The Guns of August: 100 Years Later

This piece originally appeared August 17, 2014 in Critics at Large

The Flag by Byam Shaw (1919)

These reflections were inspired by the two-day conference “1914-1918 The Making of the Modern World” held at the Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs on July 30 and 31, 2014. Speakers presented papers on a wide variety of topics, both national and international, on military, political, social and artistic themes associated with the Great War and its legacy. The conference concluded with a visit to the residence of the Lieutenant Governor, David Onley, at Queens Park and later that evening with an emotional evening of military formations, music and speakers at Varsity Arena packed with 6000 people. I will not attempt to address all topics and speakers but will focus on one thread, albeit never explicitly stated: the frequent disconnect between how veterans and civilians experienced and recalled the war and the contemporary and later attempts to depict it in art and popular culture.

Apart from commemorations, my impression is that most public awareness about the Great War is derived from films – All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, Gallipoli to name just a few – or from novels such as Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy and Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong. What they all have in common is their anti-war message, that this war, as opposed to the Second World War, was not only a tragedy but a waste. Even Margaret Macmillan in her masterfully-delivered keynote overview on the origins and legacy of the war used the word “waste” to signify the human losses and the problems that it created: among them, that without the war, Russia would have evolved into a constitutional monarchy and the Bolsheviks would have never come to power; without Germany’s defeat, Hitler and Nazism may not have occurred, and no Second World War. And the problems in the Middle East that continue to bedevil us are in part a legacy of the war.

Another take on the war delivered by historian, Jonathan Vance, drew upon his seminal monograph, Death so Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (UBC Press, 1997) to profile John Daniel Logan, and then to extrapolate from his life the values that not only shaped him but those of his English-Canadian fellow veterans and civilians alike between the world wars. Prior to the Great War, Logan acquired a superior education, wrote poetry and literary criticism, taught and worked in advertising. None of these accomplishments provided him with financial or emotional satisfaction. It was only when he joined the army in 1916 at the age of 46 and fought at Vimy and Passchendaele that he found his métier in life. He enjoyed not only the comradeship of his unit but he drew spiritual sustenance from the ultimate sacrifices made for the cause. After the war, Logan assembled two collections of poetry that were inspired by the vision of a heroic death that was sublime and beautiful, expressed in the lofty language that we usually associate with British writers such as Rupert Brooke before his death or J.M. Barrie before his disillusionment. But Logan never lost his belief in the spiritual dimension of a sacrifice willingly made, regardless of the brutality inflicted upon the body by shrapnel, artillery or gas. War was the supreme adventure, a great glorious undertaking demonstrating that life was less important than death. He never changed his mind about that; the poems he wrote before 1916 were similar to those he wrote after. And yet before we stereotype him as pre-war Victorian, Vance reminded us that Logan was dismissive of the jingoistic war poetry and promoted the aspirations of women poets. He likely would not have appreciated D.W. Griffith’s heavy-handed propaganda war film, Hearts of the World, of which we were shown a clip by another speaker, the film scholar, Seth Feldman, who provided an excellent overview of contemporary and more recent films about the war. But Logan did believe that the “trial of war” would invigorate Canadian culture.

Logan’s belief in noble sacrifices for a righteous cause, not the waste of human lives, reflected the sentiment of much of the English-speaking population during and after the war (unlike French Canadians who could only remember the war with bitterness and its associations with the rancorous 1917 conscription crisis). Theirs (the English) was a just war against an evil tyranny and they hearkened back to medieval and Victorian texts and imagery to commemorate it through war memorials, stained glass windows in churches that deified as Christ-like soldiers and Armistice Day proceedings. In her PowerPoint of war paintings, art historian Maria Tippet featured a popular painting, The Flag by John Byam Shaw that represents the sacrifice made by the Canadian soldier depicting the body draped with the Canadian red ensign placed between the paws of the British lion and surrounded by people for whom the sacrifice had been made. The peace and serenity that suffuses the dead soldier is how Canadians wanted to remember those who willingly sacrificed their lives. By contrast, F.H. Varley’s For What? is a controversial, modernist painting in which dead soldiers are heaped unceremoniously in a cart to await burial beneath a row of crosses. The image, like the title, conveys the pointlessness of the war, a perspective vehemently rejected by most English-Canadian veterans and civilians because, as Vance quoted a politician, it would mean surrendering to desolation. One can only imagine what veterans and the public would have thought of the savagely satirical drawings and paintings of the German Expressionist artist, George Grosz, or his national compatriot, Otto Dix, who spent four years in the trenches and rendered his experience into unflinching, stark etchings and paintings.

For What? by Frederick Varley (1918)

Unlike in Britain where the post-war era was marinated in disillusionment, Canadians, according to Vance, surrendered to a myth that was “a complex mixture of fact, wishful thinking, half-truth, and outright invention.” The myth bore little resemblance to the slaughter that occurred but enabled veterans and the public to make sense of it. Rather than recount the horrors of war—for the most part veterans remained adamantly silent—they remembered only the good times: the lighter, more humorous moments, a beautiful sunrise, bathing in streams and the laughter of the “boys.” These selective memories were recalled in memoirs, novels, poetry and film such as the melodrama Under the Black Eagle that follows the adventures of a police dog on the Western Front.

The anti-war vision found expression in novels such All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Its cinematic adaption was seen in Canadian theatres but in no way enjoyed the support it garnered elsewhere. The Canadian veteran, Will Bird, wrote his memoir, And We Go On, as a corrective to books such as All Quiet that he believed were “putrid with so-called realism.” Unlike other Canadian accounts that underscore the lighter more humorous moments, Bird’s account does not ignore the physical horror but in his telling he and his comrades retain their sense of decency and humanity, and were not brutalized by their war experience. Bird’s memoir was well-received and, despite its bracing grimness about life in the trenches, was more commensurate with the upbeat convictions of Logan and the romantic pre-war English-Canadian sensibilities during the interwar years.

As scholars Ross Fair and Martin Friedland reminded us, these conservative, traditional sentiments were also much in evidence in Toronto and at the University of Toronto during the Great War. Toronto the Good was a relatively small military bastion and everyone seemed swept up by the “imperial patriotism” and were willing to undertake whatever sacrifices were necessary to win the war. Unlike cosmopolitan London in the UK, there does not appear to be any evidence of dissent or opposition to the war; there were no conscientious objectors or conchies, as they were derisively known, or any evidence of women handing out white feathers to civilians whom they believed should be in uniform. Any opposition was confined to pressuring the U of T President, Robert Falconer, to fire three German-born professors. Academic freedom collapsed under press and political attacks. Falconer was strongly criticized by a member of the U of T board when he arranged in November 1914 for these professors to take a leave of absence with full pay until the end of term. But his sentiments about the war reflected the citizens of Toronto and the interwar generation when he implored students to unite behind the Union Jack contending that “to live by shirking one’s duty is infinitely worse than to die.”

James Wilby and Jonathan Pryce in Behind the Lines (1998)

Mark Humphries paper on “Shell Shock and its Aftermath” reinforced conservative attitudes by linking them to the culture’s definition of masculinity when Canadian shell shock victims applied for a pension after the war. More than 15,000 Canadian soldiers were diagnosed with some form of war-related psychological wounds. Humphries provided the example of Hunter L. who displayed heroic service in France before being blown up by a shell and rendered unconscious after which he “cried for some time.” He returned to duty voluntarily and incurred a similar experience, was shipped to a hospital in England where he was “on bad terms” with the other patients for being emotional. He was sent home, continued his education becoming a professor. In 1932 he broke down, the shell shock symptoms returned and he was unable to work. He applied to the federal government for a pension arguing that the war was responsible for his breakdown. The two doctors who reviewed his case refused to grant him a pension labelling him a deviant predisposed to psychological illness attributing it to “early overprotection, lack of boyish animal spirits, rebelliousness to authority and…the physical stigmata of deviation,” that is, physical signs on his body and certain aberrant mannerisms suggesting he was more feminine than masculine. Although he highlighted only Hunter L. in his talk, Humphries concluded from his study of other similar cases that men who sought treatment or asked for compensation were violating the unwritten code of conduct: men were to be self-reliant, aggressive and unemotional. Otherwise, they were tainted with being neurotic and feminine. When their manhood was at stake, no wonder traumatized veterans were forced to suffer in silence.

At this point we can come full circle to where this paper began—with recent novelistic and film treatments of the war. Today there is a greater understanding of masculinity, as a social construct, and that current attitudes toward manhood have substantially changed since the period under review, and about post-traumatic stress, which is recognized as a product of the realities of wartime conditions. Rarely does one hear today that this condition is the result of a psychological predisposition even though it is still ingrained in the military culture that one should not ask for help. In Regeneration, the first novel in Pat Barker’s trilogy (renamed Behind the Lines in the DVD version), she presents two historical physicians: Lewis Yealland, a Canadian neurologist with a reputation for 'curing' shell-shocked patients and ensuring their quick return to the trenches, who employed electric-shock, shouted commands, prescribed isolation and a restricted diet to treat hysteria, and William Rivers, an English anthropologist, who believed that war neuroses did not result from the war experiences themselves, but were "due to the attempt to banish distressing memories from the mind.” He encouraged his patients to remember, instead of trying to forget what they had been through. (Barker’s sympathetic treatment of River’s therapeutic relationship with the poet Siegfried Sassoon was generally unrepresentative of the times.) Yealland was a product of his culture, whereas, Rivers seems historically out of place and would have been much more comfortable in the present. Canadian veterans, civilians and doctors would have dismissed Rivers as naïve at best and possibly dangerous and would have admired the achievements of Yealland, the reverse of how I suspect we would currently regard them.

Today the public will continue to read novels and see films that possibly project the attitudes of our time back into an earlier era—the past as a foreign country may be a cliché but it is true—but readers can also benefit from good history that, without condescension and with a sensitivity to complexity, reconstructs the values and the political and cultural expressions of those who lived in earlier times. For me the need for historical works to supplement popular culture was the greatest insight I received from this thoughtful and rich conference. I believe that the conference organizers at the Munk Centre will soon make available a video podcast as they have done with so many of their previous symposiums. Do yourself a favour and watch it.

(Photo by Keith Penner)

– Bob Douglas has written extensively on the Great War in That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War (Encompass Editions, 2012).

The West's response to Putinism

This is the concluding post (for the time being) on Russia and the Ukrainian crisis.
 

 Members of a Pro-Russian militia

Apart from ethic Russians, and countries like China, Brazil and India, who dwell in a media bubble that substitutes fantasy for reality, the preponderant circumstantial evidence points to the conclusion that pro-Russian separatists fired a surface-to-air missile at a commercial aircraft from Ukrainian territory at what they probably thought was a Ukrainian military aircraft. Separatist leaders boasted about it on social media and lamented their error in messages intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence and authenticated by America. It is also indisputable that Russia armed the rebels with tanks, personnel carriers, artillery—and batteries of surface-to-air missiles. Putin's response to the tragedy was to stonewall and deny responsibility while escalating his weapon delivery to the insurgents. How should the West respond to this most aggressive expression that “denounces and distances itself from liberal democracy" known as Putinism? 

When Russia undertook its Anschluss  of Crimea after a hastily arranged plebiscite amid the presence of 20,000 Russian soldiers, Putin gambled that the West might noisily protest and might impose some minor sanctions but that he would face no serious difficulties. His own domestic popularity soared to over 80 percent. Long forgotten was the opposition to the 2011 Parliamentary elections and his position to run again as President. Besides economic considerations that will be discussed below, as Fareed Zakaria notes, Putin articulated an ideology based on nationalism, religion, social conservatism and control over the media—the antithesis of the Western values of individual rights, free expression, tolerance, cosmopolitanism and internationalism.

Putin has provided a model for leaders such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who has made clear his disdain for liberal democracy and his embrace of an “illiberal new state based on national foundations” Long an admirer of Putin, Orban since his Fidesz Party won election in 2010, his government has taken steps to undermine the rule of law, gut press freedom, attack civil society groups and increase executive power.

Putin's Russia

This, the second of three postings on Russia and the Ukraine,  is an update of the brief  overview on Putin profiled in That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden (Encompass Editions, 2013)

Democracy is a “façade…where substance is forgotten for the sake of shocking statements and mutual accusations, where real politics is reduced to shady deals and decisions made behind the scenes but never discussed with voters.”

—Vladimir Putin cited by Gregory Feifer in Russians: The People behind the Power

Putin’s disdain for so-called “Western-style democracy” derives in part from his experience as a KGB officer during the last year of his four-year stint in Dresden in 1989. There he witnessed mass street protests and the ransacking of the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police. From a distance, he noted with fear and horror the changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Like his hero, Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving KGB boss in Soviet history (1967–1982) and who was in Hungary during the 1956 revolution, Putin believed that any talk of democracy leads to demonstrations, and protest leads to disorder and attacks on the Chekists, (the name given to Lenin’s security police during the 1920s and currently revived as a badge of honour). Better to nip it in the bud before it grows any further and becomes a threat to the state. People need to be disciplined, manipulated, kept in the dark and bought off with better wages and pensions.

A destroyed apartment in Moscow 1999

Appointed to the head of the F.S.B in 1998—the post-­Soviet successor to the K.G.B.—in large part because he courted and won the necessary support from Boris Yeltsin’s “Family,” he wasted no time in consolidating his position and making himself the appointed heir to Yeltsin. In 1999 there were a series of bombings throughout Russian cities, separatists Chechens were blamed and the bombings were used as a pretext for launching the second Chechen war that turned Chechnya into rubble. The war launched Putin into the presidency despite the considerable evidence that a foiled apartment bombing in the Russian city of Ryazan may have been staged by F.S.B. agents. Even Russians, who believed that the security police played a role in the attacks, voted for Putin.

Putin's Frankenstein Monster

In That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden (Encompass Editions, 2013) I wrote about the Ukrainian famine and Vladimir Putin's goal to refashion Russia and transform himself in a tsar.  In the last year much has happened. The following blog is an update.

“When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer….But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

—George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Crash site of the downed Airlines Flight 17

A Russian-made SA-11 sophisticated missile fired July 17/2014 that destroyed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine and killed 298 people is a terrible tragedy. But, given the broader historical context and the violence between the Russian-backed rebels and the Ukrainian military in the last three months preceding the attack, including the shooting down of Ukrainian military planes (and the subsequent downing of two Ukrainian military aircraft),  something of this nature was likely to happen. I do not believe that we can fully understand what some, notably Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, describe as a "terrorist attack" while others portray the missile attack as a "calamitous error" until the role of Ukraine in the Russian psyche is explored. 

It is not only their historical relationship that is important but the idea of a mythic “Mother of the Nation” has deep roots in Russian literature, art and religion. From the time of the medieval Muscovites, the Russian Empire and during the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, has long been mythologized as the cradle of Russian civilization. Ukrainians were described as “little Russians.” In the late eighteenth century, Catherine the Great annexed Crimea through wars with the Ottoman Empire which was called the "New Russia (an epithet that is currently being revived). In more recent times, Stalin hated and crushed the embryonic Ukrainian nationalist movement and engineered a man-made famine during the early 1930s which historian, Timothy Snyder, (Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin London: Bodley Head, 2010) estimates killed 3.3 million people. I will not describe that catastrophe as genocide because there is spirited debate among historians about its applicability and the highly respected Snyder does not use that contentious label.

Vladimir Putin is merely the latest uncrowned tsar to be the embodiment of the pipe dream that all Russian speaking people should live under the auspices of the Russian state. Writing in The New York Times, scholar and journalist, Timothy Garton Ash, alluded to a 1994 conference where he heard Putin, then deputy mayor of St Petersburg, declare that Russia could not simply abandon to their fate those “25 million Russians” who now lived abroad. The world had to respect the interests of the Russian state “and of the Russian people as a great nation.” Ash indicates that the German translation for Putin’s use of Russian people is “volk” and that word carries the same connotations that the Nazis used to describe the German people living not only in Germany but to Germans living outside its borders.

The Repercussions of Violence: Joyce Carol Oates' Carthage

This review of Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage originally appeared in Critics at Large. I have posted it on this site because the problem of PTSD of American soldiers from America's current wars is touched upon in Chapter 19 of That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden (Encompass Editions, 2013).

 

The first thing that I noticed about Joyce Carol Oates’ gripping, almost visceral novel, Carthage (HarperCollins, 2014) is that the title resonates with associations from the ancient world. There is Virgil’s jilted Dido, queen of Carthage, spurned by Aeneas, who put service to nation above love. Carthage is also the city state in North Africa where the Romans soundly thrashed the Carthaginians and then covered the area with salt so that nothing could grow. Both of these associations reverberate throughout the novel which is mainly set in the small town of Carthage in upper state New York. It is about the damage individuals inflict on one another and the toxic repercussions of war in a small American town. The individuals most affected are either forcibly relocated or move away so that they can get on with their lives. Metaphorically, Carthage has become covered with salt.

Structured in three parts, Carthage begins with Zeno Mayfield and a search party who are on the hunt for Mayfield’s missing nineteen-year-old daughter, Cressida, in the Adirondack woods. The first part chronicles in 2005 the mysterious circumstances leading up to and surrounding the girl’s assumed murder. The night before, Cressida—a spiky, brainy and troubled loner—had uncharacteristically gone to a rowdy lakeside tavern, where she met and left with her older sister Juliet’s ex-fiancé, Brett Kincaid, a onetime Carthage High football star, now a decorated Iraqi War hero. Suspicion falls upon him the morning after Cressida’s disappearance when he is discovered passed out in his pickup in a nature preserve and her blood is found in the truck. Given that her body is not found, the legal procedures and the grieving process in her family become more complicated. What begins as both a carefully crafted suspense thriller and family drama expands into a layered exploration individual culpability and how violence affects families, especially women. Oates suspends judgement by letting her characters provide their own perspectives in alternating passages and sometimes whole chapters.

Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed: The Navigator of Gothic Landscapes

This review originally appeared in the daily online site Critics at Large July 13.

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, author of The Accursed

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America’s most distinctive, award-winning authors and among its most prolific. She has published over fifty novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction including a memoir. Although consistently innovative, her fiction roughly divides into the Gothic that began in 1980 with the publication of Bellefleur, and intense realism. Her most recent novels The Accursed (HarperCollins 2013) and Carthage (HarperCollins2014) are representative of these categories and illustrate the range of her creative writing. She began working on The Accursed in the 1980s, put it aside, and did not return to it until 2012. The following is a review of that novel while a subsequent entry will explore Carthage.

Just as in the preface of the first foreign language edition of Dracula (1901) Bram Stoker attests to the authenticity of the events, however improbable, described in the novel so The Accursed begins with an “author’s note” written purportedly in 1984 by an amateur historian, M.W. van Dyck II. Similarly, the structure of The Accursed—its letters, private journals, diaries, a sermon, and a patchwork of narratives delivered with their own unique voice—resembles that of Dracula; this is a feature that Oates likely intended because there are scattered allusions to her predecessor’s great Victorian novel, especially in two of the most vividly rendered chapters set in the Bog Kingdom, the dark netherworld of Princeton's privileged monde. Moreover, to reinforce the Gothic flavour, Oates suggests echoes of the beast people in The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells and the seductive Countess in the Bog Kingdom, whose namesake is the protagonist of Camilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Her debt to American Gothic is abundantly evident in how she reworks themes from the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne. For good measure, she sprinkles references to the spiritualist Madam Blavatsky.

Oates frames The Accursed using a manuscript with the same title written by the aging M.W. van Dyck who serves both as editor and writer of chapter commentaries. After dismissing previous professional works on the subject, van Dyck lists his qualifications for documenting the so-called Crosswicks Curse, which afflicted the college town of Princeton, N.J. in the years 1905 and 1906. He has a personal stake in the investigation: he was born in Princeton in 1906 to parents afflicted by the curse. Being a native Princetonian, a descendant of one of the town’s most august families, and a graduate of its university (where Oates still currently teaches), van Dyck claims that he is “privy to many materials unavailable to other historians.” Oates’ conceit is its greatest strength but readers, who are not devotees of the author, will require some stamina to complete this fascinating but daunting novel.

When Faith Becomes Dangerous: Philip Kerr’s Prayer

When I submit reviews of thrillers for Critics at Large, I do not usually include them in this site because they are not relevant to the two volumes of That Line of Darkness. I make an exception here because what starts out as a police procedural turns into a Gothic mystery.

Over two years ago, Lawrence Krauss posted an article in The Guardian about the vehement animosity expressed toward individuals who were not believers. A 16-year-old atheist from Rhode Island had to take time off from school after being threatened and targeted by an online hate campaign for requesting that a Christian banner be removed from her school. She is even described on the radio by a state representative as an "evil little thing." Krauss also alludes to a study that suggested that atheists were among the most distrusted groups in society on par with rapists. The article goes on to suggest that science itself has become suspect among believers. The most chilling implication of this piece is the length that believers will go to disparage and demonize unbelievers, including scientists. It convinced me that Philip Kerr’s Prayer (Putnam, 2014), his latest standalone novel, has an unnerving basis in reality. Kerr, who is probably most well-known for his historical crime novels featuring the sardonic German detective, Bernie Gunther, has now turned his attention to the role of faith in modern society and to its dark underbelly. Faith in God—or not—initially appears to be the underlying theme throughout Prayer.