In Time of War I: Bedlam

London WWII : Blitzed

Blitz noun: An intensive or sudden military attack.  Londoners survived the Blitz.  literal: London during both world wars was blitzed. figurative (heard on a sidewalk this afternoon): Last night I got totally blitzed.

Most everyone is well aware that London was heavily bombed during WWII.  But during the First World War, German aircraft -- both dirigibles (blimps) and planes -- bombed London.  For example, on 4 September 1917, RAF pilot Cecil Lewis was in London when one an attack from a blimp occurred.  The Germans were trying to hit Somerset House, important to the war effort, but hit the Savoy hotel (the bomb went through four floors), with another bomb falling by Cleopatra's Needle along the Thames embankment.  The damage that Lewis describes in his memoir Sagitarius Rising has been left just as it was: pierced bronze sphinxes (holes today that you can put your fingers into) and chipped granite stonework.

Cleopatra's Needle: Damage to Stone and Bronze Sphinx (Photo: author)

St. Paul's Cathedral suffered damage during the second war, some remnants of which have been left in the stone on the back of the cathedral.  The remarkable photos of it during the blitz impress, not least when you consider that people were actually atop the church during the bombing to put out fires.

St. Paul's during a Night of Bombing

St. Paul's: Interior Damage

Churchill carried the English through, in part by his tough wit and good humor.  Wit: one instance was while he visited America.  A woman admonished him when he requested a "breast" of chicken for dinner: 

Woman: "Winston, in America we don't say that."

Churchill: "Madame: what do you call it, then?"

Woman: "We call it 'white meat.'"

The next day the woman received a corsage from Churchill that bore a note: "Madame: you may pin this corsage on your white meat."

But Churchill's sterner stuff helped carry England through the war.  Hitler had said early in their attacks, "in three weeks England would have a neck wrung like a chicken."  When England remained standing (albeit alone as Italy and France made a separate peace), Churchill remarked Hitler's failed agenda: "Some chicken! Some neck!" [Link]

In the program notes for Terence Rattingan's play Flare Path (about British a bomber crew during the war), there was a criticism that England committed war crimes by bombing German civilians.  It is not an irony that Hitler had decreed to the German people that there were no civilians in Germany: they were -- every one of the women, children, and men -- combatants.  In consequence, they inherited the war their chosen leaders gave them.  Churchill set the mode -- if such a war was necessary:

There is only one thing that will...bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating exterminating attack...upon the Nazi homeland.  We must be able to overwhelm him by this means, without which I do not see a way through.

Max Hastings (quoting Churchill, above, in the programme guide for Rattigan's play) sees this comment as revealing Churchill's "desperation."  Far from it.  It is utter common sense.  This was to nip the war in the bud, something that did not happen in the First World War as Churchill -- a soldier in that earlier event -- well knew.  This was experience talking, not desperation.  To kill the German chicken, it must be done quickly and thoroughly.

After all, the World War, like a game of football, was already into its second half, as everyone in Europe knew.

A woman in a restaurant in Honfleur, France, said this to me (in French) as we talked about the two wars: "two times the Germans were here.  When again?!"  I had never before, nor have since, heard a French person express that.  It was the same sense that Churchill knew: it must be stopped this time or it would continue.

Germany is a different country from what it then was, despite prejudices and propensities that have continued there just as they have in any other place on the earth.  The lessons of wars -- any wars from those at Illium or Iraq -- are these.

War is beyond any possible measure for its separations, for its griefs upon griefs, which are the real losses.  These are losses beyond all the materiel, prosperity, and accumulated culture and wealth despoiled in a conflagration.  What is the area or volume -- the squared or cubed dimensions -- of suffering in war?  That is unanswerable and is like someone asking "is the color yellow round or square?"  War is of a nature that it cannot, for its suffering, be defined or measured.

What strikes me about all war is seen in the parallel to the playground bully: war is a heyday for the bully when he is in the ascendancy -- and when he deludes himself about having a "right" to violent means toward a "justified" end.  These mental constructs are lies which bullies tell themselves, lies that everyone but the bully can see through.  And so, the Germans had on their military belt buckles in both world wars the motto "Gott mit Uns" (God with Us) -- as so many armies throughout the millenniums have believed of their self-justified causes.

 

But always, when the war comes home to the fascist bully, when he has picked on a foe beyond his ability to beat, that's when (sudden irony!) the returned violence is perceived as a moral wrong, and the bully sees himself as a victim.  The bully cannot operate without a sense of his own entitlement, the self-induced blindness and indifference toward, the wrongs he inflicts upon others.  These are the luxuries that bullies cannot do without.  Responsible and moral souls have no such luxury.

But as to wars fought solely as a defense, the war that England met which they faced with immeasurable bravery -- there is the paragon of keeping calm and carrying on.  It means standing up to a bully no matter the outcome, to protect those without help, to physically stop the bully.  It means using force and violence.  There is no other way.  You can't sit down to tea with him; in his lust for the toys of power, he cannot hear any language but his own, cannot hear any sense of reason.  And anyone who speaks against his aims is, of course, an enemy.

 

He is a three-year-old in a tantrum wanting what he cannot have and is unfit to remain in polite company.  The toy he is not entitled to must be pried from his hand.  He may well be and should be soundly spanked.  And...he will always consider himself to be the righteous party violated and unjustly treated.

Set all this aside for one other consideration on war.

It is a fitting irony that the Imperial War Museum (which many of my students will visit tomorrow) sits on what was the site of the Victorian insane asylum "Bedlam."  War is insane.  To be good at war is an imperative in this world, a necessary evil to protect one's citizens and to enforce a modicum of law in the world.  As Churchill duly and reverently pointed out, those of us living owe immeasurable debt to those who fought and died so that we might live and live freely.  But to prefer and precipitate war without actual cause or provocation (I know...there's the rub) -- that is the epitome of insanity.

Three scholars of WWI, Becker, Andoin-Rouzeau, and Temerson, have asked what war means for everyone involved in it.  Their question assumes that there are the dead -- of course, a given.  But then, for those of us who remain, there is this question:

What is the weight of the dead upon the living?

That may well be the most prescient and sane question about war that we can ask, especially if we answer it very clearly before entering a war.

One-Time Bedlam: the Imperial War Museum
Honoring the Fallen while Documenting the Insanity of Wars

WWII Bedlam war death Churchill Hitler Justice e London St. Paul's bombing Blitz