Where Youth and Laughter Go

[Guest guest]

April 24, 2006 Issue

 

Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

 

 

The Hell Where Youth and Laughter Go

 

by Taki

 

A recent Newsweek cover story on the war’s most

fearless doctor brought back painful memories. As a

very young boy I was on the receiving end of

Anglo-American bombing while I lived in Tatoi, a

northern suburb of Athens where the royal summer

palace was situated and next to which my family had a

house. Near the summer palace lay a tiny Greek

military airport occupied by the German Luftwaffe. By

1942, aged six, I learned what collateral damage was

all about.

 

Not that we called it that, back then. It was called

bad luck. Just as the French farmers in Normandy

cursed the offshore batteries that turned their houses

into bombed-out hovels before the D-Day landing—forget

what the movies show—so did the Greeks living near

Tatoi fulminate against those dropping bombs on them

in defense of liberty, democracy, and freedom.

 

Hollywood types don’t understand what bombs can do to

humans, so they show children cheering and adults

lifting their glasses to their unseen benefactors, but

the truth is somewhat different.

The earth trembles,

men and women lose their bowels, the noise scares the

living daylights out of one, the screams of the

wounded remain in the psyche.

Even worse is the

weeping of the survivors over lost loved ones after

the sirens have screeched the all-clear. One thing is

for sure: no one looks up to the sky and thanks Ike or

Winnie. To the contrary.

 

These are the facts. The rest is Hollywood and neocon

propaganda. Those doing the fighting, of course, have

it much worse. As General Sherman said, war is hell,

but successive generations with abundant evidence

before them still persist in fighting.

 

Why men fight is a moral issue of great importance,

especially today, when non-fighters instigate wars

that others fight for them.

“I adore war. It’s like a

big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I

have never been so well or so happy,†said the poet

Julian Grenfell before dying at the western front.

Grenfell was killed early on, before disillusionment

had the chance to set in.

That other wonderful poet,

Harvard-educated Alan Seeger, serving with the French

Foreign Legion, told his mother that “every minute

here is worth weeks of ordinary experience.â€

He

perished two years later at the Somme. I guess some

poets have a death wish.

 

Not the gallant Siegfried Sassoon, who survived a

nervous breakdown to fight again and live to a ripe

old age.

 

Here’s what he had to say about war:

 

“I knew a simple soldier boy / Who grinned at life in empty

joy, / Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, / And

whistled early with the lark. / In winter trenches,

cowed and glum, / With crumps and lice and lack of

rum, / He put a bullet through his brain. / No one

spoke of him again. / You smug-faced crowds with

kindling eye / Who cheer when soldier lads march by, /

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where

youth and laughter go.â€

 

Hear, hear.

Incidentally, when the campaign against

French fries was on, I couldn’t help thinking how

wrong the sofa-samurais had it.

Did you know that from

Aug. 4, 1914 to Aug. 29, 1914, 260,000 French soldiers

were killed without advancing the front by a single

foot? “The more men died, the more urgently a cause

had to be found for them to die for.†Does it sound

familiar? Like staying the course?

 

So why do men fight?

The question of motivation of the

Wehrmacht, the unity of the German army sustained to

the bitter end, had little to do with political

indoctrination.

(That applied to elite Waffen SS units only.)

It had to do with the social organization of

army units. A captured sergeant laughed when his

interrogators inquired about the politics of his men.

“When you ask this question, I realize well that you

have no idea what makes a soldier fight. If we think

at all it is about Heimat [home]. We fight for each

other …â€

 

Needless to say, modern-day weapons make for unheroic

deaths. Men are blown to tatters. Paul Fussell writes

in Doing Battle how red-hot metal tore into his body,

while the man next to him turned a whitish green while

letting out a subdued groan before dying.

 

High-explosive projectiles scatter dreadful evidence

of mortality. Here’s William Manchester landing on Iwo

Jima: “You tripped over strange viscera fifteen feet

long, over bodies cut in half at the waist. Legs and

arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet

from the closest torsos.

The stench of burning flesh

was everywhere…†Flying fragments of the human body

themselves cause wounds. Manchester’s father had a

piece of one of his men’s tibia buried in his back.

Others were hit by flying arms and were temporarily

stunned.

 

But the boys back home tell us to stick with it. Bush

says that despite more tough fighting, progress is

being made. After all, the mission has been

accomplished.

 

Papa Hemingway comes to mind. In A Farewell to Arms,

Frederick Henry has had enough. “I had seen nothing

sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory

… abstract words such as honor and courage were

obscene beside the names of villages, the names of

rivers …â€

 

Read that you neocons and hang your heads in shame.

But I won’t hold my breath until you do.

 

April 24, 2006 Issue