If you were in Paris at 11:00 a.m. on 11th November 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, you would have stood for hours in an autumn drizzle that seeped into your skin and sapped your body heat. And somewhere along those hours, the measures from Yo Yo Ma's cello -- that enigmatic Sarabande of Bach's Cello Suite No. 5 -- would vibrate into the silent and shivering crowds. Then, precisely at 11:00, every bell in France -- not merely Notre Dame's and those of other churches in Paris but across the whole nation -- would shingle the air, and the country would remember for 11 minutes: 100 years ago the killing in the mud had stopped at that very moment and these very bells had rung, bells all across France, to announce the end of The Great War's alliances with death.
And then you would have listened to political speeches that were doing the same thing that speeches at memorial events after the Armistice, a century earlier, had attempted to do: to cast the horrible events of WWI in a way that politicians wanted you to remember them. Not, that is, understand them, but remember them in a particular (politically influenced) way.
Remembering and Understanding. These are not the same.
Remembering? I remember finding unexploded egg grenades and mills bombs, stokes and other unexploded mortar rounds, unfired bullets pulled from the mud, untouched after a century and still in their stripper clips into which an individual soldier had loaded them by his own hand; and unexploded shells (gas, shrapnel, and high explosive fragment shells). Soles of shoes. Leather horse harnesses. Strands of barbed wire -- each distinctly French, British, or German. A German canteen. Shrapnel balls and steel fragments -- everywhere. A French soldier's cup. A fin off a French mortar. Fuse caps. The split metal casing of a "Flying Pig" that burst wrong and which a student actually took home in a suitcase. Wire holders. A primer guard off a British 18-pounder shell. An unexploded French Petards Raquettes, detonating wire still intact. Fragments of rum jugs. All of these, among other things, I remember finding.
But the buttons and such things as a clay pipe's bowl are those which move one to lament, things one knows were handled by some young man, a fiancee, a husband, a son, a father, an uncle, a friend....
And being in these fields and villages is not a passive remembrance. As my wife and I once ate lunch in a small village, just outside a cafe near the pits (where the "iron harvest" -- unexploded munitions -- are set off), a pile of 90-some-year-old shells were made to detonate and split the air. It's a sound that those in the war heard by the hundreds and thousands -- hourly -- when under some massive attack. A century later it still goes on: not merely the sound...that tearing of the air. It is also that simultaneous jarring of the earth under you, as if it were hit by an immense meteorite. But more: as additional piles of munitions are set off, each detonation sends a massive, concussive wave of explosion, again the shock in the air around you that you feel in your lungs and head; it's an invisible but moving wall of sheer and sudden force. And then...quiet. Some half hour later, the bomb disposal personnel drive tranquilly up in their little truck to the French cafe in the tiny village, pile out chatting, and order their lunch. It's a daily event in the area. You can read about this "Iron Harvest" here: [Link].
I also remember standing in craters (at Hawthorne Ridge, at the Butte de Vauquois, at Haute Chevauchee, at Vimy Ridge, at Lochnagar) -- the immense and vacuous bowls scooped out of each place, massive craters blown out by thousands of pounds of boxed high explosive buried deep beneath the trenches and towns, instantaneously sand-blasting, fragmenting, and lifting everything -- complete towns, vast trench lines with dugouts, tunnels, and of course, soldiers -- thousands of feet into the air. Bits of war materiel and bones are still scattered everywhere. Estimates are that for another 500-700 years pieces of it all will continue to rise to the surface of the fields.
How could veterans remember such things, and why remember their war? Isn't it best to forget? As one veteran of another war put it, how could you ever forget? The pieces: fragments I picked up just days before writing this will be added to the other inert (and non-human) detritus of war that I collected from the cratered fields over the years. Because they mean something. They mean that something horrible happened here, and it happened to people because of other people -- mostly politicians. As Auden brilliantly put it in his later, WWII, poem -- a poem fit for today as well as helpful for remembering past wars,
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
(excerpt, W. H. Auden, "1 September 1939")
"There is no such thing as the State": it is an individual who, with other individual people who grow hungry, sleepy, and lustful, choose to send other people to be killed for a dream, a dream cast so often as "the lie of Authority."
All of these objects I have gathered from the fields of battle and thus remembered for their context -- they all have had one important effect: they have helped me to better understand the war to some degree for its realities, realities that are set against politically "directed" remembrance. This is not what politicians want you to do: understand. Politicians want you to remember something as they cast it for their own, present, and political ends. The lie of Authority. This is how it is possible for history to repeat itself: by people not understanding but "remembering" through guided (more often misguided) means.
There are other ways to understand: for instance, two WWI veterans -- one whom I interviewed when he was 103 years old, and the other a friend's old grandfather, who served in France in a machine gun battalion.
These people were actually in France in November 1918, and they helped me to better understand things about WWI. One of them squatted in a trench line on the edge of village occupied by the Germans. His orders were for his unit to attack and capture this largely insignificant little village in the minutes just before 11:00 a.m. on 11 November 1918. He knew that most of his unit would be killed in that attack. The guns all along the front were firing shells in the quickest succession possible -- for mere practicality: that is, if the Armistice were going to occur (as the rumor had it), all those heavy, unfired shells would have to be loaded again into boxes, back onto camions, and then hauled back to the ammo depots -- immense work that absolutely nobody wanted to do.
Just before the order came to attack, everything boomed to a ragged stop. The last masses of shells exploded at 11:00 that morning and silence fell -- a silence interrupted only by some birds chirping and a French soldier running down the road announcing "Le guerre est finie! Le guerre est finie!" And that was how Emmet Johns experienced and remembered the end of his war.
Whether from people or objects I've encountered, the understanding they have brought was shaped more by reality than by the too often delightedly grim scholarship (detached from experiential understanding) that hovers over events of this war and tend to form our remembrance of it.
Understanding begins with experience: walking the old trench lines with maps, standing in fields, and seeing personal items -- or even a fragment of bone -- besides (more commonly found) the bullets they carried, the buttons they buttoned, the pipe that one smoked.... And reading memoirs of those who were there.
If you are interested:
WWI UXBs and war materiel/Verdun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqMOjpFH6g8
WWI UXBs and war materiel/Somme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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