The Great War Remembered

I think Veteran's Day might be my favorite holiday - or, not favorite, not exactly that - but the one I find most - moving? It's certainly the one "serious" holiday I seem to post about every year. It may be that it has retained much more of its "true meaning" than any others - Memorial Day or Labor Day are markers of the seasons, excuses to have a cookout - they're underlying meanings are, not forgotten, but moved back in the mix. Veteran's Day - barely celebrated anymore (though I think one of the reasons it holds onto some of its power is that when it is celebrated, it's celebrated on the Day Itself - the Monday holidays tend to lose their specificity over time) - means almost nothing except what it means.

Though I suppose what it means is open to dispute. I agree with Jim Henley - that what it means to me is mostly Armistice Day. I much prefer to treat Memorial Day as a day to remember the dead; Armistice Day should be precise. It should be about 11/11/1918, the end of the Great War - WWI needs to be remembered, in itself. That war seems to have a special place in the disasters of this world - it represents a sharp and clear rift in the human experience, and unlike most such events, there is nothing whatsoever one can find in it to take comfort from. It isn't hope dashed or desires thwarted, it's stupidity, callousness, arrogance and mass murder. It was not set off by any great causes - it represented no special evil that had to be stopped (neither side can claim to have been fighting for the good) - nothing good came out of it. The opposite....

It is odd: I studied history in college, and understood the importance of the war, its place in political history,,, but it's only been later that I've felt the full impact of it. I've kept on taking classes, but, since college, mostly film, lit, art classes, or intellectual history... And this just constantly underlines the ways WWI was a break from what came before. Studying German film - how can you miss it? it's everywhere in their films; it shaped their whole culture, obviously. But it shaped everyone - spawned new movements, shaped the art of the 1920s and beyond - and defines how that postwar art is a complete break from before.

The world changed, in almost unprocessable ways, between about 1870 and 1925. (A point I've noted before.) It's a different world after WWI - the maps are different, the idea of what human beings are was different - how we represented ourselves was different. And the end of the war - euphoric as it may have been on November 11, 1918 - didn't resolve anything. The peace turned out as bad as the war - given the fact that the peace led directly to WWII, and even larger even more horrible event - the peace may have been worse than the war. So maybe today is best seen as a chance to mourn for a lost chance - the Armistice should have ended the war, should have found a way to make something good of the horror, to find a way not to do it again. But they botched it....

So it seems good to remember it, the war, the people who served in it. To remember the possibility of peace that came with the end of the war - as well as the failure to achieve peace. Remembering World War One, specifically, is an almost necessarily anti-war act. I have noticed this in films: it's an old adage that it is impossible to make an anti-war war film - war is too cinematic, too exciting. And that's more true than not - but I've noticed that most of the best really anti-war war films are WWI films - Paths of Glory; Johnny Got His Gun; All Quiet on the Western Front; Gallipoli, to name a few. It's a war that is very very difficult to romanticize, to find any redemption in. Even heroism is almost impossible in the trenches - all you can do is die or wait to die. WWII - has villains; wars like Vietnam - it's too hard not to take sides, anti-war films there become anti-Vietnam war films. The closest I can think of to the tone of WWI films might be some post-WWII Japanese films - like Fires on the Plain or the Human Condition, or even, at times, Letters from Iwo Jima. Those films probably get their effects by showing the common soldier's suffering and sense of betrayal alongside the knowledge that they are not fighting for anything worthwhile. The postwar Japanese films that reject Japan's cause in the war while retaining sympathy for the soldiers in the war gets closer to the deep pessimism of World War One films...

I'm rambling a bit. I'll leave with one more note - the last three surviving veterans of the war: Claude Stanley, John Babcock and Frank Buckles. Good work, gentlemen...