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Post by wild on Mar 11, 2012 17:33:11 GMT -6
The gas,and the explosions,flooding,crushed bodies,festering lungs.That was the mines from which the rankers came and returned.At least they could see the sky in the trenches,So I would be a bit suspicious of officer class poetry.
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Post by clw on Mar 12, 2012 18:26:37 GMT -6
Fred and cwl are being polite to me, but I truly think this book is entirely relevant to much we discuss here and the LBH in general. I'm hoping people will agree. Not guilty. What a horrible thing to say -- you've taught me better than that. Tsk, tsk. It's not politeness, it's the quiz issue; but here goes... Fussell does make important points about the tone of war being set by the "mental world" and literary structures of the times. By WWII the illusions are gone from it's poetry -- no more skies and sunsets and twilights and such. We've lost the innocence of 1914, yet he says It is perhaps less that we have "lost hope" than that we have lost literary resources. The horrors of the Great War stripped away the illusions of the Golden Age and it's 'high diction'; we had learned they provided only false hope, and by WWII we had been toughened to the point of bluntness in our literature. Of course no one has mentioned Downton Abbey. Too chicky flicky for you guys? Just wondering.
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 12, 2012 18:41:55 GMT -6
I'm not sure 'innocence' was lost, but ignorance. I'm not certain that such illumination spread far from the veterans, because they couldn't chat it up easily. We had similar romantic issues in the coverage of the next war, but they collapsed quicker, and by 1943 we were showing dead American bodies on the beach in Life, but only the clean deaths, not the horrors and decapitations and shredding.
But having established the importance of the mental world, what would it be in 1876, and what would the choice of memory tools be, and how would that affect the recording of the LBH? I see many similarities to how people chose to remember, depending upon inclinations and their unique tool box. But there were many more choices then than the first rounders had, what with movies and radio.
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Post by clw on Mar 12, 2012 19:29:45 GMT -6
I'm not certain that such illumination spread far from the veterans, because they couldn't chat it up easily. Just a couple of weeks ago I finished Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abby. It wasn't just Highclere Castle that she opened as a hospital, she opened an important one in London too. Her story is revealing as to how almost overnight some barriers between the classes were breached and others were most definitely not. And there's discussion of how and what veterans communicated of their experience was pretty much based on their social class. Goes to your comment and I think Wild's too.
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Post by wild on Mar 13, 2012 10:17:20 GMT -6
clw And there's discussion of how and what veterans communicated of their experience was pretty much based on their social class. Goes to your comment and I think Wild's too. One particular class distinction was that they shot rankers but not officers. I'm looking forward to his take on funk.Should be interesting. Downton Abby was brilliant.No one but the Brits can do that. Regards
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 13, 2012 11:03:29 GMT -6
Who is 'they?'
In any case, the death rate among British officers in actual combat units was huge in the Great War. For the first two years I think, per capita, it was as high or higher than for the men in combat. It started out because they dressed differently and stupidly and the Germans shot at skinny knees and Sam Brown's and people with pistols or walking sticks first. Second, the officers often led the charges on foot so attired. Third, the old Army couldn't believe that Kitchener's New Army had IQ's above ducks, and so officers did stuff that normally would have been done by NCO's and Other Ranks.
That's not saying they weren't treated different - they were - but in the main the British officers did themselves well with most of the men. Exceptions, of course. Especially the early ones.
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 16, 2012 9:18:51 GMT -6
Frustrating this fizzled - again - but I still think it important to realize and read the materials that composed the mental world of those who would record the Custer event.
I think it mandated the Last Stand motif and all the very British/western Europe myths to make an appearance despite fact or common sense. This also necessitated the application of those values to the Sioux, which is both insulting to them and confusing, but sometimes surprisingly accurate.
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Post by wild on Mar 23, 2012 17:13:56 GMT -6
The Great War and Modern Memory This book deals with a select band of poets and wordsmiths. It presents and comments on their observations and recordings of their experiences at a war resort popularly known as the Somme. They are all officers and seem to have been selected because they sport duel initials,come from genteel backgrounds and are of indeterminate sexual orientation.In fact their sexual leanings are catholic ranging from pederasty to necrophilia. Their only relationship with the vast majority of humanity[ refered to as the other ranks] who share the trenches with them is to eye up the pretty boys.The other ranks in cooperation with the enemy artillary provide the gore but beyond that our poets ignore them. Our war bards write a poem.It is an elegy written in the pastoral style.It describes the lingering death of a pretty young soldier hanging Christlike on a hedge of barbed wire.He has cherry lips and his flaxen hair resembles a halo.He hangs silhouetted against the sunset.3 Nightingales provide the lament and poppies carress his feet. Our poets are at "stand to". Half way through this book I was regretting that there had not been a pals battalion for poets.You know where they all get slaughtered together.Then I read that in fact there was an artists battalion but unfortunately devoid of poets. Could the pastrol style be employed to convey the horror of a direct hit on the latrines of a dysentry ravaged battalion?I was losing faith in Fussell.But he had saved the best wine till last.He has an officer, Brigadier E Coli CO turd brigade no less visiting a dominatrix for a spot of excrement gobbling. Very hard work this book and very little reward. Blackadder does it much better and perhaps MASH.
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Post by El Crab on Mar 25, 2012 1:29:12 GMT -6
I'm 21 pages into The Great War and Modern Memory, and I'm glad I finished reading Like Lions They Fought first. It really touched on the British officer corps and how many viewed war as a sporting endeavour, and many tried desperately to get into Zululand in time to get into a battle.
I hadn't had much knowledge of the British mentality of the turn of the century. I'm glad I read such a volume to get a little preview of this.
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 25, 2012 4:35:53 GMT -6
Wilde hasn't read it, since he gets so much wrong. He just flipped through it.
It's a small book, and Fussell deals with a select few; he can't cover everyone. It's a literary work and would therefore be concerned with those literary, a large proportion of whom would be upper class and well educated. It covers far more than the Somme, and actually devotes more to Passchendaele. The sexuality of the authors ranged from straight to gay pedophilia. Contrary to Wilde's damnation, most of them were good officers, well regarded by their men and military.
Fussell comments several times on how those NOT well read were often far more truthful and accurate in their recollections, like Benteen noticed about O'Neil. If Wild had read it, he'd know that. But, in demonstration of Fussell's theory, Wild has to interpret this in terms of his own templates on how to understand the world. It serves him poorly.
The author's point, which Wild misses, is that the style in language and thought was unprepared for the reality of the Great War, and how it changed - quickly - and how this distorts history because it distorted memory of the recorders.
Wilde doesn't seem to realize that Fussell's ending concerns a book, Gravity's Rainbow (which is rather well thought of) by Thomas Pynchon. In it, a character undergoes a disgusting death and mental breakdown, and it's relevant because he was a Great War vet. This is not a creation of Fussell's. He is demonstrating how the Great War's mental devastation is still showing up in modern works and - at the time of publication - evolving.
The people like Rupert Brooke, rock gods before the war, were laughed at after. The language changed. With it changed how prose was written, and poetry, as understood for centuries, failed.
While Wild uses literary terms like "pastoral style", he doesn't use them in accurate reflection of either the last great era of popular poetry nor of the author's point. A great deal of the book is devoted to Fussell showing how Wilde's summation would be absurd, and that the pastoral style was totally irrelevant and insufficient and fresh idiom was demanded. The book shows how that played out.
Wilde is like the Hardy Poetry Society referenced, a group which for status gathers under Hardy's name but which doesn't much like poetry including Hardy's. It's a name he's read about, is all.
MY continued point is that how the LBH was recorded and IS recalled was limited by the literary templates available at the time. Just like people think in terms of movies and pop music today, before that existed people thought in terms of literature. They were shattered in WW1, but very powerful at the time in ways we don't appreciate.
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Post by shan on Mar 25, 2012 5:44:16 GMT -6
DC
I happen to think you are right on the ball with all this. I'm familiar enough with the work of the English poets who were attempting to relay something of the horror of the first world war, to be able to see the strange mental wrench they must have been experiencing when, after having been raised on the work of the so called romantic poets, and having grown up believing the fantasy of poems like the " Charge of the light Brigade," they were confronted with the inglorious squalor of the Western front.
I'm not so previous wars sure were any less demeaning to the participants or, when it came down to it, any less inglorious, it's just that nobody who was there had ever written about it so truthfully. Yes the Anglo Saxon, Celtic and Viking bards and poets, { some of whom would have been present, or ever participated in some of these battles}, would often put in some of the horror of spear and sword spilling guts and hacking off limbs, but they always had an eye on the glory, especially the glory they were bestowing on the particular hero they were paid to praise, so that in many ways it was the glory of war not the horror they were celebrating.
Which brings me to my own field the visual arts. Countless historical paintings of battle have, almost more than the written word, have been responsible for a kind of Monty Python view of battle. Painting after painting, whether it be Harold dying at the battle of Hastings, or the Charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo portray the soldiers, and more particularly the officers, striking poses that look more akin to a bad actor playing Hamlet in a VIctorian melodrama. If one steps back for a moment and tries to ignore the fantastic skill that the artist often display, one could almost be reduced to hysterical laughter. And this is nowhere more prominent than in 99'9% of paintings concerning the so called last stand. If you want to see a bad actor playing Hamlet think Custer in Paxton's famous painting.
That said, we are all trapped in this mind set. Over the years I must have painted maybe 20 or more versions of the last stand, trying, or so I imagined, to get beyond the myth and portray something a little nearer the truth. But on almost ever occasion I've been subverted by the myth, and have failed miserably and just produced yet another version of the glorious blonde hero nobly dying for our sins. There have been half a dozen small sketches in which I have sought portray the real horror, and for me at least these have worked, but I know that no body would ever want to see them let alone buy them, and the reason for this is not so much that they are gross with a big G, no, it's because in the end we all prefer the myth no matter how much we protest. Read between the lines of the boards dealing with this subject will tell you that. This battle was fairly short, sharp and in the end involved all kinds of released fury on the dead, and those still alive imaginable, imaginable maybe, but it's not something we want to see or read described.
Lastly, if paintings corrupted reality, movies moved in and took up the gauntlet and using the template, gave us, and continue to give us, moving versions of those paintings, versions of reality more akin to fairy stories than reality. Umm what a lot of bile, strange considering I feel so relaxed on such a beautiful sunny morning. Bought the book DC, however it may be a month or two before I get to read it as it sits on a growing pile of books that I may not have enough life left to get around to reading.
Shan
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 25, 2012 10:42:17 GMT -6
There. Thank you, far better than I could have explained it, having zippo artistic talent of my own.
That's exactly what I have hoped for: an example of how the existing mindsets provide the templates that are really, really hard to unload in the service of truth.
Again, that's how I think we ended up with the Last Stand motif, which I contend was a demanding literary template used to explain in terms the public would accept (they go together) RATHER than a truthful description. Because in 1914 you could not truthfully say in public "After four weeks standing in knee high sewage amid the body parts of men and horse, the 45TH regiment of Pastry Chefs, as ordered, stupidly left their trench and walked forward into taped out machine gun fire lanes, losing near the entire unit, and this to no known reasonable goal or purpose. Their bodies will rot over the coming years in full view of both sides in No Man's Land." Spots, many spots, forever England, don't you know.
What I would like is to specifically identify those templates in use at LBH and remove them and see if it provides a more honest and likely scenario of what happened in aggregate with new timelines and existing evidence. The "Last Stand" itself, the kindnesses to living kin from Maggie Calhoun to La Custer to Mrs. Sturgis. Was there, for example, really a unique second source for Calhoun's men fighting so well except from his brother in law?
Yes, about the movies, and why I dislike discussing them on these boards as they are melded into the history and are, as you say, difficult to remove at all.
I don't think Isaac Rosenberg's poetry is pastoral in the accepted sense. He talks about a flower, yes. And much of all that, the flowery nonsense and homoerotic tone of popular prewar literary genres, is gone at the end. The Lost Generation was not just those dead or living in Paris but one which had had its idiomatic language and art and reality ripped from them and demanded they reinvent it.
Because sound recording and movies arrived, the fact that the language and the way we actually thought was changed in sometimes hidden from readers who attribute it all to technological innovation to frame the change. But it was mental as well.
This is Dead Man's Dump by Rosenberg. Can anyone imagine this before 1914? Yes, war was always brutal, but now men were dead at tens of thousands in an hour, millions over the months, and lay in sight and range of nose for years. Great violence for no advance. THAT was different. Nothing effete or romantic about this.
The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear.
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended—stopped and held.
What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! have they gone into you! Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their soul’s sack Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled?
None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth.
What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop.
The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, Those dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’ But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.
Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love, The impetuous storm of savage love. Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke, What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul With lightning and thunder from your mined heart, Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?
A man’s brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer’s face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness.
They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye, The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences.
Here is one not long dead; His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said, The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.
Will they come? Will they ever come? Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight. So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face.
Makes you want to enlist, eh? Ah, war's Glory!
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Post by fred on Mar 25, 2012 12:20:12 GMT -6
What I would like is to specifically identify those templates in use at LBH and remove them and see if it provides a more honest and likely scenario of what happened in aggregate with new timelines and existing evidence. The "Last Stand" itself, the kindnesses to living kin from Maggie Calhoun to La Custer to Mrs. Sturgis. Was there, for example, really a unique second source for Calhoun's men fighting so well except from his brother in law? I have tried-- in my own way-- to do just this with my latest writing endeavor... though not as eruditely expressed. You learn a lot when you have been in combat and while Vietnam had horrors of its own, they paled in comparison to either world war. Paler still were my own experiences, none of which have ever kept me awake at night, yet I saw enough... and did, or not did, enough still. Our base camp-- the division HQ-- was at a place called Di-An (pronounced, zee-on... for whatever reason; I guess if the Vietnamese can pronounce "N - G - U - Y - E - N," win... well, you get the point). Beyond my immediate cantonment area and motor pool, we had large conex containers for the nearby QM stores, then a helipad, then we had the graves registration unit. They had a small mortuary built there and lucky indeed were the days of inactivity. Despite seeing only body-bags arrive, one knew what they contained... if not how much. They say smell is the most memorable of the senses.... I do not know if I am off-base here, but the work on the LBH I have spent so many years doing reflects those days in Di-An and running highways 1 and 13, running through the Iron Triangle, learning, knowing, and understanding what war and the military were like. That is why the horror of the LBH is no less palpable than the horror... read, conz' glory and the Costume Clown's "cavalry bravado"... of either world wars... or the commensurate horror of what some saw in Vietnam, and others witness in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no glory at the LBH, all the missus be damned. No one died with a smile and the only comparison to "ivory" was in the stiffness of the corpses... or the silence of today's markers. There was panic and screaming; there was dust and smoke and incredible fear, yet so many who were not there condemn so many who were. So many "historians"-- the allusion to ivory again-- know better, however... so many judges. It is funny-- and maybe silly-- but the ironic beauty/horror DC sees in the poetry of WWI is not dissimilar to the beauty I see in a time-line based on accounts and based on what experience in warfare brings to a historical event. There was no time for anything on June 25... except trying to stay alive... and there was no glory in it; only relief. They are not the same. Too many-- way, way too many!-- trivialize war by glorifying it. I stood on top of my jeep one time, scared sh*tless, trying to draw fire away from my driver and some others who were tending a mortally wounded comrade. When it was all over, the soldier died... and several of us cried. No one saw any glory... and I doubt neither Fred Benteen nor Marcus Reno saw much either... on either day. And I feel quite safe in saying that about 268 men would have given up all that glory for a couple of extra days... even yet depriving so many of the vistas of flags flying in the wind and the magnificent sounds of charging trumpets. Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by wild on Mar 25, 2012 12:22:35 GMT -6
Who's for the trench-- Are you, my laddie? Who'll follow French-- Will you, my laddie? Who's fretting to begin, Who's going out to win? And who wants to save his skin-- Do you, my laddie?
Who's for the khaki suit-- Are you, my laddie? Who longs to charge and shoot-- Do you, my laddie? Who's keen on getting fit, Who means to show his grit, And who'd rather wait a bit-- Would you, my laddie?
Who'll earn the Empire's thanks-- Will you, my laddie? Who'll swell the victor's ranks-- Will you, my laddie? When that procession comes, Banners and rolling drums-- Who'll stand and bite his thumbs-- Will you, my laddie?
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Post by wild on Mar 25, 2012 12:30:36 GMT -6
Iontach Fred iontach.
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