The Great War

In Tolkien’s Memory

 

Why is Ernest Hemingway considered to be a great, he-man war writer and John Tolkien a composer of fairy tales? Tolkien fought in a bloody war, Hemingway attended one.  The answer is simple.  Hemingway said he was, dared any to say otherwise, and ninety years of criticism fell into line.  But John Ronald Reul Tolkien’s work drips with the mythology and knowledge of the Great War as much as any of its supposed chroniclers.    

 

On the WEB, I was reading some comments on Ernest Hemingway last month, apparently composed by the general public.  It was upsetting.

 

Hemingway was the great literary love of my teenage years, and I have generally been his great defender in the times of his unpopularity.  Like one, perhaps two other men in the last half century, I decided that I would like to be his heir in spirit if not in talent.  I went to Spain, ran the bulls, watched the bullfights and did my college English ‘thesis’ (a pretentious bunch, we called them that, although only for a B.A.) on The Necessity of the Spanish Bullfight.  This mandated lots of Hemingway and somewhat fey British writers who had gone to Spain in the twenties and pronounced themselves experts on the corrida.  I did not trouble myself with any Spanish authors or authorities.  By the time I finished I was surprised to discover I disliked Hemingway.  Only as the years passed did I recover my affections and respect.  I almost feel like my temporary if lengthy estrangement from Papa was a betrayal for which I should feel guilt.  I think I should.

 

So it was difficult, difficult to see Hemingway read through the eyes of Oprah buffs in full PC mode who could neither read (one thought Hemingway ‘verbose’) nor understand his world, and kept trying to append modern templates of gender relationships and shallow terminology over it.  Literature is only one reason History should be studied more. So when I read idiotic reviews of The Sun Also Rises and For Whom The Bell Tolls, I went ballistic.  Entire paragraphs of summation droned on without any indication that Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s narrator in the former, was wounded, and wounded in, if I correctly recall, a quite specific way.  He was impotent, probably because his genitalia had been damaged in the War (I have conflicting memories, but we first read about it early on, while he’s picking up two prostitutes).  The contributors treated his unconsummated relationship with Lady Brett, a British woman, as Jake realizing that she was simply bad news.

 

Hemingway served on the front lines in World War One before his country joined in it.  He knew the world of the war and the world it left.  The worst deficiency of the people I read discussing Hemingway is that most of the writers had no clear idea about World War One or what followed.  The ‘Lost Generation’ is a phrase of Gertrude Stein’s that has commonly and often exclusively been applied to the ex-patriots (trust fund babies or artists or both) living in Paris after the war, and Hemingway certainly was part of that. But outside the world of American literary critics, often ex-patriots themselves, the term had very different meanings.  The number of young men between sixteen and thirty in most of Europe had been cut in half by the war.  Dead.  Lost indeed.

 

There were so few men of any social class to date – much less to marry - that many British women of that War generation who were not normally so inclined – no joke – formed relationships with each other out of actual loneliness and desperation brought about by the lack of alternatives.   This was continental social trauma; trauma of the sort only Mississippi, perhaps, could recognize in the United States.  After the Civil War, the biggest item in that state’s budget was for artificial limbs.   

 

So when the lovely Lady Brett and the gelded Jake Barnes fall in love but are unable to do anything particularly constructive about it, the booze and depressed behavior becomes somewhat more understandable.  They were not unusual types in the 1920’s.  No doubt Hemingway knew some.

 

This is the sort of information that would make reading Hemingway more meaningful.  Much like a critic eventually noticing that Thomas Hudson, the hero of Hemingway’s first posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream, bore the name of a very successful and once famous British portrait painter.  The great man would have his employees paint all but the face, which he would do. 

 

Yo!  ARoooGa!  ARoooGA! Metaphor Alert!  Metaphor Alert!  Hey, Hemingway buffs!  Metaphor!  Over here….

 

Oh, forget it. 

 

Amazing numbers of the Great War survivors were horribly wounded.  It was common into the 1960’s, when I first went to England, to see stiffly erect uniformed veterans badly burned by mustard gas being tour guide assistants or, more often, security at national monuments.  It was, in fact, unusual in the normal day not to see a face gracing a skull with pathetically small amounts of hair neatly combed across deeply ridged scars, the visage looking like it had been held cheek down on a hot skillet decades before with the bubbles of skin hardened and blue.  These men were in their sixties and seventies, veterans of the last war that used poison gas often. The Europeans were used to them, and nobody except the spoiled Americans – like me – were momentarily shocked enough and so rude enough to stare.  While we had burned victims, there were so few in comparison to the population that they were rarely encountered.  Not so in Europe.

 

Some of the old soldiers had such taut skin the lips were pulled back to constantly expose their teeth. Some looked like their horizontal hold had gone, some like their faces operated on an axis diagonal to the norm. With the chronically red eyes and missing or uncontrollable eyelids, they could be quite horrifying to the unwary. Without hardly any exception, they all stood erect and were neatly dressed and did their job efficiently and well without complaint.  Of course, many of them couldn’t talk because their larynx had been burned out.

 

Only years later did I realize: they looked exactly like Tolkien’s orcs. 

 

The Lord of The Rings, the great work of romance by Great War veteran J. R. R. Tolkien, is almost totally rooted in the British experience of WW I and the literary traditions existing before it and evolving during it.  You’d hardly know it by reading the mound of articles about it.  Most who have treaded on this before are hampered by utter ignorance of history contemporary to the event, no appreciation for the literary world in which it was hatched, and deep fear of the possibility they’ll have to acknowledge they know nothing about the mythology or disciplines (mostly ancient languages) that charmed Tolkien all his life.  Few, if any, popular authors demand as much knowledge to review a book as John Tolkien, and it is intimidating.  Most try to escape by shallowing out the work to the depth of the authors imitating him: another ‘sword and sorcery’ book of ‘good and evil’ and ‘dragons and knights’ on quests.  Tolkien is way, way more than that.

 

Reading LOTR was, to me, what I imagine reading a compressed Conquest of the New World (or “A” New World) would have been like to a European farm boy as it happened, with the history and mythologies of the fascinating inhabitants instantly available, perhaps by daily installments on birch bark.  It was strange but oddly believable.  It was exciting.  I wanted to go and see Middle Earth for myself.   I liked the folks involved.  I wept when it was over.  I did. Most of my compatriots seemed to have read or glanced at it when they were stoned or tripping and only recall the moments of alternative reality within the story.  They missed the story Tolkien was telling and received a story they wanted to hear.  That’s the stigmata of a great story teller, I guess, but I regret their loss.

 

If Hemingway is an author that requires historical perspective, especially about World War One, Tolkien actually demands it.  If for no other reason than the enjoyment and edification of the movie audience, we ought to know more about those horrible four years.  So with apologies to the Jake Barnes of the world (because all wars are awful) and even though there have been wars with greater total dead and casualties, never has so much sustained conflict and bloodshed been fixed in such static areas for so long.  So very, very long.  The British, in one battle and with a vastly smaller population, lost more men dead than the United States sustained in casualties in the entire war.  In a partially concurrent battle, Verdun, so did the French.  In both, so did the Germans.  The Russians lost more than all combined.  And that doesn’t include the Italians, Austrians, Turks….. 

 

The United States has difficulty imagining the implications of all this.  The recognition scenes we have of that conflict, a concept I have stolen from Paul Fussell, are very different in the collectively dim and unreliable memories of Americans and the rest of the world.  This, when Americans visualize it at all.

 

It becomes tiresome to continually berate the American public for knowing so little of their own history, never mind Europe’s.  It leads it into unintended hilarity, as when we claim we won the First World War.  After all, right after we arrived, the Germans quit.  Right?  Right?

 

And by the way, off the top of your head and before we continue - since only ‘we’ won it - why did the United States enter World War One in the first place?  Eh?  Shouldn’t things like “world wars” be considered important enough to know why we participated?  (Especially since our President is so hot to risk one now?) Chances are, based on my experience, even college graduates with advanced degrees do not know.  Neither can most date our participation.  There is something very wrong with this.

 

The very few months the United States fought the Kaiser, using borrowed artillery and equipment, was certainly a godsend for the exhausted French and British, and a bitter blow to the Germans who squandered their defeat of the once Russian, now Soviet armies and never could break all the way through on the Western Front, which was, by the way, only Western to the Germans. Because we were there so short a time, and the war of movement began again, we never fully appreciated what the average soldier on the Western Front endured for four years.  There is much competition, of course, and hell - like love - is hard to measure person to person, but if there was a more horrible war for participant soldiers than the Western Front 1914-1918, we don’t ever want to know of it, much less participate.

 

So, a summary of the Western Front before the United States entered the war.

 

The War started in August of 1914.  The Germans invaded France through neutral Belgium, nearly captured Paris, were pushed back.  Both sides dug in, exhausted, to wait out the winter.  They stayed four years, pretty much with no movement, shelling each other constantly.

 

Typically, soldiers were in trenches facing the enemy from the English Channel to Switzerland; the trenches were often lined with cadavers daily eaten by black rats, weighing several pounds each, with water to above boot level, and no – absolutely no – cover once you left that paradise.  Four years of static artillery barrage by both sides had removed all growth, including much grass or the famous red poppy, anywhere near the field of view. There were at the front lines no actual latrines to speak of, because they made no sense: they had to keep you below ground level, and were the first to fill with water.  You pissed and defecated into the water and used your helmet to toss it over the top.  Or left it. Whatever.  Surrounded by decaying human, horse, dog, and rat corpses that could not be moved away without the bearers exposing themselves to the enemy and adding to their number, shit might have been considered an air freshener. You ate, slept, and worked in that environment.  Got it? And then, of course, the combat.

 

Anyone who has been under heavy artillery barrage, or air bombing, it is said, never really recovers. The unending noise alone could drive a man (..woman, child…) insane, never mind the vibrations and air pressure blowing out ears and eyes.  All this short of actual broken skin wounds or death. 

 

The First World War introduced the following additional horrors to the above: bombing and strafing by airplane (which was brand new – most people had never seen an airplane till the war, and many Russian soldiers had never heard of such, and fired at their own in terror…), crushing by tank (also new), the flame thrower (which suffocates you in close quarters if it doesn’t evaporate your corporeal being), the improved machine gun, and poison gas. Gas was an uncertain ally, dependent upon the wind, and being heavier than air would often stagnate in friendly trenches for days. 

 

When the war started, only the machine gun was considered understood in all applications.  It wasn’t.   And, I almost forgot the heavy artillery barrages by huge howitzers of a size previously unknown outside the world’s navies (420 mm) that allowed shells to constantly fall from the sky; continual bombing by a plane that never ran out of fuel.   These lasted weeks, sometimes.

 

In the rainy season, with all settled into muck and mud, heavy artillery fire loosened up the soil beneath your feet in the trench, keeping water and granules agitated and able to act like, in extreme cases, quicksand.  You could drown in the trenches, standing at attention, clawing the muddy sides down upon you, sinking under the weight of wet leather and canvas and gun and backpack.  It happened.

 

Of course, there were the charges and counter charges every once in a while.  Each Army - German, French, English – had at least one General with A Plan That Would Win the War. The English Sure Thing’s author was the dour General Haig; his idea was an attack along the Somme River, subsequently called his “Big Push.” While France and Germany bled each other at Verdun, Haig assembled huge amounts of artillery and troops for a focused assault.  He had absolutely no clue as to the German fortifications, apparently assuming they were as dismal and ludicrous as the English trenches.  He was quite wrong. 

 

While the English dug in soil, the Germans excavated deep into chalk and rock, had bunkers thirty feet deep, with wooden beam structures, electricity, and kitchens.  Most of the troops could sleep inside, underground and relatively safe from bombardment.

 

Haig also had dismal appreciation of the men he led, draftees in the New Army.  He thought them so stupid that only the basics were possible, and tried to make their assault idiot proof.  He misdiagnosed who was the idiot.

 

Before the war, Haig had denigrated the machine gun (two per battalion were sufficient, he felt and, worse, wrote) and was sure the horse cavalry was the ticket to success.  The amount of cargo space allocated to the shipping, care, and feeding of the utterly useless cavalry lost battles and probably delayed the War’s end by months if not years.  Of course, the British Army allocated manual space to the slinging of camels aboard ships, instruction that no doubt caused comment well before the first winter in Flanders.   A significant portion of Haig’s effort for the Somme was making sure the cavalry was ready to go when the infantry broke the German line. They were, but the line didn’t come near to the breaking point.  And they were fortunate, since one machine gun could destroy a company of cavalry quickly (Haig was right!).  And the Germans had lots of machine guns.  And barbed wire.

 

The battlefields were covered with nearly as many dead animals as men.  And there was no way to drag the large horse corpses out of fragrance range without exposing yourself to fire.  An added feature.  Watching the stupid slaughter of horses pulling guns and wagons to the animal loving British must have been nearly as awful as the slaughter of men.  Added to this, the desecration of the pastoral beauty of Picardy and Belgium, defoliated and barren and disgusting beyond ken, must have revolted civilized beings before even considering the bloodbath. But nobody could do that; nobody could escape the mutual slaughter. 

 

In late June of 1916, Haig notified the Germans that an attack was coming by numerous means, foremost amongst which was a bombardment of the section to be attacked that lasted over a week.  Then he simply ceased fire on the targeted trenches.  The Germans, knowing their enemy, rushed back to the trenches from their impressive dugouts and set their machine guns.  Then, Haig ordered the infantry to attack by walking forward.  So they’d stay together.  Some groups kicked soccer balls back and forth as an illustrative example of the ease of attack that the officers had convinced their men would be the case. The seconds of excited wonder before the Germans opened up were not many.  The British Army, that day, lost about nineteen thousand men dead and many more wounded, the worst day in their history.  Nothing in United States history comes close. 

 

During the six month Battle of the Somme, the British lost about a half million more or less in dead and wounded. The average required height for a British soldier dropped several inches during that battle to fill the ranks.  In its worst conflict, The Civil War, The United States, North and South, lost about as many during their four year war to military action as the British did at the Somme, but out of a much bigger population.  It was so horrible that the British military lied and equivocated about it, and figures are not sure to the present time.

 

At the end of six months, the conquered ground could be measured in yards.  Something like twelve kilometers at its deepest and pointless penetration.

 

After the Americans came, the Allies were able to slowly push the Germans back until, in one last try, the Germans with their Storm Troopers (their word) counter-attacked and destroyed nearly all before them, but they suddenly stopped in France.  Nobody knew why.

 

Turned out, the exhausted (physically, psychologically, emotionally) German troops discovered the food, wine, and material of France and stopped to party.  The vaunted discipline of the German Army vanished in a pillaging spree.  They were unable to resist the Allies’ renewed push and fell back with increasing speed towards Germany.  At the time, and to the soldiers involved, no reason could be seen for this, since the Allies seemed on the ropes one minute, the enemy stopped for no known reason, and the next minute the rout was on.  It must have seemed a miracle to the British, who started the war with another miracle at Mons, where dead archers from hundreds of years past led by Angels stopped the Germans.  Could the Great War, as it was called early on, actually be ending?  Was it over?  After all the indescribable horror?  Praise with Great Praise!

 

The Somme is but one of numerous fiascos above the norm that lacerated the War to End All Wars.  Virtually every survivor of this horror who became a writer or artist made frequent reference to these years of hell; if they didn’t, critics, biographers, and Freudians did it for them.  And why not?  Surely it is a valid concern.  Trauma of this sort must rank as a key component of that man’s life.  There is this one exception.

 

The man most often voted Author of the (20^th) Century, and certainly one of its best sellers, and surely one of the most influential, fought at the Somme. His most famous work has recently been reduced to cinema, and the first third of this nine hour extravaganza has already won Oscars and approaches a billion dollars in ticket sales world wide. It would be informative to call for a show of hands from among the movie’s viewers and ask who thinks someone could have fought at the Somme and not have had it deform his life, cauterize any romantic notions, stifle any decency.  Any reading of Tolkien’s best and most famous work, The Lord of the Rings, ought to be accompanied by a reading of World War One literature, history, and myth.  There is lots of all three.  You cannot fully appreciate or even understand LOTR without this background. You really cannot.

 

Let’s cut to the chase. The problem with any detailed review of J. R. R. Tolkien is that the man was so narrow in his interests (by lay standards) and so deep in his knowledge of them that people shrink from discussing them, especially in public forums, because they cannot but seem morons in so doing.  I am no more qualified to undertake a scholarly analysis of something called, say, Tolkien and The Time of His Literary Gestation than I am to discuss Urdu predicate forms in Finnish, although Tolkien probably could, if such existed.  Tolkien could speak many languages, read in many more, and some - like old Finnish and Icelandic – can politely be called recondite without the help of excessive amounts of liquor.

 

Reviewers take refuge in this.  Because neither they nor their audience really care about linguistics or foreign languages, analyses tend to skip over that discipline with a quick aside, and chat about Hobbits.  Since virtually nobody reads history anymore, reviewers and readers alike can bask in shared ignorance.  But when C. S. Lewis read his friend’s book and said it had “a beauty to break your heart,” he was speaking of someone who knew the gruel that Tolkien had turned into mithril, from experiences that turned young men into orcs. 

 

Worse for the average reader, Tolkien cheerfully enjoyed creating languages and large vocabularies for them; languages never spoken before but coming complete with myths and tales of their speakers - people who had never existed either.  Because unlike, say, the absurdity of the Star Trek linguistic entry, Klingon, Tolkien’s languages are real, in that they have distinct grammar and syntax and complicated relationships with other languages, actual and Tolkien.  The standard way to create a pretend language is simply to substitute one set of sounds for another or one word for another and keep the constructs of the original language.  In essence, code

 

Real languages aren’t code for each other, of course, which is why translators have to do more than memorize vocabulary lists.  Translation is encryption.  For obvious example, in English the subject, the predicate variant of “to be”, and the object are just about always - absent contractions - separate words.  In just about every other language, this isn’t true, and a three word English sentence can become one.

 

It is difficult for writers to frame a reason to discuss the differences between the languages of Elvish groups, for which they are grateful.  To discuss them, you probably should be able to converse in them.  You know, order a hamburger, ask for the restroom in Quenya.

 

Well, that ain’t going to happen, so you can condemn or praise the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, as you see fit.  But these are books that depend on atmosphere and mood, and the success of both is due to the extensive and complete back-story; a series of posthumous tomes that can either be viewed as the creation of a compulsive and odd autodidact or a mythic summation of pre-Christian Europe by an anal Catholic who didn’t like gaps in knowledge.  And someone who had seen combat in all its dehumanizing forms.

 

But these are not the works of a compulsive or disturbed author. These are the works of an artist who created the most successful adjacent reality in literature – any literature – and poured as much of his love, learning, and intellectual energy into them as Sauron poured evil and his own substance into his One Ring.  I have heard that it is the most popular book in Russia since the Revolution, in stolen and legal editions, and that it has made huge inroads in China and throughout Asia, where record keeping of debts to western publishers is nil, for all intents.  So there is no surer count of the vastness of Tolkien’s popularity than of the dead at The Somme. 

 

What makes Tolkien so successful is that readers do not feel they are on a foreign planet in science fiction in Middle Earth, or in a feel-good romance, but are, in Tolkien’s phrase, subjugated to ‘sub-creation’ of a world they recognize instantly and have, apparently, missed.  The book is full of “recognition scenes,” which is a phrase Paul Fussell used in a book of quite a different sort twenty years after LOTR was first published.  In The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell traces the literature of England before and during the War as evolved in the new reality.  He never mentions Tolkien, who – ironically - I would bet he hated, but so much of LOTR owes its existence to The Western Front and the myths and horrors that Tolkien either experienced first or second hand that I remain amazed nobody has done an accounting of this.  Given the lack of original theses clogging the desks of colleges today, someone better get cracking.  I, for one, would want to read some of them.

 

It is hard to imagine a famous author, the sole survivor of a ghastly slaughter, not to have had that aspect of his life dragged repeatedly over the coals till either something of value was derived or the public lost interest.   But Tolkien’s wartime experiences on The Somme are rarely given more than an “it was awful” mention, and his subsequent chronic illness, assumed to be a form of typhoid, is merely a handy segue to that easily handled and extensive portion of his life: academic Don at Oxford and chatty notions about The Shire, hobbits, and a world long gone that was real and a world of fiction ever to be with us. 

 

Next- The Great War of the Ring Indeed