Trechos de uma resenha de Ordered To Die: A History Of The Ottoman Army In The First World War (2001), de Edward J. Erickson.
The long-term effects of the World War I period in many respects have defined the states and societies of the Middle East. This is true, of course, of the shape of the countries: in essence the borders of the Republic of Turkey, as well as those of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan were drawn in the immediate aftermath of the war. For the Republic of Turkey, the long-term
effects were particularly significant. Firstly, there was the loss of life, due to battlefield casualties, epidemics and hunger. This hit Anatolia particularly hard, because it was primarily from among the peasant population of Anatolia that the
Ottoman Army had recruited its soldiers. All in all the population loss of Anatolia's Muslim population was in the region of 2.5 million. Anatolia after the war was a strikingly empty country, as many travellers tell us in their descriptions. It would take a generation to restore the Anatolian population to its former size. Secondly, the war had given the political leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress the opportunity to rescind the age-old system of capitulations, which gave preferential treatment and legal immunity to subjects and protégés of European powers and to give full rein to their policy of "National Economy" (millî iktisat). Through this policy the Unionists tried to replace the Armenian and Greek bourgeoisie, which together with European interests, controlled over ninety percent of the modern sectors of the economy with a newly created class of Muslim entrepreneurs. Their Kemalist successors continued this nationalist economic policy and from the Nineteen Forties onwards began to achieve its aims. Thirdly, the very creation of the Republic of Turkey, would have been unthinkable without the large-scale "ethnic cleansing" (to use that cynical term from the Bosnian war), which cost 600.000 to 800.000 Armenians their lives and up to 200.000 Greeks their homes. The national struggle (millî mücadele) led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha after the war, which ultimately gave birth to the republic, was largely motivated by the desire to prevent the Greeks and Armenians from reversing their fortunes. Fourthly, the ease with which the Turkish nationalist leadership after the war renounced any claims to the Arab provinces and adopted Anatolia as their new fatherland that had been part of the Ottoman Empire for four hundred years certainly owes something to the fact that Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues had all served at one time or another on the Arab fronts and had become deeply disillusioned with the (lack of) loyalty of the Arabs to the empire. Finally, the degree to which the republic and its political system were dominated by the military cannot be understood without reference to World War I and its sequel, the "national struggle." This legacy is also still with us today.
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Chapter 1 is a description of the Ottoman army as it was organised and reformed in the years between 1908 and 1914. The emphasis is on the disaster of the Balkan War, the reorganisation thereafter and the advent of the German military mission.
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Chapter 2 deals with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war, the German alliance and the war aims. Here Erickson draws on the research of Ulrich Trumpener and others, as well as on published memoirs. To put the Ottoman and German war plans into context, he gives a number of relevant statistics. It is sobering to realise that on the eve of this - essentially industrial - war, Ottoman coal production was one third of one percent of that of Great Britain!
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Chapters three to seven then contain the actual description of the Ottoman campaigns, which is presented in a clear and systematic way. Chapter 3 deals with the early offensives, notably the ill-fated Caucasian campaign, which ended with the defeat at Sarikamis. In a very interesting passage, Erickson links the plan for the encirclement of the Russians at Sarikamis to the great German victory in the battle of Tannenberg (August, 1915), because that had convinced both Germans and Ottomans that Russian field headquarters were very vulnerable to encirclement. It is also striking that, in Erickson's view, the fact that the Ottoman army's pincer movement came very close to success, is a vindication of the strategic correctness of Enver's plan, which is usually adduced as proof of his irresponsibility and adventurism. [...]
The author's relative weakness outside the field of military history is shown by the fact that he mistakenly identifies the Dutchman Westenenk and the Norwegian Hoff as military attachés.
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The next chapter is called "Under Attack" and it deals with the crucial period of April 1915-January 1916, when the Ottomans - against all odds and even their own expectations - defeated the Allied attempts to break through the Dardanelles, which would probably have brought the Ottomans to their knees. It was also the period of the Armenian deportations and massacres, of course. Erickson, to his credit, does not try to avoid this sensitive subject and he clearly makes an effort to present a balanced account. He deals primarily with the question of the responsibility and involvement of the Ottoman army. That he sees the Armenian deportations primarily as an outcome of military reasoning and as a perceived strategic necessity in the face of the Russian onslaught is the logical result of the focus of his research and of the sources he has used, but it leads to an underestimation of the political factors involved.
Erickson's treatment of the military developments of 1915-1916 is convincing. He clearly brings out the crucial role played by logistical problems and especially by the lack of modern transport facilities. Whether it is true that better interior lines of communication could have made the difference between victory and defeat, as he says, or not (would not the lack of an industrial base and the sheer lack of manpower have told in the end?), it is clear that the fact that ammunition for the Palestinian front had to be loaded and unloaded twelve times between Germany and the Sinai front; and that Ottoman soldiers had to walk for a month after being detrained before they reached the frontline, was a handicap of tremendous importance.
In chapters five and six the author decribes the events of the years 1916 and 1917, which saw great Ottoman successes on the Mesopotamian and Sinai fronts, but only more disasters and further Russian advances in Anatolia. Chapter seven treats the year 1918, when exactly the reverse was true: the melting away of the Russian army allowed Ottoman forces to reach the Caspian, while in Mesopotamia the British steamroller slowly but surely moved upstream and in Palestine, Allenby's tactical
acumen (combined with a huge numerical superiority) routed the Ottoman troops.
The overall conclusion of the author is that, all things considered, the Ottoman army's record in World War I is an astounding achievement, a "saga of fortitude and resilience", if one takes into account the fact that the army had been all but annihilated in 1913 and that it had to fight under desperate logistical conditions. That is a conclusion amply supported by the evidence adduced in this book.
At least as interesting as the main body of the text are the appendices. In these, Erickson makes available sets of data on subjects such as the Ottoman army organisation, the structure of the General Staff and headquarters, German military assistance and Ottoman casualty figures, which are otherwise hard to find. Erickson's figures for the Ottoman casualties are composed by taking the casualty numbers in the official Turkish campaign histories, when these numbers are given (which is the case in two thirds of the campaign histories), and then extrapolating from that base.
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In conclusion, we can say that Ordered to Die is a book with a clear but limited purpose, i.e. to present a purely military history of the Ottoman war effort in the English language, where histories of this type have so far only been available in French or Turkish. In spite of some of the minor criticisms expressed above, it achieves that purpose very well indeed.
The story of the Ottoman Empire in World War I cannot be told in military terms alone, however. As in many other belligerent countries, World War I also set the scene for profound demographic, economic and social upheaval. Side by side with their ethnic policies, which ultimately resulted in the expulsion and deportation of hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox and in the death of a large part of the Armenian population, the Young Turks also developed a national economic policy, inspired by German economic thinking. The primary aim of this policy was to allow the Turkish/Muslim majority of the population to become masters in their own house in a situation where the more developed sectors of the economy, especially mechanized industrial production, international trade and financial services were completely dominated by foreign interests and local Christians.
Trechos de Yashka: My Life As Peasant, Exile, And Soldier (1919), de Maria Bochkareva (como relatado a Isaac Don Levine).
It was November, 1914. With my heart steeled in the decision I had made, I resolutely approached the headquarters of the Twenty-fifth Reserve Battalion stationed in Tomsk. Upon entering a clerk asked me what I wanted.
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The man looked at me for a moment and burst out laughing. He called to the other clerks. "Here is a baba [woman] who wants to enlist!" he announced jokingly, pointing at me.
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There was little time for relaxation, however, as we went through an intensive training course of only three months before we were sent to the front.
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MY FIRST EXPERIENCE OF NO MAN'S LAND
A big battle was raging at this time on our section of the front. We were told to be ready for an order to move at any moment to the front line. Meanwhile, we were sheltered in dugouts.
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Our position was five miles behind the first line of trenches. The booming of the guns could be heard in the distance. Streams of wounded, some in vehicles and others on foot, flowed along the road.
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Night came. The Germans were discharging a volume of gas at us. Perhaps they noticed an unusual movement behind the lines, and wished to annihilate us before we entered the battle. But they failed. Over the wire came the order to put on our masks. Thus were we baptized in this most inhuman of all German war inventions. Our masks were not perfect. The deadly gas penetrated some and made our eyes smart and water.
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The front trench was a mere ditch, and as we lined up along it our shoulders touched. The positions of the enemy were less than three-quarters of a mile away, and the space between was filled with groans and swept by bullets. It was a scene full of horrors. Sometimes an enemy shell would land in the midst of our men, killing several and wounding more. We were sprinkled with the blood of our comrades and spattered by the mud.
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I climbed out with the rest of the men, to be met by a volley of machine-gun fire. For a moment there was confusion. So many of our number had fallen like ripe wheat cut down by a gigantic scythe wielded by the invisible arm of Satan himself. Fresh blood was dripping on the cold corpses that had lain there for hours or days, and the moans were heart-rending.
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And forward we went. The enemy had seen us go over the top, and he let loose Hell. As we ran forward we kept firing. Then the order came to lie down. The bombardment grew even more concentrated. Alternately running for some distance and then lying down, we reached the enemy's barbed wire entanglements. We had expected to find them demolished by our artillery, but, alas! they were untouched! There were only about seventy left of our Company of two hundred and fifty.
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When dawn broke in the East, putting an end to my expeditions through No Man's Land, I had saved about fifty lives.
I had no idea at the time of what I had accomplished. But when the soldiers whom I had picked up were brought to the relief-station and asked who rescued them, about fifty replied, "Yashka." This was communicated to the Commander, who recommended me for an Order of the 4th Degree, "for distinguished valour shown in the saving of many lives under fire."
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As I was about to descend into the ditch I suddenly observed a huge German taking aim at me. Hardly did I have time to fire when something struck my right leg, and I had a sensation of a warm liquid trickling down my flesh. I fell. My comrades had put the enemy to flight and were pursuing him. There were many wounded, and cries of "Save me, Holy Jesus!" came from every direction.
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It was about Easter of 1915 when I arrived in Kiev. The station there was so crowded with wounded from the front that hundreds of stretchers could not be accommodated inside and were lined up in rows on the platform outside. I was picked up by an ambulance and taken to the Eugene Lazaret, where I was kept in the same ward with the men. Of course, it was a military hospital,and there was no woman's ward.
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The fifteenth of August, 1915, was a memorable day in our lives. The enemy opened a violent fire at us at three o'clock in the morning, demolishing our barbed-wire defences, destroying some of our trenches, and burying many soldiers alive. Many others were killed by enemy shells. Altogether we lost fifteen killed and forty wounded out of two hundred and fifty. It was clear that the Germans contemplated an offensive. Our artillery replied vigorously, and the earth shook with the thunder of the guns. We sought every protection available, our nerves strained in momentary anticipation of an attack. We crossed ourselves, prayed to God, made ready our rifles, and awaited orders.
At six o'clock the Germans were observed climbing over the top and running in our direction. Closer and closer they came, and still we made no move, while our artillery rained shells on them. When they approached within a hundred feet of our line we received the order to open fire, and we greeted the enemy with such a concentrated hail of bullets, that his ranks were decimated and plunged in confusion. We took advantage of the situation and rushed at the Germans, turning them back and pursuing them along the twelve-mile front on which they had started to advance. The enemy lost ten thousand men that morning.
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The autumn of 1915 passed, for us, uneventfully. Our life become one of routine. At night we kept watch, warming ourselves with hot tea, boiled on little stoves in the front trenches.
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Every twelve days we were relieved and sent to the rear for a six-days' rest. There we found ready for us the baths established by the Union of Zemstvos which in 1915 had extended its activities along the whole front.
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I suffered more than anybody else from the vermin. I could not think at first of going to the bath-house with the men. My skin was eaten through and through and scabs began to form all over my body.
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I found myself confronted by a German, who towered far above me. There was not an instant to lose. Life or death hung in the balance.
I rushed at the German before he had time to move and ran him through the stomach with the bayonet. The bayonet stuck, and the man fell. A stream of blood gushed forth. I made an effort to pull out the bayonet, but failed. It was the first man that I had bayoneted; and it all happened with lightning-speed.
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Our casualties were enormous The corpses lay thick everywhere, like mushrooms after rain, and there were innumerable wounded. One could not take a step in No Man's Land without coming into contact with the corpse of a Russian or a German. Bloody feet, hands, sometimes heads, lay scattered in the mud.
That was the most terrible offensive in which I was engaged. It has come down into history as the Battle of Postovy. We spent the first night in the German trenches we had captured. It was a night of unforgettable horrors. The darkness was impenetrable. The stench was suffocating. The ground was full of mud-holes. Some of us sat on corpses. Other rested their feet on dead men. One could not stretch a hand without touching a lifeless body. We were hungry. We were cold. Our flesh crept in the dreadful surroundings. I wanted to get up. My hand sought support. It fell on the face of a corpse, stuck against the wall. I screamed, slipped and fell. My fingers buried themselves in the torn abdomen of a body.
I was seized with horror such as I had never experienced, and shrieked hysterically.
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I was informed, after an X-ray examination, that a fragment of shell was imbedded in my body and asked if I wished an operation to have it removed. I could not imagine living with a piece of shell in my flesh, and so requested its removal.
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That journey on the train was a symbol of the country's condition in the winter of 1916. The government machinery was breaking down. The soldiers had lost faith in their leaders, and there was a general feeling that they were being sent in thousands merely to be slaughtered. Rumours flew thick and fast. The old soldiers had been killed off and the fresh drafts were impatient for the end of the war. The spirit of 1914 was no more.
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The opening of the year 1917 found us resting two miles in the rear. There was much fun and merriment in the reserve, billets. Although the discipline was as strict as ever, the relations between the officers and men had, in the course of the three and a half years of the war, undergone a complete transformation.
The older officers, trained in pre-war conditions, were no longer to be found, having died in battle or been disabled. The new junior officers, all young men taken from civil life, many of them former students and school teachers, were liberal in their views and very humane in their conduct.
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In February, 1917, the front was unprepared for the eruption that was soon to shake the world. The front maintained its fierce hatred for the Germans and could not conceive of a righteous peace save through the efficient organization of a gigantic offensive against the enemy. The obstacle in the way of such an offensive was the traitorous Government. Against this Government were directed the indignation and suppressed discontent of the rank and file. But so old, so stable, so deep-rooted was the institution of Tsarism that, with all their secret contempt for the Court, with all their secret hatred for the officials of the Government, the armies at the front were not ripe yet for a conscious and deliberate rising.
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THE REVOLUTION AT THE FRONT
Then came Order No. 1, signed by the Petrograd Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers. Soldiers and officers were now equal, it declared. All the citizens of Free Russia were henceforth equal.
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The speakers were almost all eloquent. They painted beautiful pictures of Russia's future, of universal brotherhood, of happiness and prosperity. The soldiers' eyes would light up with the glow of hope. More than once even I was caught by those eloquent and enticing phrases.
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But there, a few hundred feet away, were the Germans. [...] They must be driven out before we could embark upon a life of peace. We were ready to drive them out.
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Kerensky told me that the Women's Battalion of Death had already exerted a beneficial influence, that several bodies of troops had expressed a willingness to leave for the front, that many of the wounded had organized themselves for the purpose of going to the fighting line, declaring that if women could fight, then they - the cripples - would do so, too.
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THE WOMEN'S BATTALION AT THE FRONT
At last the signal was given. We crossed ourselves and, hugging our rifles, leaped out of the trenches, every one of our lives dedicated to "the country and freedom." We moved forward under a devastating fire from machine guns and artillery, my brave girls, encouraged by the presence of men at their sides, marching steadily against the hail of bullets.
[...] But, dauntless of heart and firm of step, we moved forward. Our losses were increasing, but our line was unbroken. As we advanced further and further into No Man's Land, the shadows finally swallowing us completely, with only the fire of explosions revealing our figures at times to the eyes of our men in the rear, their hearts were touched.
[...] We swept forward and overwhelmed the first German line, and then the second. Our regiment alone captured two thousand prisoners.
[...] Here we were, a few hundred women, officers, men - all on the brink of a precipice, in imminent danger of being surrounded and wiped out of existence.
It was in these desperate circumstances, as I was rushing about from position to position, exposing myself to bullets in the hope that I might be struck dead rather than see the collapse of the whole enterprise, that I came across a couple hiding behind a trunk of a tree. One of the pair was a girl belonging to the Battalion, the other a soldier. They were having sex!
[...] The Germans re-occupied, without opposition, all the ground and trenches we had won at such terrible cost. There were only two hundred women left in the ranks of my Battalion.
I regained consciousness at a hospital in the rear. I was suffering from shell-shock.
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[...] the news arrived of the overthrow of Kerensky and the Bolshevists' victory in Petrograd.
"Peace! Peace!" thundered through the air.
"We will leave the front now! We are going home! Hurrah for Lenin! Hurrah for Trotzky! Hurrah for Kolontay!"
"Land and freedom! Bread! Down with the bourgeoisie!"
[...] Meanwhile the mob was advancing. It encountered in the immediate rear about twenty of my girls, who were engaged in the supporting line.
These twenty girls were lynched by the maddened mob.
Four of the instructors, who made an attempt to defend these innocent women, were crushed under the heels of the savage crowd.
[...] I and my remaining soldiers ran for ten miles. Although we could see no sign of pursuers we ran no risks. We stopped in the woods beside the road to Molodechno.
Trechos de Adeus Às Armas (1929), de Ernest Hemingway.
O ano seguinte trouxe numerosas vitórias. Conquistaram as montanhas que estavam no fundo do vale, e a colina, com sua floresta de castanheiros. As vitórias se repetiram além da planície, ao sul do planalto, e em agosto pudemos atravessar o rio e ficar em uma casa de Gorizia, onde havia uma fonte e um jardim com árvores frondosas, cercado por um muro, e glicínias junto à casa. Agora se combatia nas montanhas vizinhas, situadas a menos de uma milha. A cidade era bonita e nossa casa era muito agradável. Atrás passava o rio, e a cidade tinha sido conquistada brilhantemente, mas as montanhas de mais adiante eram inexpugnáveis, e me alegrei por ver que os austríacos tinha o desejo de, uma vez terminada a guerra, habitar ali algum dia, porque se eles bombardeavam o local não era para destruir, mas apenas para fins estratégicos.
Os habitantes continuavam nela. Havia hospitais e cafés, artilharia nas ruas afastadas e dois prostíbulos: um para a tropa e outro para os oficiais. Ao final do verão, as noites frescas, os combates nas montanhas por trás da cidade, a ponte ferroviária, destruída pelas granadas, o túnel desabado ao lado do rio onde há pouco se tinha combatido, as árvores ao redor da praça, a extensa avenida de árvores que conduzia a ela, tudo isto, sem falar das mulheres da cidade, do rei que passava de automóvel e ao qual era possível ver o rosto, seu longo pescoço e seu queixo acinzentado, como um cavanhaque; além disso, a visão imprevista do interior das casas as quais o bombardeio deixara, em sua maior parte, sem uma de suas paredes, os entulhos e os escombros nos jardins e nas ruas, as vitoriosas operações no Carso; estes fatos faziam deste um outono muito diferente do anterior, quando vivíamos no campo. A guerra também se modificara.
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A ofensiva começaria dentro de dois dias e eu teria que ir a Plava com as ambulâncias. Há muito tempo que eu não escrevia para os Estados Unidos e sabia que tinha que fazê-lo, mas havia demorado tanto que agora achava muito difícil escrever. Além disso, eu não tinha algo a dizer.
Mandei duas ou três cartas militares, Zona di Guerra, das quais suprimi tudo menos "Estou bem". Isto os faria ter paciência. Na América estas cartas fariam muito sucesso: eram estranhas e misteriosas. Nosso setor também era estranho e misterioso. Pensei que, comparado com outras guerras com a Áustria, o lugar em que nos encontrávamos era perigoso, ainda que bem dirigido. O exército austríaco fora criado para proporcionar vitórias a Napoleão, qualquer Napoleão. Eu gostaria que
houvéssemos tido um Napoleão, mas em seu lugar tínhamos o general Cadorna, gordo e feliz, e Vittorio Emmanuele III, o homenzinho de pescoço longo e cavanhaque. Do outro lado, na ala direita do exército, tinham o duque de Aosta. Talvez fosse charmoso demais para ser um bom general, mas de qualquer maneira tinha um aspecto varonil. Muitos gostariam de tê-lo como rei. Mas era apenas primo do rei e mandava no Terceiro Exército. Nós pertencíamos ao Segundo Exército. O Terceiro Exército tinha algumas baterias inglesas.
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Às vezes matavam os condutores das ambulâncias inglesas. Eu sabia que não me matariam! Pelo menos nesta guerra. Pessoalmente eu não me interessava e não me parecia mais perigosa que uma guerra de cinema. Deus sabe que eu gostaria que terminasse. Talvez ocorresse neste verão. Talvez os austríacos cedessem. Nas guerras anteriores sempre cederam. O que se passava com esta guerra? Todos diziam que os franceses haviam chegado ao fim. Rinaldi me disse que os franceses se sublevaram e que as tropas entraram em Paris. Perguntei-lhe em que resultara e ele respondeu: "Oh, foram contidos!"
Eu gostaria de ir à Áustria em tempo de paz. Ir à Floresta Negra e ao maciço de Hart. Mas onde fica o maciço de Hart? Lutava-se nos Cárpatos, mas eu não queria ir lá. No entanto, talvez não fosse totalmente desagradável. Eu poderia ir à Espanha, se não fosse pela guerra.
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Falei com o comandante e me inteirei de que, a partir do início da ofensiva, teríamos que conduzir nossas ambulâncias, cheias, ao longo do caminho coberto, até o topo, seguindo a estrada.
No alto da colina encontraríamos um posto e várias ambulâncias para evacuar. Confiava em que o caminho não estivesse interceptado. Só se dispunha de uma pessoa para esta operação. O caminho fora coberto para esta operação, já que, desde o outro lado do rio, estava-se sob o fogo inimigo. Aqui, nas construções, o barranco do rio nos protegia do fogo das metralhadoras. Uma ponte quase derrubada cruzava o rio. Quando começou o bombardeio tinha-se a intenção de construir outra, mas agora as tropas tinham que atravessar os vales, subindo pela curva do rio. O comandante era de baixa estatura e tinha um grande bigode muito retorcido. Participara da guerra contra a Líbia e mostrava duas condecorações por suas feridas. Ele me disse que, se tudo terminasse bem, faria com que me condecorassem.
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Os Estados Unidos declararam guerra à Alemanha, mas não à Áustria. Os italianos tinham certeza de que a América também declararia guerra à Áustria e se interessavam por todos os americanos que chegavam, inclusive os da Cruz Vermelha. Perguntaram-me se o presidente Wilson declararia guerra à Áustria, e respondi que era questão de dias. Eu ignorava quais eram os insultos que recebêramos da Áustria, mas considerava lógico que se lhe declarasse a guerra como à Alemanha. Perguntaram-me se declararíamos guerra à Turquia. Respondi que não tinha muita certeza.
- Turkey [peru em inglês] - eu disse - é nossa ave nacional.
Mas, traduzido, o jogo de palavras soava muito ruim; pareciam não compreendê-lo e desconfiar, assim que eu disse que sim, que provavelmente declararíamos guerra à Turquia.
- E a Bulgária?
Havíamos bebido vários copos de conhaque e respondi que sim, em nome de Deus, que à Bulgária e ao Japão.
- Mas - disseram - o Japão é aliado da Inglaterra. Não se pode confiar nesses malditos ingleses.
- Os japoneses cobiçam as ilhas do Hawaii - eu disse.
- Onde ficam as ilhas do Hawaii?
- No Oceano Pacífico.
- Por que os japoneses querem essas ilhas?
- Não as querem de maneira alguma - eu disse -. São meras formalidades. Os japoneses são uns homenzinhos estupendos e simples que apreciam a dança e os vinhos leves.
- Como os franceses - disse o comandante -. Retomaremos Nice e Saboia dos franceses.
- Reconquistaremos a Córsega e toda a costa Adriática - acrescentou Rinaldi.
- Itália conhecerá novamente os esplendores de Roma - disse o comandante.
- Não gosto de Roma - respondi -. Faz muito calor e há muitas pulgas.
- Você não gosta de Roma?
- Sim, eu gosto de Roma. É a mãe das nações. Nunca me esquecerei de Rômulo sendo amamentado no Tibre.
- Quê?
- Nada.
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Napoleão varreu os austríacos nas planícies. Nunca os atacara nas montanhas. Ele os teria deixado descer e açoitá-los-ia perto de Verona. Mas no front ocidental não açoitavam quem quer que fosse. Hoje em dia era impossível ganhar as guerras de tal maneira. Talvez continuássemos indefinidamente. Talvez fosse uma nova Guerra dos Cem Anos.
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Na cidade houve duas manifestações contra a guerra e, em Turim, um motim considerável. Um comandante inglês me disse um dia, no clube, que os italianos perderam cento e cinquenta mil homens no planalto de Bainsizza e em San Gabriele.
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- Onde viveremos depois da guerra?
- Provavelmente em um asilo para anciões - eu disse -. Durante três anos esperei ingenuamente que a guerra terminasse no Natal. Mas agora já não espero que acabe antes que nosso filho seja tenente.
Trechos de Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (2014), de Stephen Parker.
[the outbreak of war] Like his father, Eugen [Bertolt] Brecht joined in the general mood of patriotic fervour. [...] as Walter Brecht points out:
His patriotism went so far that, at the start of the year 1915, he still wrote a poem in homage to Kaiser Wilhelm II on his first birthday in the war.
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Brecht and his contemporaries witnessed the destruction of the world of 1914.
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These compositions, read alongside other sources, show the sensitive, psychologically brittle boy initially devoting himself to the patriotic cause in the name of national purification. He did so by treating suffering as sacrifice - and suffered the consequences in a truly harrowing lesson for life. The assured manner of Brecht's later demolition of discredited patriotic values belies his profound struggle in the years 1914-16, which saw the collapse of his belief in the cause of German Christian nationalism as the reality of suffering left him traumatised, his world shattered. The young Brecht followed a trajectory from idealism to profound disillusion similar to that of the English poet Wilfred Owen, who by 1917 was denouncing Horace's dictum dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as "the old lie". In Germany, which collapsed in the turmoil of defeat and national humiliation, the denunciation would be all the more bitter.
Before the outbreak of war the Brecht boys were out in uniform on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons in the Wehrkraftverein, Eugen making up for the earlier ignominy that Emil Enderlin had inflicted on him when he had not been allowed to participate. Later, Brecht would claim that he'd always managed to avoid this pre-military training by forging his father's signature. That may well be true of the later stages of the war. However, in the early stages no one wanted to miss out on the action, least of all Eugen Brecht. Teachers and pupils volunteered for the front and numbers in the Wehrkraft soared. The retired generals Rösch and von Hößlin provided leadership. Pupils helped with the harvest and with transportation, others watched out for enemy aircraft.
Johann Grandinger recalls that in August 1914 Eugen Brecht joined the war effort:
In the first days of the war Brecht had to conduct the nightly watch for aircraft with my father up the Perlach Tower. But in those days enemy aircraft only came as far as Freiburg. At first Eugen also served quite diligently in the Wehrkraftverein. Of course there, too, every free minute was taken up with debate, mostly about literature.
Eugen Brecht immediately wrote in the national cause. His reportage "Tower Watch" appeared in Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten on 8 August 1914, his first mass-circulation publication. He wrote that there were no enemy planes overhead but he could see troop trains leaving the station, carrying soldiers to their "uncertain fate". And he could hear the singing of "The Watch on the Rhine", the anti-French battle song from the Wars of Liberation. The young volunteer's account ends with a call for young people to support the war effort.
How did the sixteen-year-old schoolboy come to appear in the press as the advocate of war only days after its outbreak? Immediately before the war, Eugen Brecht saw his future as a theatre critic in the mould of the famous Berlin critic Alfred Kerr, later an arch-enemy. He introduced himself to Wilhelm Brüstle, the editor of the literary review of Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten. [...] the more pressing events of August delayed publication and Eugen made his debut instead as a war correspondent.
Brecht's sympathetic review of Karl Lieblich's poems in September captured the patriotic mood: Lieblich's was a "German book". The review contained quite conventional views on art: Brecht praised Lieblich's affinities with Dehmel and showed his antipathy towards "super-modernist" aesthetic fashion, particularly the "city demon" of Expressionism, an allusion to Georg Heym's verse.
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In his own "official" war writing, Brecht followed the same precept of combining truth after nature with idealism - until the yawning gap between the two plunged him into a profound artistic and psychological crisis, from which he emerged as if re-born, as the Brecht we know. Well versed in capturing heroic death in the patriotic cause, in August 1914 Eugen Brecht showed Brüstle that he was equipped to support the war effort with his pen. Eugen's next piece appeared on 10 August, in response to the sinking of the German warship Viktoria Luise on 6 August. Eugen conveyed what he had learnt about composure in the face of sacrificial death for the patriotic cause, imputing such composure to the stricken sailors, who "forgot wife and child, father and mother and went to a certain death for the great cause". Eugen addressed his fellow citizens as if he were the Kaiser's spokesman: "Let's show them that we understand their sacrifice and thank them for it!".
Detzer's patriotic sermons glorifying the Kaiser provided the boy with theological justification of suffering. As a Protestant at war, Detzer evidently felt that he should represent the values of the predominantly Lutheran Reich within the predominantly Catholic South. His sermon at the Barefoot Church on 9 August 1914 made a deep impression on Brecht. The aggressive language fed into "Thanksgiving Service", a poem which captured the mood of popular euphoria on this first "Victory Sunday" of the war.
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In time-honoured fashion, religious and secular images of suffering and death as transfiguration merge in the young Brecht's war poetry. As in his pre-war poetry, he is a fervent proponent of the German cause in God's name, which, he believes, can bring national purification for the civilian population as well as the military.
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Eugen Brecht regularly took part in victory celebrations at the Stadtgarten and at school. He celebrated the capture of Liège in an "Augsburg War Letter" [...] Together with Gehweyer, he produced postcards to support the Red Cross War Aid.
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Berthold Eugen became a regular freelancer for the two papers and earned recognition - as well as fees - in the first two years of the war. Improbable as it now sounds, Brecht's rise to fame began as a patriotic war correspondent. He met his deadlines for stories, reportage and poems from the Augsburg home front, showing his capacity to intervene rapidly in the affairs of the moment. He would in time develop out of that capacity an instrument for strategic intervention through art. For a while, his ambition to achieve fame through his writing came together with his patriotic fervour in his journalistic adventure. The Brecht family was proud that he was seizing the moment, as he had advocated in "Storm". [...] While Eugen was busy with his vital war work, school classes shrank as pupils volunteered or were conscripted. Many died at the front, others returned mutilated.
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Boys disappeared from class from one day to the next. Eugen Brecht, the war's vociferous advocate in August 1914, could not volunteer. He gave his reason why in the poem "Springtime".
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"The Officer Cadet" of April 1915 and "Dance Ballad" of January 1916 articulate shock and horror at the carnage in moving ballads which tell of deeply disturbed individual lives, ruined by war. Any notion of sacrifice for a just and noble cause is abandoned.
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When Werner Frisch and K. W. Obermeier collected Brecht's wartime writings from the two Augsburg newspapers, they observed that they displayed the "most profoundly disturbed mental attitude" of their author. It is surprising that critics - and above all Brecht's biographers in thrall to images of Brecht as the ice-cold cynic and political master strategist - have not properly considered Frisch and Obermeier's view. The poems of wartime madness testify to the boy's extreme mental torment, bordering on disintegration.
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In 1914-16, Eugen Brecht came to realise that the German people had a price to pay for the soldier emperor Wilhelm II's pursuit of his grand design to overtake the United Kingdom as the world's leading imperial power. Eugen Brecht had a price to pay, too. He had made a name in Augsburg with his glowing support for the patriotic cause, yet the source of his renown was now a source of torment. His struggle to free himself from the torment induced by his naive belief assumed, as always, a literary form. He began to take his leave of "official" German literature and to immerse himself once again in the poètes maudits and subversives of all hues. As his political awareness grew, he had nothing but scorn and contempt for the catastrophic folly of the German imperial project.
The First World War had a seminal impact upon the writer that Brecht became. Understanding its origins would remain a major pre-occupation. Looking back in exile to the confusions of those wartime days, Brecht produced a magnificent montage of contrasting images and literary allusions, drawn from the official canon and subversive writing. Full of scathing irony, the montage conveys a distance from events and ideas which was not remotely available to the adolescent, caught as he was between his fast-unravelling Christian belief in the national mission and his resurgent admiration for his free-thinking literary heroes.
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The reputation he had acquired in that place had become an embarrassment. He was done with the popular mood.
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"A schoolboy's mind disturbed by the war."
By 1915 Brecht himself had published poems in which he had exposed the suffering and madness of war.
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In early 1916 Brecht's anguished tone in poems like "Dance Ballad" gave way in "Soldier's Grave" - his final war poem published during the First World War and the final piece that he signed Berthold Eugen.
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The war had converted the young Brecht from an ardent supporter of the Kaiser to an increasingly considered and radical opponent of his foreign policy in war.
[...] In January 1916 the school authorities reprimanded him for his behaviour.
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It was not just Brecht's contempt for the patriotic cause which outraged Friedrich Gebhard. [...] Gebhard reprimanded Brecht in front of the class, thundering away and threatening expulsion, just as the school had expelled that other poet, Ludwig Ganghofer.
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Brecht's expulsion was firmly on the agenda. Biographers have interpreted this whole episode as if the ice-cold, cynical Brecht had emerged fully formed from his mother's womb. Such an interpretation, as we have already suggested, has no thought for this hyper-sensitive teenager's very brittleness and vulnerability.
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Conscription would take care of a very necessary lesson in life.
Yet he was saved from this fate by the intervention of an auxiliary teacher, Romuald Sauer.
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[...] those poems of wartime madness, born of the extreme conflict between his ardent belief in soldierly sacrifice for the German imperial mission and the awful reality of the mass butchery of his generation.
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[...] what we already know: that Brecht experienced a severe mental conflict. An outright collapse is readily conceivable. His naïve enthusiasm for patriotic sacrifice had crumbled in the face of suffering which, as Knoblach says, he experienced with vicarious intensity. A little later, in December 1917 Brecht himself adumbrated his collapse and recovery in a letter to Caspar Neher. In a manner well-nigh unique in the fiercely self-reliant Brecht's writings, he recorded a profound debt of gratitude to Neher for his role in his "renaissance".
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The wartime experience of suffering with such a "thin skin" made the growth of a "thick" skin to protect his extreme sensitivity an existential necessity. This was an essential lesson of the war. Brecht's recovery from his mental torment was necessarily defined through literature.
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Sexual activity became a vital part of his construction and assertion of "selfhood", its importance matched only by writing.
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Donning his uniform, Brecht took up his duties as a medical orderly in Augsburg. At this late stage in the war, the square bashing of basic training was dispensed with. He reported to the field hospital at the Schiller School in Oberhausen, today's Löweneck School. It was a gruesome place. Directly behind the school was a railway track, on which trainloads of badly-wounded soldiers were brought directly from the Alsatian Front for operations and amputations. He later told Sergei Tretiakov that he treated wounds with iodine and bandaged them, giving patients enemas and blood transfusions. The scenes which Brecht witnessed would come back to haunt him.
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On 11 November the fighting in the First World War ended on all fronts when the western powers and Germany signed the armistice.
Brecht was busy assembling seven of his favourite compositions in his Songs for the Guitar by Bert Brecht and his Friends. The small collection remained unpublished during his lifetime.
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Brecht would return again and again to the grim significance of Rosa Luxemburg's murder in the chaotic events surrounding the foundation of the Weimar Republic.
The outbreak of World War I was the great crisis of Browning's lifetime. The gun that started it all - a .32 Caliber FN Model 1910 semiautomatic pistol wielded by the Serbian assassin Gavrilo Princip - was a Browning invention. American entry into the war in 1917 created a demand for more effective automatic weapons. America, the country that had given the world the gas-operated machine gun, found itself woefully undersupplied, the 1,100 machine guns actually available to the U.S. military consisting entirely of obsolescent models like the 1895 Colt and the 1904 Maxim. Germany, by contrast, already fielded tens of thousands of more-modern machine guns.
From their inception, machine guns, with their massive magazines, turrets, and cooling systems, were little more mobile than cannons. From aircraft, pillboxes, and the decks of ships they could take a terrible toll, but the U.S. military wanted something more: the capacity for "walking fire," whereby soldiers with easily portable automatic weapons could advance on an enemy while spraying them with a heavy suppressing fire. Yet again, John Moses Browning rose to the occasion, producing for an exhibition in February 1917 the Browning Automatic Rifle or B.A.R. The device fired a 20-round clip of .30/06 caliber bullets, could be set for either single shot or automatic fire, and, weighing a mere 17 pounds, could be comfortably carried and fired from the hip or shoulder. Like so many Browning designs, the B.A.R. was a marvel of simplicity, consisting of 70 pieces that could be taken apart completely and reassembled in less than a minute.
The U.S. military quickly adopted the B.A.R. for all branches of service, and the gun was a battlefield staple for decades to come, one of two Browning guns (the 1911 Colt .45 was the other) to become a standard military issue.
The U.S. government also required a new machine gun equal to the rigors of prolonged trench warfare. Here, too, Browning was happy to oblige his country. In April 1917, Browning brought a newly designed .30 caliber machine gun to the Springfield Armory where government weapons were tested, and proceeded to fire 20,000 rounds without a single malfunction. After a brief pause, Browning repeated the feat, expending a total of 40,000 rounds at a rate of 600 rounds per minute without a jam or any other mechanical problem. Browning's astounding demonstration set a new benchmark for machine gun performance, and persuaded the government to make him an offer for full manufacturing rights for the machine gun, automatic rifle, and .45 semiautomatic pistol for the duration of the war.
A government representative made the offer to John and his brother Matt, admitting to them that the amount the government could tender was "only a fraction of what you would receive from royalties on orders already booked, and it may not be acceptable." The amount the government was offering - $750,000 - was no mean sum, but only a fraction of the more than $10 million John could have made on the aforementioned royalties.
Nevertheless, John Browning did not hesitate. "Major, if that suits Uncle Sam, it's all right with me." After the government official left, Matt reminded his brother how much money he stood to lose by accepting the government's first offer. John answered simply, "Yes, and if we were fifteen or twenty years younger, we'd be over there in the mud."
So appreciative was the federal government for John Browning's generosity with his inventions in a time of national crisis that no less than the U.S. secretary of war, Newton Baker, wrote him a personal letter of appreciation:
My dear Mr. Browning:
I have learned from Major Little of the patriotic and generous attitude taken by you in the negotiations for the use of your patents of light and heavy machine guns in this emergency, and beg leave to express my appreciation for it. You have performed … a very distinct service to this country in inventions, and contributed to the strength and effectiveness of our armies. You have added to that service by the attitude you have taken in the financial arrangements necessary to have your inventions available to the government.
When the first B.A.R.s and Browning .30 caliber machine guns entered the war in the fall of 1918, a Browning was available on the battlefields of France to inaugurate them. John's son Val, who had helped in the manufacture of both weapons, was sent to France to train Americans in the use of the new weapons, and was the first to use each of them in the field against the enemy. A heavier machine gun requested by General Pershing, a .50 caliber model, was also developed by Browning but was not in production by war's end. It did become a staple of U.S. forces in later wars, alongside the B.A.R. and the .30 caliber machine gun. Both machine guns were used to devastating effect on aircraft in the Second World War, and the B.A.R., because of its ruggedness and portability, proved especially effective in jungle warfare in the Pacific theater of that war.
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After the war, John Browning, now in his late 60s, continued to innovate. His last major invention, a 37-millimeter cannon commissioned by the U.S. military, was a sign of things to come - though Browning himself would not live to see them - of modern warfare that would move from the trenches to the skies.
John Moses Browning did not long outlive the war that had seen his invention used to greatest effect. In 1926, he passed away of a heart attack while working at what had become his second home, the Fabrique Nationale at Liège.
Trechos de A Grande Guerra: 1914-1918 (1968), de Marc Ferro.
Longe de ser uma provação, a guerra libertou as energias masculinas. O conflito foi recebido com entusiasmo pela maioria dos homens em idade militar.
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Foi dito que o espírito internacional estava falido, que os socialistas fracassaram em parar a guerra, que traíram seu juramento. Os contemporâneos ficaram impressionados com isso. Mas os homens estavam certos de que isso era falso: ao responder ao chamado de seu país, eles desempenhavam um dever patriótico e revolucionário. Eles sentiam que seu país tinha sido atacado gratuitamente, que, ao ir à guerra, soldados de mentalidade revolucionária e seus irmãos de armas estariam criando a paz eterna. O ideal utópico de lutar em uma "guerra para acabar com as guerras" inspirou os soldados franceses. Pacifismo e internacionalismo foram fundidos com individualismo e patriotismo, uma ocorrência decididamente excepcional, explicada pela natureza peculiar da guerra que, para todos os combatentes, era uma guerra justa, uma guerra pela defesa nacional - e, de qualquer forma, uma guerra que era inevitável.
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Mesmo em 1870 havia um grupo que, aberta ou secretamente, queria que o governo fosse derrotado. Isso não foi verdade em 1914-18: não existiu um "Partido Estrangeiro".
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Havia, é claro, oponentes da guerra, mas não defendiam a causa inimiga: eram bastante pacifistas, inimigos de todos os governos se não de todas as guerras. Jaurès, por exemplo, condenava apenas guerras "imperialistas", mas sentia que a defesa nacional era legítima. A maioria das pessoas sentia o mesmo, até na Rússia, onde o ódio à autocracia era praticamente universal.
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Na França, e mais tarde na Itália, alguns clérigos, detestando o regime e sua tendência secular, esperavam que a "retribuição divina" caísse sobre sua "pátria errante".
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Por outro lado, os socialistas extremos, como Lenin, sentiram em 1914 que nada seria mais calamitoso para a revolução proletária do que uma vitória militar dos exércitos do czar ou do kaiser; eles deveriam, portanto, trabalhar para a derrota de seu próprio país.
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Na Europa, cada povo se sentia vitimado, cercado por inimigos que estavam atrás de seus bens, de seu crescimento, até mesmo de sua existência. O patriotismo foi uma maneira pela qual a sociedade reagiu à unificação econômica do mundo. Os movimentos de nacionalidade foram uma variante desta tendência, e não exclusivamente ligados à perseguição racial ou religiosa. A conexão é mais ainda aparente quando o patriotismo está associado ao reavivamento do regionalismo.
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O imaginário popular, de Alfred de Musset a Hansi, substituiu os britânicos pelos alemães como inimigos nacionais. A guerra de 1870, a perda da Alsácia-Lorena, os apelos revanchistas de Maurice Barrès e a chamada de clarim de Déroulède lembravam diariamente aos franceses que eles tinham "perdido dois filhos", que não deveria haver piedade para os assassinos. Nas escolas, as crianças aprendiam isso desde os primeiros anos - seus primeiros livros didáticos mostravam a águia prussiana atacando o galo francês, arrancando sua bela plumagem.
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Essas imagens foram fixadas na consciência nacional, sendo o patriotismo e a educação preenchidos com elas. De Bouvines a Sedan, a derrota e a morte vinham do prussiano.
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A história de cada povo tinha sido marcada por uma luta defensiva contra o inimigo hereditário: franceses contra alemães, alemães contra eslavos e franceses, russos contra asiáticos e alemães, italianos que em breve estariam em uma disputa mortífera com o inimigo tradicional, a Áustria ou com os turcos, eles próprios inimigos dos eslavos. A Áustria era a exceção: seu inimigo tradicional era o Infiel. Mas, há um século que o Império Otomano vinha se desintegrando; faltava-lhe uma substancial fronteira comum e não tinha sequer um pretexto para ódio. Em todos os países, os professores propagavam esses mitos nas escolas. Eles talvez fossem pacíficos por convicção; suas lições não tinham esse efeito. Quando eles glorificavam Joana d'Arc ou Alexandre Nevski, eles automaticamente glorificavam a guerra. Eles iriam seguir em 1914-18 a lógica de suas lições, para se tornar o melhor exemplo de patriotismo.
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[em 1914] O patriotismo tomou emprestadas ideias tanto do jacobinismo quanto da direita, influenciando a sociedade de cima a baixo.
Em 1914, o antimilitarismo do período pós-Dreyfus perdeu seu vigor. [...] A mudança é mostrada pela vida de [Charles] Péguy: Péguy era um católico Dreyfusiano, um pacifista, e então escreveu Notre Patrie, em que os socialistas são descritos como agentes do imperialismo alemão. Havia mais nacionalismo do que patriotismo na linguagem de Charles Maurras ou Maurice Barrès, cujo jornal, Action Française, circulava entre a juventude nas Grandes Écoles. A nova geração era inflamada a cada incidente franco-alemão.
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"A França é um país belicista, a Alemanha é um país militarista", escreveu Guglielmo Ferrero em 1899 - na Alemanha, o público não era intoxicado com 1870, de que eles se lembravam apenas no dia da comemoração, enquanto que na França a "perda da Alsácia-Lorena e da memória da derrota tornou-se uma espécie de obsessão nacional".
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Desde 1900, a economia francesa sofreu um rápido crescimento, embora, em comparação com a Alemanha ou a América, exibisse muitos sinais de exaustão. À medida que sua curva demográfica declinava, os franceses tremiam na sombra de seus inimigos hereditários. A Alemanha já não encorajava, à antiga maneira, a expansão francesa no exterior para compensar a perda da Alsácia-Lorena. A rivalidade franco-alemã atingia todos os cantos do globo (Marrocos, Congo, China) e aparecia em todos os níveis (colonial, comercial, financeiro). Ao longo dos últimos anos, outros pontos de contenção vieram com a penetração alemã em empresas francesas: agora a Alemanha estava presente até mesmo dentro das fronteiras francesas. A França, é claro, ainda tinha uma grande parte a desempenhar no início do século em questões financeiras e econômicas. "A França é um banco", era a frase de Nicolau II. O investidor francês especulava em empréstimos, em particular empréstimos estatais; As poupanças eram "enterradas" no exterior, particularmente na Rússia, onde o interesse era alto. Os bancos e o governo colaboravam e o capital francês adquiriu um papel poderoso, até mesmo predominante. [...] A Alemanha não tinha poder financeiro, mas era onipresente, e os franceses notaram uma crescente resistência entre 1910 e 1914. Era apreciado o fato de que o capital francês permitia que os estados clientes fizessem encomendas na Alemanha: o dinheiro francês estava indo, até certo ponto, para fortalecer a indústria de seu rival.
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Os homens supunham que uma República nunca poderia estar preparada tão rápido quanto um Império; portanto, enquanto a Alemanha empreendeu uma ofensiva imediata e preparada, a França teve que esperar e manobrar.
- - - Em 1913, o presidente [Armand] Fallières disse: "Devemos ir direto ao inimigo, sem hesitação, pois a ofensiva corresponde ao temperamento dos nossos soldados." O socialista Paul-Boncour aprovou, dizendo: "A notícia de que nosso exército voltou a ideias mais ofensivas em estratégia e tática é bem-vinda. A ofensiva é um axioma, tanto militar quanto francês." Os manuais de 1913 não continham prescrição para retirada.
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Os esquerdistas exigiam uma guerra defensiva, combatida por grandes massas, e exploração máxima das formações de reserva; eles pensavam em termos das guerras da Revolução e negligenciaram o fato de que a curva demográfica francesa estava em declínio, que o contingente de recrutas franceses diminuía a cada ano, que os números contavam a favor da Alemanha.
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Quando a trombeta chamou, os socialistas também foram para a guerra.
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[Karl] Kautsky e [August] Bebel concordavam mais ou menos com isto: "O imperialismo pode conter material suficiente para causar a guerra... mas os trustes e cartéis têm interesse em paz." A crise do Marrocos sofreu isso, uma vez que, em última análise, os cartéis franceses e alemães encontraram um caminho para um acordo, apesar da tensão de seus governos. "O movimento internacional de capital é a maior garantia da paz mundial", era o ponto de vista de Jaurès.
[Neste último ano haverá 2 posts por semana. Aguente firme, leitor-soldado veterano das trincheiras, falta só mais um pouco.]
Trechos de Surpreendido Pela Alegria (1955), de C.S. Lewis.
Tennyson se saiu otimamente bem naquela ocasião. Tinha uma voz boa e grave, e cantava solos no coro. [...]
Que todos encontrem a paz. Um destino pior os aguardava, pior do que o mais vingativo dos calouros explorados poderia desejar. Ypres e o Somme devoraram a maior parte deles. Foram felizes enquanto duraram seus dias de glória.
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Durante minhas últimas semanas em Wyvern, estranhas matérias começaram a circular nos jornais, pois estávamos então no verão de 1914. Lembro que eu e um amigo ficamos perplexos diante de uma coluna que trazia o seguinte título: "Poderá a Inglaterra manter-se fora disso?" "Manter-se fora disso?", disse ele. "Eu não vejo como é que ela pode entrar nisso." A lembrança pinta as últimas horas daquele período letivo com tintas levemente apocalípticas, e talvez a lembrança falha. Ou talvez para mim fossem apocalípticas o bastante para saber que eu estava partindo, para ver todas aquelas coisas odiadas pela última vez; mas não simplesmente (naquele momento) para odiá-las. Há uma esquisitice, um quê de fantasmagórico mesmo numa cadeira de Windsor quando ela lhe diz: "Você nunca mais me verá." Logo no início das férias a Inglaterra declarou guerra. Meu irmão, então de licença de Sandhurst, foi convocado. Algumas semanas mais tarde fui encontrar o sr. Kirkpatrick em Great Bookham, no condado de Surrey.
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No continente, continuava a inábil carnificina da primeira Guerra Alemã. Assim, já prevendo que provavelmente duraria até eu atingir a idade do serviço militar, fui forçado a tomar uma decisão que a lei havia tirado das mãos dos meninos ingleses da minha idade; pois na Irlanda não havia a figura do alistamento obrigatório. Mesmo então não me orgulhei por decidir servir, mas de fato achei que a decisão me absolvia de acompanhar o andamento da guerra. Para Arthur, cujo coração irremediavelmente o descartava, não havia tal dúvida. Portanto, consegui esquecer a guerra de um modo que algumas pessoas julgarão vergonhoso, outras inacreditável. Outras ainda podem considerar essa atitude como fuga da realidade. Mas sustento que foi antes um acordo com a realidade, a delimitação de uma fronteira. Na prática, eu disse ao meu país: "Você me terá numa data já fixada, mas não antes. Morrerei nas suas guerras se necessário for, mas até lá viverei minha vida. Poderá ter meu corpo, mas não minha mente. Participarei de batalhas, mas não lerei sobre elas." Se essa atitude necessita de explicações, devo dizer que um menino que é infeliz na escola inevitavelmente adquire o hábito de conservar o futuro no seu devido lugar; se ele começa a admitir infiltrações do próximo período letivo nas férias correntes, acaba entrando em desespero.
[...] acho difícil lamentar o fato de ter escapado à assustadora perda de tempo e ânimo que implicaria ler notícias da guerra ou participar mais que artificial e formalmente das conversas sobre o assunto. Ler, sem conhecimento militar ou bons mapas, relatos de batalhas que eram distorcidos antes de chegar ao general de Divisão, e distorcidos mais ainda por ele mesmo, além de redigidos com todo elogio e gratidão pelos jornalistas; tentar gravar aquilo que será contradito no dia seguinte; temer e esperar intensamente com base em indícios inconsistentes - tudo isso é seguramente um mal emprego da mente.
Mesmo em tempo de paz acho que estão redondamente enganados os que defendem que meros meninos devam ser incentivados a ler jornais. Quase tudo o que um menino lê lá na adolescência já terá sido reconhecido como falso em ênfase e interpretação, ou mesmo em fato, quando o mesmo menino estiver na casa dos vinte anos - e a maioria dessas informações terá perdido toda a importância. A maior parte do que estiver gravado na memória precisará, portanto, ser desaprendido; e ele provavelmente terá adquirido um gosto incurável pela vulgaridade e o sensacionalismo, e o hábito fatal de esvoaçar de parágrafo a parágrafo para ver que uma atriz se divorciou na Califórnia, um trem descarrilou na França e quadrigêmeos nasceram na Nova Zelândia.
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Ganhando ou não uma bolsa de estudos, no ano seguinte eu entraria no exército; e mesmo um temperamento mais otimista que o meu podia sentir em 1916 que um subalterno de infantaria seria louco se desperdiçasse o tempo se preocupando com algo tão hipotético quanto sua vida pós-guerra.
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É claro que nunca fui aprovado nos tais exames preliminares, mas não consigo lembrar se voltei a fazer as provas, sendo outra vez reprovado. A questão perdeu importância depois da guerra, pois um benévolo decreto eximiu os ex-combatentes de prestá-los. Do contrário, sem dúvida, eu me veria obrigado a abandonar a ideia de entrar em Oxford.
Não chegara a completar um período letivo na universidade quando meus documentos foram aprovados, selando meu alistamento; e a situação fez dele um período letivo dos mais anormais. Metade da faculdade fora convertida num hospital, e estava nas mãos da R.A.M.C. (Unidade Médica do Exército Real Britânico). Na metade restante, vivia uma minúscula comunidade de estudantes - dois de nós ainda de idade inferior à militar, dois incapacitados, outro partidário do Sinn Fein, que não queria lutar pela Inglaterra, e alguns outros que nunca consegui classificar.
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Depois veio o Exército. Por uma guinada notável do destino, isso não significou a saída de Oxford. Fui enviado para um Batalhão de Cadetes cujo acantonamento ficava em Keble.
Passei pelo curso normal de treinamento (algo leve naquela época, comparado ao da guerra atual) e fui alocado como segundo tenente na Infantaria Leve de Somerset, o antigo 13º Regimento de Infantaria. Cheguei às trincheiras da frente de batalha no meu décimo nono aniversário (novembro de 1917), servi a maior parte do tempo nas vilas próximas a Arras-Fampoux e Monchy - e fui ferido no monte Bernenchon, perto de Lillers, em abril de 1918.
Fiquei surpreso por não desgostar mais do Exército. Foi, é claro, detestável. Mas as palavras "é claro" aliviaram o aguilhão. É nisso que ele diferia de Wyvern. Ninguém era obrigado a gostar. Ninguém dizia que você deveria gostar. Ninguém fingia gostar. Todos os que você encontrava ali tinham como certo que tudo aquilo era uma odiosa necessidade, uma horrível interrupção da vida racional. E isso fazia toda a diferença. A tribulação evidente é mais fácil de suportar que a tribulação que se alardeia prazerosa. Aquela gera camaradagem e até (quando intensa) uma espécie de amor entre os companheiros de provação; esta, desconfiança generalizada, cinismo dissimulado e aflitivo ressentimento.
Além disso, achei meus superiores incomparavelmente mais tratáveis que os veteranos de Wyvern. Isso sem dúvida porque os homens de trinta são mais gentis com os de dezenove do que estes com os meninos de treze: são realmente adultos e não precisam de autoafirmação.
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Certa vez, também, no Clube dos Oficiais de Arras, onde eu jantava só e bem satisfeito com meu livro e meu vinho (uma garrafa de Heidsieck custava então oito francos, e doze uma de Perrier Jouet), dois oficiais de postos infinitamente superiores, todos cobertos de condecorações e insígnias vermelhas, vieram à minha mesa perto do fim da refeição, e saudando-me como "sorridente Jim", levaram-me à mesa deles para umas doses de conhaque e alguns charutos. Não estavam bêbados, nem me deixaram embriagado. Foi pura boa vontade. E embora excepcional, isso não era exageradamente excepcional. No exército havia gente detestável; mas a lembrança preenche aqueles meses com contatos agradáveis e transitórios. A cada poucos dias parecia que se encontrava um erudito, um excêntrico, um poeta, um alegre humorista, um contador de casos ou pelo menos um homem de boa vontade.
No meio daquele inverno tive a sorte de cair de cama com o que as tropas chamavam de "febre da trincheira" - P.U.O. (pirexia de origem desconhecida) para os médicos - e fui enviado para um hospital em Le Tréport, ficando ali por um maravilhoso período de três semanas.
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O hospital era um hotel transformado e ficávamos dois num quarto. Minha primeira semana viu-se prejudicada porque uma das enfermeiras do turno da noite estava tendo um ardente caso de amor com meu colega de quarto. Minha febre era alta demais para que eu me sentisse constrangido, mas o sussurro humano é um ruído muito tedioso e antimusical; especialmente à noite. Depois disso minha sorte mudou. O homem amoroso foi enviado para outro lugar e substituído por um misógino musical de Yorkshire, que na nossa segunda manhã juntos disse o seguinte: "Eh, rapaz, se nós mesmos fizermos a cama aquelas mulheres não vão ficar no quarto tanto tempo." Assim, passamos cada um a arrumar sua cama todo dia, e a cada dia, quando as duas enfermeiras olhavam para dentro, diziam: "Ah, eles já arrumaram as camas! Não são ótimos esses dois?" - recompensando-nos com os sorrisos mais radiantes. Acho que atribuíam nosso ato ao galanteio.
Foi aqui que li pela primeira vez um volume dos ensaios de Chesterton. Jamais ouvira falar dele e não tinha a menor ideia do que ele representava; tampouco posso explicar por que ele me conquistou tão prontamente. Talvez fosse de esperar que meu pessimismo, ateísmo e ódio do sentimentalismo fizessem dele para mim o menos atraente de todos os escritores. Parece até que a Providência, ou alguma "causa segunda" de uma espécie bem obscura, supere nossas inclinações anteriores quando decide aproximar duas mentes.
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O leitor já terá adivinhado que nosso batalhão era excepcionalmente bom; uma minoria de bons soldados de carreira comandando um conjunto agradavelmente heterogêneo de praças promovidos (esses, fazendeiros dos condados do sudoeste da Inglaterra), advogados e universitários. Ali podia-se ter uma conversa tão boa quanto em qualquer outro lugar.
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Duvido que, dentre os homens que lutaram na França, algum outro tivesse maior probabilidade de ir direto para o Céu se fosse morto em combate. Em vez de zombar dele, melhor teria sido se eu me dedicasse a limpar suas botas. Posso acrescentar que não gostei do tempo que passei na companhia comandada por ele. Wallie tinha uma verdadeira paixão por matar alemães, e um completo desrespeito pela segurança não só sua como dos outros. Estava sempre arquitetando ideias brilhantes, diante das quais nós os oficiais subalternos ficávamos arrepiados. Felizmente ele era bem facilmente dissuadido por qualquer argumento plausível que nos ocorresse.
Tal era sua coragem e inocência que jamais, nem por um instante, desconfiava de qualquer motivo nosso que não fosse militar. Jamais poderia assimilar os princípios de boa vizinhança que, pelo acordo tácito das tropas, sabia-se governar a guerra de trincheiras, e aos quais fui apresentado imediatamente pelo meu sargento. Eu havia sugerido "despachar" uma granada de rifle contra uma posição alemã, onde víramos cabeças se mexendo. O sargento replicou: "Como o sinhô quisé. Só que assim que o sinhô começá a fazê esse tipo de coisa, a gente vai começá a levá bomba também, sabe?"
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O trem militar que partia de Rouen - aquele trem interminável, que viajava a menos de vinte quilômetros por hora e no qual não se viam dois vagões iguais - saía perto das dez horas da noite. Eu e mais três outros oficiais ficamos numa cabine. Não havia aquecimento; luz só das velas que nós mesmos levávamos; e para sanitários, as janelas. A viagem duraria cerca de quinze horas. O frio era enregelante.
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Sobre a guerra em si - já tantas vezes descrita por gente que presenciou mais dela que eu - devo falar pouco aqui. Até o grande ataque alemão na primavera, vivemos um período incrivelmente calmo. E mesmo então eles atacaram não as nossas posições, mas as dos canadenses que estavam à nossa direita, simplesmente "mantendo-nos calados" com saraivadas contra nossa linha ao ritmo de três bombas por minuto - durante todo o dia.
Acho que foi nesse dia que reparei como um pavor maior reduz o menor à insignificância: um rato que vi (um pobre ratinho tiritante, como eu não passava de um pobre homem tiritante) nem tentou fugir de mim. Ao longo do inverno, o cansaço e a água eram nossos principais inimigos. Consegui dormir marchando, despertaram-me e surpreendi-me ainda marchando. O soldado andava nas trincheiras em botas de borracha de cano alto, com água acima do joelho; impossível não lembrar a torrente gelada enchendo a bota quando você a perfurava num arame farpado.
A familiaridade tanto com os mortos muito antigos quanto com os muito recentes confirmava aquela ideia de cadáver que eu concebera no momento em que vi minha mãe morta. Passei a conhecer, a prantear, a respeitar o homem comum: especialmente o querido sargento Ayres, que (suponho) foi morto pela mesma granada que me feriu. Eu era um oficial fútil (distribuíam-se patentes com excessiva facilidade na época), um fantoche manipulado por ele, que acabou transformando essa relação ridícula e dolorosa em algo belo; tornou-se para mim quase um pai.
Mas quanto ao resto, a guerra - os sustos, o frio, o cheiro dos explosivos, os homens horrendamente mutilados se movendo como besouros meio esmagados, os cadáveres sentados ou de pé, a paisagem de terra arrasada, sem uma folha sequer de capim, as botas calçadas dia e noite até parecerem andar sozinhas - tudo isso me surge em imagens raras e desbotadas na lembrança. É tudo alheio demais ao restante do meu passado, e muitas vezes me parece ter acontecido a outra pessoa, não a mim. De certa forma, é até irrelevante. Um instante de imaginação parece hoje importar mais que as realidades subsequentes. Foi a primeira bala que ouvi - de mim tão distante que "gania" como a bala de um jornalista ou de um poeta dos tempos de paz. Naquele momento havia algo não exatamente como o medo, menos ainda como a indiferença: um sinalzinho tremulante que dizia: "Isso é Guerra. Foi sobre isso que Homero escreveu."
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A NOVA FISIONOMIA
O restante das minhas experiência bélicas pouco tem a ver com este relato. De como "capturei" cerca de 60 inimigos - ou seja, descobri, para grande alívio meu, que a multidão de espectros cinzentos que subitamente surgiram do nada traziam todos as mãos erguidas -, isso não merece menção, senão como piada. Pois Falstaff não "capturou" sir Colville of the Dale? Tampouco interessa ao leitor saber como acabei indo para casa por conta de uma granada inglesa, ou como a lindíssima irmã N., do C.C.S. (Centro de Tratamento de Feridos), desde então personifica minha ideia de Ártemis.
Duas coisas sobressaem. Uma é o momento, logo depois de ter sido atingido, em que achei (ou pensei achar) que não estava mais respirando, concluindo que aquilo era a morte. Não senti medo algum, mas também coragem alguma. Não me parecia ocasião para nenhum dos dois sentimentos. A afirmação - "Eis aqui um homem à morte" - surgiu-me na mente tão seca, factual e desprovida de emoção quanto algo que se lê num livro didático. Nem sequer foi interessante.
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Voltei a Oxford - desmobilizado - em janeiro de 1919.
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Quanto à Alegria, rotulei-a "experiência estética" e conversei muito sobre ela usando esse nome, dizendo que era muito "valiosa". Mas me vinha muito raramente e, quando vinha, não empolgava muito.
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Nossa geração, a geração dos soldados que regressaram da guerra, começou a passar. Oxford se encheu de novos rostos. Os calouros passaram a encarar com histórica complacência o nosso deturpado ponto de vista. O problema da carreira profissional assomava maior e mais lúgubre.
"Nenhum homem é uma ilha, isolado em si mesmo; todo homem é um pedaço do continente, uma parte da terra firme. Se um torrão de terra for levado pelo mar, a Europa fica diminuída, como se fosse um promontório, como se fosse o solar dos teus amigos ou o teu próprio; a morte de qualquer homem me diminui, porque sou parte do gênero humano, e por isso não me perguntes por quem os sinos dobram; eles dobram por ti." (John Donne, trecho da Meditação XVII)
O subproduto mais óbvio do belicismo continua a ser também o mais perturbador e melancólico: mortos.
O jovem Donne foi contemporâneo da derrota da orgulhosa Armada Espanhola em 1588, mais uma dessas impactantes guinadas na História e que certamente faz ecos à derrota do orgulhoso Segundo Reich em 1918. Pensem nos testemunhos da época, vindos de figuras com espalhafatosas golas quinhentistas: quanta bravura nesses combatentes!, que horror tanta destruição, que tristeza tantas mortes...
O poeta inglês não foi o único a associar o acidente geográfico ao acidente biográfico que um dia desabará sobre cada um de nós, soldados ou não. De um artigo da nossa volúvel Wikipedia:
Isle of the Dead, Op. 29, is a symphonic poem composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff, written in the key of A minor. He concluded the composition while staying in Dresden in 1908. It is considered a classic example of Russian late-Romanticism of the beginning of the 20th century.
The piece was inspired by a black and white reproduction of Arnold Böcklin's painting, Isle of the Dead, which Rachmaninoff saw in Paris in 1907. Rachmaninoff was disappointed by the original painting when he later saw it, saying, "If I had seen first the original, I, probably, would have not written my Isle of the Dead. I like it in black and white."
Essa observação espetacular do compositor lembra muito o destino de alguns quase-defuntos da Primeira Guerra Mundial, conflito que agora começa seu último e escabroso ano. Não é difícil esboçar casos hipotéticos:
(diz um italiano) "Se naquele instante eu não tivesse me abaixado, a bala do sniper austríaco teria me finalizado."
(diz um alemão) "Se eu tivesse dado três passos a mais, o explosivo dos britânicos teria me atingido em cheio."
The long-term effects of the World War I period in many respects have defined the states and societies of the Middle East. This is true, of course, of the shape of the countries: in essence the borders of the Republic of Turkey, as well as those of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan were drawn in the immediate aftermath of the war. For the Republic of Turkey, the long-term
effects were particularly significant. Firstly, there was the loss of life, due to battlefield casualties, epidemics and hunger. This hit Anatolia particularly hard, because it was primarily from among the peasant population of Anatolia that the
Ottoman Army had recruited its soldiers. All in all the population loss of Anatolia's Muslim population was in the region of 2.5 million. Anatolia after the war was a strikingly empty country, as many travellers tell us in their descriptions. It would take a generation to restore the Anatolian population to its former size. Secondly, the war had given the political leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress the opportunity to rescind the age-old system of capitulations, which gave preferential treatment and legal immunity to subjects and protégés of European powers and to give full rein to their policy of "National Economy" (millî iktisat). Through this policy the Unionists tried to replace the Armenian and Greek bourgeoisie, which together with European interests, controlled over ninety percent of the modern sectors of the economy with a newly created class of Muslim entrepreneurs. Their Kemalist successors continued this nationalist economic policy and from the Nineteen Forties onwards began to achieve its aims. Thirdly, the very creation of the Republic of Turkey, would have been unthinkable without the large-scale "ethnic cleansing" (to use that cynical term from the Bosnian war), which cost 600.000 to 800.000 Armenians their lives and up to 200.000 Greeks their homes. The national struggle (millî mücadele) led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha after the war, which ultimately gave birth to the republic, was largely motivated by the desire to prevent the Greeks and Armenians from reversing their fortunes. Fourthly, the ease with which the Turkish nationalist leadership after the war renounced any claims to the Arab provinces and adopted Anatolia as their new fatherland that had been part of the Ottoman Empire for four hundred years certainly owes something to the fact that Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues had all served at one time or another on the Arab fronts and had become deeply disillusioned with the (lack of) loyalty of the Arabs to the empire. Finally, the degree to which the republic and its political system were dominated by the military cannot be understood without reference to World War I and its sequel, the "national struggle." This legacy is also still with us today.
