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.

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.

And Time Stood Still

 "And time stood still...." [Link]

Life revolves around peculiar moments that stand in perfect stillness, and yet in that stillness, they influence the rest of life.  Such moments remain with us, and remain with the full import and potency of their striking epiphane and truth.  It's T. S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world."

Yes.  I remember intensely significant moments where time stood still -- but stood neither in stasis nor in movement.  The center scarcely moves -- the center of a turning wheel, and while the outer edge spins at a furiously ignorant pace, the center remains a tranquil point of potency and significance, even if we can't articulate the significance of the moment.

It's the center of the dance, a moment revolving within time, a moment between lovers' eyes, a moment not captured by the lovers but a moment in which they are captured.  They shall forever not live outside it.

It is a place only arrived at by all your past conspiring to bring you into it, and it is a place from which the future shall forever grow.  It's the "eternal moment" that the Romantic poets wrote of.  It's that moment which Peter Ibbeston enters when he understands the Duchess of Towers is his childhood love, Mimsy [Link].  Cupid finds his lost Psyche and wakes her with a kiss.  Pygmalion kisses Galatea as she transforms from cold, immovable stone into warm, living flesh.  And life is never the same.  From that still moment of waking, both Mimsy and Peter, Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and Galatea will move through their lives -- and exist both within that moment and within the future that the moment will continually unfold before them.

Yet -- and because -- it is life, we move on from that moment, for good or ill.  The moment stands still through it all, but its stillness moves in us.  Its potency is seen in how it drives our hearts to places we would otherwise never comprehend.  Yet even as it is moving us, we never quite lose sight of the moment.

The quiet moment stands with a truth, with a force that may not be denied -- or if denied, only dishonestly.  This has not been put more succinctly than by Eliot in Burnt Norton:

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, 
   there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not 
   call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither 
   movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the 
   point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only 
   the dance.

And what if you should miss the vital moment? What if you should make some other choice just then? What if Galatea should not love in return -- what is there?  Eliot again:

What might have been is an abstraction 
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Footfalls echo in the rose garden we never entered.  The ghosts of a life we did not choose move over the dead leaves.  The words we never spoke perpetually whisper in us.  The ghosts of two lovers who never embraced in complete understanding haunt our mind.

The danger is that such moments are pregnant with the lasting realities of life and love, loaded with all of their tragedy and their comedy.  That is why, as Sheldon Vanauken put it, "Honesty is better than any easy comfort." The still moment dwells only in honesty, in truth, no matter the outcome, no matter whether love is fulfilled or unrequited. Galatea may love Pygmalion -- or she may leave him.  And -- there are the masks of Comedy and Tragedy in Gerome's painting.

Pygmalion and Galatea. Gerome, c. 1890

 

In the midst of our best moments, we'll recall a truth left unspoken for fear of an outcome, and a lost moment parades before our mind.  And yet...in the midst of our worst moments, the ever-present still moment in which we chose a truth and received a gift of love presses us toward the center and relieves the spinning of peripheral and distracted life.

As the song says, you can try to repair the past.  You can try to become someone you're not.  Those attempts can't last. Gatsby tried: you can't get the past back.  Nevertheless -- here, there, always -- a certain eternal moment in the past stands, still and tranquil, within every present and future moment.

The life we chose.  The life we did not choose.  Both remain within the still moment -- a moment that remains forever "the still point of the turning world."  And eternity is merely that: a moment in time, standing still, shaping all the rest of time.