Circles of Time (2 page)

      
Monday, June 20, 1921. Observations and reflections. By train from Folkestone to London.

            How many times, I wonder, have I been on this train and taken a seat by the window and written in a journal? Times beyond count. A milk run in 1915 and '16. The carriage jammed then with men coming back to Blighty on leave. The mud of Flanders still on their boots, that glazed “trench look” in their eyes. Only half believing their luck. Only half believing they were not in fact dead and being transported to hell.

            “I took you for a German.” That look of hate before she heard me speak in unbroken English. There had been that look during the war. The cold stare at my civilian clothes. The acid remark: “Been to France on holiday?” The atmosphere always warmed when I told them I was a newspaperman. They were well-informed men. They despised most war correspondents for good reason, but most had read my pieces and appreciated the honesty—even after the censors had chopped out the more unpleasant bits. They had raised reading between the lines to a fine art and knew what I was saying about the war.

            “I took you for a German.” The hate runs deep—here and everywhere. “I took you for a Frenchman … [the man on the train from Saarbrucken to Berlin, ignoring me coldly because he had heard me speaking French at the station; warming up after our passports were checked before leaving the occupied zone] … a damned frog bastard.” We spoke German and I told him I was from Chicago. Second-generation German-American. “I have an uncle in Milwaukee,” the man said. “You Yankee fellows backed the wrong side. You'll find out.”

            Who knows? As Jacob Golden used to say, there are no heroes anymore. We are all villains obsessed with the idea of kicking civilization to bits. The only animal on earth who fouls its own nest and makes a virtue out of slaughter.

            The man at the cemetery pitied me. The faint smile, the glow in his eyes. The righteous look seen on the faces of the devout when told that one no longer believes in God. But I admit it took all the courage I had to walk away from her grave. It's easier to hang on. To return once a month, or three times a year, and “visit.” I'm sure the man from Dover does just that. He visits, passing the time of day with his dead sons. The woman I saw once by the grave of her husband, seated in a little folding chair. “Talks a blue streak,” the caretaker told me. “Comes across from London twice a year and tells him all the news of the family. They get a bit daft, poor souls.” Hanging on. Blocking the reality of oblivion from the mind. A mere prolonging of pain. Like sawing off a leg with a penknife where one quick swing with a sharp blade would be more humane.

            The war itself too painful to comprehend for most people. The statistics just starting to be printed. A million English dead. Twenty-seven percent of all young Frenchmen. God alone knows how many Germans, Russians, Austrians, Italians, Turks, and Serbs. And who can tally the continuing cost of the peace? How many dead from famine? Typhus? Influenza? The figures are meaningless anyway. No one can grasp them. Each digit a person. Ivy—slender, dark-haired, violet-eyed. Naked and loving in our bed. Reduced in importance to a single number on a list. The old man's sons. John and Hubert. Who were they? What did they do? Will we feel their loss? Two more numbers added to the tally sheet. Nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven left to record, to personalize, to focus on a once-living face.

CALTHORPE & CROFTS

Publishers

Bloomsbury Square

London

      Dear Martin:

            I trust this reaches you before you depart from Paris. Both Jeremy and I congratulate you on your new job. Very impressive. I wish your appointment had taken place before we printed the jacket for the book, but that can't be helped.

            Martin, as we discussed last year,
A Killing Ground
is quite likely the best possible book at the worst possible time. First reviews—or rather, lack of them—appear to justify that prediction. Only the most liberal, socialist, or pacifist press has bothered to review it so far—and there aren't many of those left in Britain these days! We are anything but disappointed, as—also agreed between us—making money is not the object. We feel pride in printing it, just as you feel pride in having written it. However, we must face up to the fact that the book may come in for criticism designed to discredit it and you. A “muckraking” charge as example. Give some thought to rebuttal—a thousand words or so on just why you wrote such a savage exposé. Something we could send out as a “letter of publication” to any Tory paper that takes a swipe at you. This need not be done at this moment, while you are so busy and temporarily “uprooted.” After you get settled, drop by the office and we will discuss it.

Sincerely yours,

A. T. Calthorpe

            Regarding Calthorpe. How he thinks I can avoid charges of muckraking is beyond me. It is muckraking in the purest meaning of the term. But then I'm a Chicago boy, a town where muckraking is something of a fine art.

            I wrote the book as my own personal catharsis, a way to cleanse my soul of gall. All those months covering the peace conferences at Versailles. Day after day observing the haggling over spoils. The fixing of blame and the establishment of costs—the peacemakers like so many lawyers wrangling over an accident case. And out there, along the old trench line of the western front, lay the dead. No one spoke for them. They were only mentioned as adjuncts to noble phrases—the “glorious dead” … “not in vain” … “fallen heroes” in “the war to save democracy” or “the war to end all wars.” And there they were in the boneyards, the millions who could just as well have been strangled at birth for all the good they had done to
save
or
end
anything.

            An observation through the window. Rows of dark brick houses. A factory flanking the railroad line. Men standing in front of locked gates carrying signs: “Not a Penny off the Wage.” No pastorals here. A tiny glimpse of postwar England. Strikes and more strikes with over a million out of work. The pickets look shabby and ill fed. How many of them, I wonder, came back from the war believing Lloyd George's promise that they were returning to “a land fit for heroes”?

            And so much for that.

Saturday

      My dear Rilke:

            Welcome back to jolly old Britain—although why anyone would give up a perfectly decent job in Paris is quite beyond my comprehension. Make yourself at home. Champagne in the kitchen—cold if Marco remembered to put ice in the box. I'm off to Macedonia to investigate starvation there. My chaps want full report on the reasons why. Told them that the reason for starvation is because there's no ruddy food. Not good enough for the jolly old League of (almost all) Nations, which has a penchant for quadruplicated reports on official forms. Mine will be a masterpiece—as always. And, as always, will be filed neatly away and forgotten while the Greeks continue to eat mud and straw. You may put that in your journal somewhere as an observation of despair.

I am, sir,

Yr. mo. Hble. St.

Jacob