ett," not "Boo-kay," please) -- the narcissistically fastidious character on the old Brit-com "Keeping up Appearances." For me, the fictional Hyacinth is all too real.

A Martyr?
It's Someone Who Lives with a Saint. visual source: thiswastv

You see, this true story isn't all that rare: the couch, the brush, and the rug (sans footprints).  A parody (Hyacinth in this case) plays off of realities and exaggerates them, creating a caricature of a real person or event.  In this case it's just that the parodic Hyacinth is parallel to, not an exaggeration of, the woman with the brush.  That makes the story not so much bathetic [link] but pathetic and, ultimately, tragic.  How intimately can you enter into such a connection, being reminded at every step that you're only messing up someone's life?  How many deep relationships can that person have?  I don't know.  But our relationships all bring footprints that we either try to brush away or, conversely, value -- and some footprints remain whether we like them or not.

How do they work?  Relationships operate in direct proportion to our own and others' capabilities.  That is, we accept our loved ones' and friends' capabilities or incapabilities.  We welcome and admire their abilities; we tolerate and assist them when they are incapable of something.  So too our friends accept (or refuse to accept) our own capabilities or incapabilities.  Out of respect, we tend to leave the muddy boots of our incapabilities at the door.  But very seldom can anyone change incapabilities quickly and permanently.  They may change over time; they may not.  Most often the person you first got to know is what you get -- for better or worse.  Still, everyone we know is going to leave footprints in our lives.

To Brush or Not to Brush? source: brigittesbrushes

And we tend to erase some footprints (our own metaphorical hair brush stashed somewhere out of sight) as people will naturally come and go from our lives; some prints we cherish, others we erase after little time -- when, say, temporal acquaintances have gone on with their lives and have left but little mark in ours.  Others are more permanent, leaving clear indication they walk with us and remain in our lives.

And incapabilities? Just as we have friends whose capabilities raise us up in life -- challenge us and complement our being -- there are those "false friends" (faux amis) whose presence in our lives are only and ultimately negative for the marks they leave.  (We don't always recognize such "friends" immediately, and how is it that others see them clearly when we can't?)

In cases where a false friend becomes an impediment to our lives, or stain our existence -- well, then it's best to try to brush their presence out permanently.  After all, being a doormat indicates only a lack of healthy self-respect and common sense.  And they who would walk all over us?  They are incapable of recognizing what damage they bring into our lives -- and perhaps cannot be brought to a place where they cease to deface, let alone place value on, the welcome we lay before them.

 Defaced and Damaged? Repairable? source:stainmaster

We put out a welcome mat for people who enter our lives; we create a place where they can be comfortable with both us and with themselves, a place where we may walk, where we may be, together in life.  The goal isn't to remain pristine, without a mark -- we bear the weight of others as they bear our weight, and we all show the marks.  Ultimately we must choose who will leave footprints in us, but we can't always choose how long the prints will remain, brush as we may.  Sometimes, for good or ill, footprints remain, deep, light, sometimes staining, but more: often they are favored and memorable marks we'd not live without.

Lintels, Keystones, and Archways

When did you last pass through a doorway, under a lintel, beneath an arch?  What keystone sustained an arch over you, marking your passage from one place in life to another?  These are not just literal stone, wood, brick, or metal portals.  Can we say (or imagine for a moment) that they create a passage for us through a figurative wall, a veil dividing stations in life, a curtain dividing our times, and an arch marking our travels through life?

Once upon many times ago in Scotland, my ancestors walked beneath this archway in Whithorn.

Entry to Whithorn Priory  (photo mine)

How old is it?  The Romanesque arch gives a clue.  But see where the wooden porch beams (long since gone) wore into the very stones of the arch through the centuries?  How many Christmases, Easters, weddings, baptisms, funerals, how many Eucharists did my ancestors observe here, coming up from their homes in Isle of Whithorn?

What does it mean to walk under such an arch and dwell for a time within a space that has housed the hopes and fears within millennia of hearts -- and share that space not only with one's ancestry but with each individual who gathered there throughout the long ages?  As T. S. Eliot put it, "you are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid."

There are other arches we pass through, some "costing no less than everything," as Eliot also said of faith itself.

The Arc de Triumph, with the Inconnu (the unknown solider) from the First World War, lying beneath:  this unknown soldier has not passed through the arch, but remains in situ at its center.  It is an arch of victory for which they died, giving others free passage into another room within their lives, and indeed -- on both sides of the passage. Freedom. No one there can dictate how life must be lived--unless, that is, we fail to maintain our freedoms.

Arc de Triomphe, Paris. [Source: Paris Digest]

 

 

 

 

 

The Grave of the Unknown (Inconnu) in Paris [Source]

 Another, special portal exists in Santa Fe, New Mexico -- in the basilica.  The story? It involves a successful Jewish businessman, Mr. Abraham Staab:

When money had become scarce in the hard times then prevailing, the merchant had become banker and loaned large sums to the Archbishop to prevent stoppage of the work. "How is the work on the Cathedral progressing?," inquired Staab. "Times are hard," answered the Archbishop, "but the Cathedral will be finished. All I ask is an extension of time on my notes." Staab went to a large iron safe, took out all the notes that the Archbishop had signed and said to him: "Archbishop, let me have a say in the building of that new Cathedral and I will tear up all these notes." Cautiously the man of God measured the eyes of the man of Commerce and Business and inquired: "To what extent, how, Mr. Staab?" Staab replied: "Let me put one word above the entrance of the Cathedral, chiselled in stone." "And what is that word?," parried the Archbishop. "You must trust me, Archbishop,' replied Staab. Archbishop Lamy agreed to Abraham Staab's proposal. Staab tore up the notes in the presence of the Archbishop, tossed the fragments of paper into a fire in the stove in the office. When the Cathedral was finished, there for all the world to see, was the part that Staab had taken in its building, The Hebraic initials J V H [Y H W H] symbolic of the word "God" of the Christian faith, "Jehovah" of the faith of Israel (Reeve and Walter, 311 [Link]).  

That "Tetragrammaton" (the letters making the name of God) is carved over the side entrance of the Santa Fe Basilica today.

The Tetragrammaton Source: Williams

Santa Fe's Arch Source: Williams

Here one man, between faiths and through significant personal sacrifice, assisted in making a passage towards God, God having already made a way for humans toward Himself.

There are other, perhaps more personal, arches.

When I was a wee lad, I walked under this very keystone almost every day for what seemed an eternity.  It was the keystone to my primary (elementary) school.  Once I passed inward, beneath this stone, I found a world of heavy, dark, wood hand rails along stairways, creaking blonde wood floors, smoothed by generations of shoes of children as they bumbled along in lines to their classrooms.  There were books -- some musty and some new.  We went outside, again passing beneath this keystone, to make heroic chase on the playground, then in once more for yawning lessons, then outside one final time -- to freedom at the day's end. 

The Keystone Gleaming above the East Door

Chipped but Recovered from Demolition: the East Keystone

Without those days spent passing in and out beneath that keystone, I would not have had the opportunity to learn to live, to see, to awaken in intellect and spirit. That awakening came later -- assisted through other teachers official and unofficial (but who can tell which are which?).  The days under this keystone meant the beginning of thinking for myself by thinking in the light of others -- by reading and understanding the ideas of those who have articulated to us what they saw, imagined, learned....

Without those days after (tedious) days beneath the keystone, I would not later have been able to feed on the ideas of others and inform my own paradigms and faith.  I recall some fairly grim days my poor teachers spent, sacrificing their lives to drag me through some unwanted lessons.  It was years before I hungered to know for myself, years until I thrived to see what existed beyond other passages, through other doors.  Without this keystone which they and others raised and maintained, I would only have found a mentally claustrophobic and stultifying existence awaiting generations of souls.

This school's keystone is not, for me, least among the others.  By this one, as well as by the others, I have learned that all portals, doorways, keystones, and lintels are not solely for one's own self. The best ones are created to make us useful in this world: the French soldier sacrificed the dreams he had for his own life by going (either of own will or his country's compulsion) to war.  And it was something he read, something he learned, some art that he saw, that made him do so.  And Mr. Staab? The same: he could read the name of God and gave of himself so others could know that name.

If it is true, what an old text says (I believe it is and have seen someone do it) -- that "no greater love has a man than to lay down his life for his friends" -- then to raise an arch, to set a keystone, to make portal, to create a way into life for others is what we are here to do.  Ironically, I am only brought to see this by going through the arches that others have made for me.  That's the other side -- or both sides -- of the arch.