Trechos de War In The Garden Of Eden (1919), de Kermit Roosevelt.
We steamed up past the Island of Abadan, where stand the refineries of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It is hard to overestimate the important part that company has played in the conduct of the Mesopotamian campaign. Motor transport was nowhere else a greater necessity. There was no possibility of living on the country; at first, at all events. General Dickson, the director of local resources, later set in to so build up and encourage agriculture that the army should eventually be supported, in the staples of life, by local produce. Transportation was ever a hard nut to crack. Railroads were built, but though the nature of the country called for little grading, obtaining rails, except in small quantities, was impossible. The ones brought were chiefly secured by taking up the double track of Indian railways. This process naturally had a limit, and only lines of prime importance could be laid down. Thus you could go by rail from Busra to Amara, and from Kut to Baghdad, but the stretch between Amara and Kut had never been built, up to the time I left the country.
- - -
I don't know the total number of motor vehicles, but there were more than five thousand Fords alone. On several occasions small columns of infantry were transported in Fords, five men and the driver to a car. Indians of every caste and religion were turned into drivers, and although it seemed sufficiently out of place to come across wizened, khaki-clad Indo-Chinese driving lorries in France, the incongruity was even more marked when one beheld a great bearded Sikh with his turbaned head bent over the steering-wheel of a Ford.
- - -
The modern town has increased many fold with the advent of the Expeditionary Force, and much of the improvement is of a necessarily permanent nature; in particular the wharfs and roads. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the Mesopotamian campaign is the permanency of the improvements made by the British. In order to conquer the country it was necessary to develop it, - build railways and bridges and roads and telegraph systems, - and it has all been done in a substantial manner.
- - -
Above Kurna the river is no longer lined with continuous palm-groves; desert and swamps take their place - the abode of the amphibious, nomadic, marsh Arab.
- - -
The Bengali is the Indian who most readily takes to European learning. Rabindranath Tagore is probably the most widely known member of the race. They go to Calcutta University and learn a smattering of English and absorb a certain amount of undigested general knowledge and theory. These partially educated Bengalis form the Babu class, and many are employed in the railways. They delight in complicated phraseology, and this coupled with their accent and seesaw manner of speaking supply the English a constant source of caricature. As a race they are inclined to be vain and boastful, and are ever ready to nurse a grievance against the British Government, feeling that they have been provided with an education but no means of support. The government felt that it might help to calm them if a regiment were recruited and sent to Mesopotamia. How they would do in actual fighting had never been demonstrated up to the time I left the country, but they take readily to drill, and it was amusing to hear them ordering each other about in their clipped English. They were used for garrisoning Baghdad.
- - -
One evening we halted where, not many months before, the last of the battles of Sunnaiyat had been fought. There for months the British had been held back, while their beleaguered comrades in Kut could hear the roar of the artillery and hope against hope for the relief that never reached them. It was one phase of the campaign that closely approximated the gruelling trench warfare in France. The last unsuccessful attack was launched a week before the capitulation of the garrison, and it was almost a year later before the position was eventually taken. The front-line trenches were but a short distance apart, and each side had developed a strong and elaborate system of defense. One flank was protected by an impassable marsh and the other by the river. When we passed, the field presented an unusually gruesome appearance even for a battlefield, for the wandering desert Arabs had been at work, and they do not clean up as thoroughly as the African hyena. A number had paid the penalty through tampering with unexploded grenades and "dud" shells, and left their own bones to be scattered around among the dead they had been looting. The trenches were a veritable Golgotha with skulls everywhere and dismembered legs still clad with puttees and boots.
At Kut we disembarked to do the remaining hundred miles to Baghdad by rail instead of winding along for double the distance by river, with a good chance of being hung up for hours, or even days, on some shifting sand-bar. At first sight Kut is as unpromising a spot as can well be imagined, with its scorching heat and its sand and the desolate mud-houses, but in spite of appearances it is an important and thriving little town, and daily becoming of more consequence.
- - -
The Arab thoroughly disliked both sides. The Turk oppressed him, but did so in an Oriental, and hence more or less comprehensible, manner. The English gave him justice, but it was an Occidental justice that he couldn't at first understand or appreciate, and he was distinctly inclined to mistrust it. In course of time he would come to realize its advantages. Under Turkish rule the Arab was oppressed by the Turk, but then he in turn could oppress the Jew, the Chaldean, and Nestorian Christians, and the wretched Armenian. Under British rule he suddenly found these latter on an equal footing with him, and he felt that this did not compensate the lifting from his shoulders of the Turkish burden. Then, too, when a race has been long oppressed and downtrodden, and suddenly finds itself on an equality with its oppressor, it is apt to become arrogant and overbearing.
- - -
Mesopotamia, so often called the "cradle of the world," retains but little trace of the races and civilizations that have succeeded each other in ruling the land. When the Tigris was low at the end of the summer season, we used to dig out from its bank great bricks eighteen inches square, on which was still distinctly traced the seal of Nebuchadnezzar.
- - -
Between Daur and Samarra there was nothing but desert, with gazelles and jackals the only permanent inhabitants. Into this no man's land both sides sent patrols, who met in occasional skirmishes. For reconnaissance work we used light-armored motor-cars, known throughout the army as Lam cars, a name formed by the initial letters of their titles. These cars were Rolls-Royces, and with their armor-plate weighed between three and three-quarters and four tons. They were proof against the ordinary bullet but not against the armor-piercing. When I came out to Mesopotamia I intended to lay my plans for a transfer to the cavalry, but after I had seen the cars at work I changed about and asked to be seconded to that branch of the service.
- - -
The weight of ages was ever present as one rode among the ruins of these once busy, prosperous cities, now long dead and buried, how long no one knew, for frequently their very names were forgotten. Babylon, Ur of the Chaldees, Istabulat, Nineveh, and many more great cities of history are now nothing but names given to desert mounds.
- - -
We had with us a couple of old sheiks, and it was their first ride in an automobile. It was easy to see that one of them was having difficulty in maintaining his dignity, but I was not quite sure of the reason until we stopped a moment and he fairly flew out of the car. It didn't seem possible that a man able to ride ninety miles at a stretch on a camel, could be made ill by the motion of an automobile.
- - -
The mirage played all sorts of tricks, and the balloon observers grew to be very cautious in their assertions.
- - -
During a short halt by the last rays of the setting sun I caught sight of a number of Mohammedan soldiers prostrating themselves toward Mecca in their evening prayers, while their Christian or pagan comrades looked stolidly on.
- - -
[...] we resumed our march, and attacked just at dawn. The enemy had abandoned the first-line positions, and we met with but little resistance in the second. Our cavalry, which was concentrated at several points in nullahs (dry river-beds), suffered at the hands of the hostile aircraft. The Turk had evidently determined to fall back to Tekrit without putting up a serious defense. They certainly could have given us a much worse time than they did, for they had dug in well and scientifically. Among the prisoners we took there were some that proved to be very worth while. These Turkish officers were, as a whole a good lot - well dressed and well educated. Many spoke French. There is an excellent gunnery school at Constantinople, and one of the officers we captured had been a senior instructor there for many years.
- - -
Among the supplies we captured at Daur were a lot of our own rifles and ammunition that the Arabs had stolen and sold to the Turks.
- - -
Some gazelles got into the no man's land between us and the Turk, and in the midst of the firing ran gracefully up the line, stopping every now and then to stare about in amazement.
- - -
Our anti-aircraft guns - "Archies" we called them - were mounted on trucks, and on account of their weight had some difficulty getting up.
- - -
It is surprising to see how much shelling a town can undergo without noticeable effect. It takes a long time to level a town in the way it has been done in northern France.
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Most of the inhabitants of Tekrit are raftsmen by profession. Their rafts have been made in the same manner since before the days of Xerxes and Darius. Inflated goatskins are used as a basis for a platform of poles, cut in the up-stream forests.
- - -
Another sickness of the hot season which now began to claim less victims was sand-fly fever.
[...] A week after our return to Samarra a rumor started that General Maude was down with cholera. For some time past there had been sporadic cases, though not enough to be counted an epidemic.
- - -
[...] head of the Arab bureau, was Miss Gertrude Bell, the only woman, other than the nursing sisters, officially connected with the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Forces. Miss Bell speaks Arabic fluently and correctly. She first became interested in the East when visiting her uncle at Teheran, where he was British minister.
- - -
We took up our quarters at Museyib, a small town on the banks of the Euphrates, six or eight miles above the Hindiyah Barrage, a dam finished a few years before, and designed to irrigate a large tract of potentially rich country. We patrolled out to Mohamediyah, a village on the caravan desert route to Baghdad, and thence down to Hilleh, around which stand the ruins of ancient Babylon. The rainy season was just beginning, and it was obvious that the patrolling could not be continuous, for a twelve-hour rain would make the country impassable to our heavy cars for two or three days.
- - -
The bazaar was not large, but was always thronged. I used to sit in one of the coffee-houses and drink coffee or tea and smoke the long-stemmed water-pipe, the narghile.
- - -
The conditions were too poor to induce even the easily encouraged Arabs to raid. One morning when I was wandering around the gardens on the outskirts of the town I came across some jackals and shot one with my Webley revolver. It was running and I fired a number of times, and got back to town to find that my shooting had started all sorts of excitement and reports of uprisings.
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As soon as the weather cleared we made a run to Kerbela - a lovely town, with miles of gardens surrounding it and two great mosques. [...] There were no troops stationed in the vicinity, so the prices were lower than usual.
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Hilleh, which stands near the ruins of ancient Babylon, is a modern town very much like Museyib. I never had a chance to study the ruins at any length. Several times we went over the part that had been excavated by the Germans immediately before the war. I understand that this is believed to be the great palace where Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall. It is built of bricks, each one of which is stamped in cuneiform characters. There are very fine bas-reliefs of animals, both mythical and real. In the centre is the great stone lion, massively impressive, standing over the prostrate form of a man.
- - -
The bitumen wells near by have been worked for five thousand years and are responsible for the town [Hit] being a centre of boat manufacture.
- - -
Our maps were poor. A German officer that we captured had in some manner got hold of our latest map, and noting that we had omitted entirely a very large ravine, became convinced that any enveloping movement we attempted would prove a failure. As it happened, we came close to making the blunder he had anticipated.
- - -
The road was littered with equipment of every sort, disabled pack-animals, and dead or dying Turks. It was hard to see the wounded withering in the increasing heat - the dead were better off. We reached the heights overlooking Haditha to find that the garrison was in full retreat. [...] Some of these caves had been filled with ammunition. The enemy had fired all their dumps, and rocks were flying about.
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Our aeroplanes were doing a lot of damage to the fleeing Turks, and as we began to catch up with larger groups we had some sharp engagements. The desert Arabs hovered like vultures in the distance waiting for nightfall to cover them in their looting.
- - -
An amusing sidelight was thrown in the letters addressed by Arab sheiks through this agent to the Kaiser thanking him for the iron crosses they had been awarded. There must have been an underlying grim humor in distributing crosses to the Mohammedan Arabs in recognition of their efforts to withstand the advance into the Holy Land of the Christian invaders.
- - -
As we approached the town the rattle of the small-arms ammunition sounded like a Fourth of July celebration. The general noticed that I had a kodak and asked me to go out into the dump and take some photographs. There was nothing to do but put on a bold front, but I have spent happier moments than those in which I edged my way gingerly over the smoking heaps to a ruined wall from which I could get a good view for my camera.
- - -
The Koran's injunction against strong drink was not very conscientiously observed by the majority, and even those who did not drink in public, rarely abstained in private. Only the very conservative - and these were more often to be found in the smaller towns - rigorously obeyed the prophet's commands.
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Once we had reached the far side we set out to pick our way round Kirkuk to get astride the road leading thence to Altun Kupri. This is the main route from Baghdad to Mosul, the chief city on the upper Tigris, across the river from the ruins of Nineveh. It was a difficult task finding a way practicable for the cars, as the ground was still soft from the recent rains. It was impossible to keep defiladed from Turkish observation, but we did not supply them with much in the way of a target.
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I put in all my odd moments wandering about the bazaars. The day after the fall the merchants opened their booths and transacted business as usual. The population was composed of many races, chiefly Turcoman, Kurd, and Arab. There were also Armenians, Chaldeans, Syrians, and Jews. The latter were exceedingly prosperous. Arabic and Kurdish and Turkish were all three spoken. Kirkuk is of very ancient origin - but of its early history little is known. The natives point out a mound which they claim to be Daniel's tomb.
- - -
The Turks had left in great haste, and, although they had attempted a wholesale destruction of everything that they could not take, they had been only partially successful. In my room I found a quantity of pamphlets describing the American army - with diagrams of insignia, and pictures of fully equipped soldiers of the different branches of the service. There was also a map of the United States showing the population by States. The text was, of course, in Turkish and the printing excellently done. What the purpose might be I could not make out.
- - -
When we got back to camp I found a wire informing me that I had been transferred to the American army, and ordering me to report at once to Baghdad to be sent to France.
Mais:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_of_Mudros
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/how-first-world-war-shaped-borders-of-middle-east-1.785667
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/10/31/erdogan-remembers-ww1-battles-not-defeat.html
http://ottomanwwi.wordpress.com
http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Scimitar-Fourteen-Centuries-between/dp/0306825554
Trechos de The International Jew (1920-1922), de Henry Ford.
The Jew is again being singled out for critical attention throughout the world. His emergence in the financial, political and social spheres has been so complete and spectacular since the war, that his place, power and purpose in the world are being given a new scrutiny, much of it unfriendly. Persecution is not a new experience to the Jew, but intensive scrutiny of his nature and super-nationality is.
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During the war a great deal was said about the "peaceful penetration" which the "German Government" had effected in the United States by establishing here branch offices and factories of German firms. The fact that there were many German branch houses here is unquestionable. It should be known, however, that they were not the evidence of German enterprise but of Jewish enterprise. The old German business houses were too conservative to "run after customers" even in the hustling United States, but the Jewish firms were not, and they came straight to America and hustled. In due time the competition forced the more conservative German firms to follow suit. But the idea was Jewish in its origin, not German.
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Just before the war Germany bought very heavily in American cotton and had huge quantities of it tied up here for export. When war came, the ownership of that mountainous mass of cotton wealth changed in one night from Jewish names in Hamburg to Jewish names in London. At this writing cotton is selling in England for less than it is selling in the United States, and the effect of that is to lower the American price. When the price lowers sufficiently, the market is cleared of cotton by buyers previously prepared, and then the price soars to high figures again. In the meantime, the same powers that have engineered the apparently causeless strengthening and weakening of the cotton market, have seized upon stricken Germany to be the sweatshop of the world. Certain groups control the cotton, lend it to Germany to be manufactured, leave a pittance of it there in payment for the labor that was used, and then profiteer the length and breadth of the world on the lie that "cotton is scarce." And when, tracing all these anti-social and colossally unfair methods to their source, it is found that the responsible parties all have a common characteristic, is it any wonder that the warning which comes across the sea - "Wait until America becomes awake to the Jew!" - has a new meaning?
Certainly, economic reasons no longer explain the condition in which the world finds itself today. Neither does the ordinary explanation of "the heartlessness of capital." Capital has endeavored as never before to meet the demands of labor, and labor has gone to extremes in leading capital to new concessions - but what has it advantaged either of them?
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The countries of the world which were most dominated by the Jews showed the greatest hatred of Germany during the recent regrettable war. Jewish hands were in almost exclusive control of the engines of publicity by which public opinion concerning the German people was molded. The sole winners of the war were Jews.
But assertion is not enough; proof is wanted; therefore, consider the evidence. What occurred immediately upon the change from the old regime to the new? The cabinet composed of six men, which substituted the Minister of State, was dominated by the Jews Haase and Landsberg. Haase had control of foreign affairs; his assistant was the Jew Kautsky, a Czech, who in 1918 was not even a German citizen. Also associated with Haase were the Jews Cohn and Herzfeld. The Jew Schiffer was Financial Minister of State, assisted by the Jew Bernstein. The Secretary of the Interior was the Jew Preuss, with the Jew Dr. Freund for his assistant. The Jew Fritz Max Cohen, who was correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung in Copenhagen, was made government publicity agent.
The kingdom of Prussia duplicated this condition of affairs. The Jews Hirsch and Rosenfeld dominated the cabinet, with Rosenfeld controlling the Department of Justice, and Hirsch in the Department of the Interior. The Jew Simon was in charge of the Treasury Department. The Prussian Department of Justice was wholly manned and operated by Jews. The Director of Education was the Jew Furtran with the assistance of the Jew Arndt. The Director of the Colonial Office was the Jew Meyer-Gerhard. The Jew Kastenberg was the director of the Department of Art. The War Food Supply Department was directed by the Jew Wurm, while in the State Food Department were the Jews Prof. Dr. Hirsch and the Geheimrat Dr. Stadthagen. The Soldiers' and Workmen's Committee was directed by the Jew Cohen, with the Jews Stern, Herz, Lowenberg, Frankel, Israelowicz, Laubenheim, Seligsohn, Katzenstein, Laufenberg, Heimann, Schlesinger, Merz and Weyl having control of various activities of that committee.
The Jew Ernst is chief of police at Berlin; in the same office at Frankfurt is the Jew Sinzheimer; in Munich the Jew Sterner; in Essen the Jew Levy. It will be remembered that the Jew Eisner was President of Bavaria, his financial minister being the Jew Jaffe. Bavaria's trade, commerce and industry were in control of the half-Jew Brentano. The Jews Lipsinsky and Schwarz were active in the government of Saxony; the Jews Thalheimer and Heiman in Wurtemberg; the Jew Fulda in Hessen.
Two delegates sent to the Peace Conference were Jews and a third was notoriously the tool of Jewish purposes. In addition Jews swarmed through the German delegation as experts and advisors - Max Warburg, Dr. Von Strauss, Merton, Oskar Oppenheimer, Dr. Taffe, Deutsch, Brentano, Bernstein, Struck, Rathenau, Wassermann, and Mendelsohn-Bartholdi.
As to the part which Jews from other countries had in the Peace Conference, German observers declare that any candid student may discover by reading the accounts of impartial non-Jewish recorders of that event. Only the non-Jewish historians seem to have been struck by the fact; the multitude of Jewish writers apparently judged it wise to conceal it.
Jewish influence in German affairs came strongly to the front during the war.
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The principal Jewish influences which are charged with bringing about the downfall of German order may be named under three heads: (a) the spirit of Bolshevism which masqueraded under the name of German Socialism; (b) Jewish ownership and control of the Press; (c) Jewish control of the food supply and the industrial machinery of the country. There was a fourth, "higher up," but these worked upon the German people directly.
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When Russia broke, who came first to light? Kerensky, who is a Jew. But his plans were not radical enough, and then came Trotsky, another Jew. Trotsky found the system too strong for him to break in America - he broke through the weak spot in Russia and would extend that weakness round the world. Every commissar in Russia today is a Jew. Publicists are accustomed to speak of Russia as if it were in disorder. It may be that Russia is, but the Jewish government of Russia is not. From a mass of underlings, the Jews of Russia came up a perfect phalanx, a flying wedge through the superinduced disorder, as if every man's place had been previously prepared for him.
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The Soviet is not a Russian but a Jewish institution. Nor is it the invention of Russian Jews of the present time, a new political device which has been set up as a vehicle of the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky; it is of ancient Jewish origin, a device which the Jews themselves invented to maintain their distinctive racial and national life after the conquest of Palestine by the Romans.
Modern Bolshevism, which is now known to be merely the outer cloak of a long-planned coup to establish the domination of a race, immediately set up the Soviet form of government because the Jews of all countries who contributed to Russian Bolshevism had long been schooled in the nature and structure of the Soviet.
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Like the World War, Bolshevism cannot be interpreted until it is seen who profits most by it, and the profiteering is in full sway now. The enemy is Gentile capital. Not any other. And "all the wealth of the world is in our hands" is the unspoken slogan of every Jewish outbreak in the world today.
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It is this Star of David of which a Jewish observer in Palestine remarks that there are so few among the graves of the British solders who won Palestine in the recent war; most of the signs are the familiar wooden Cross. These Crosses are now reported to be objectionable to the new rulers of Palestine, because they are so plainly in view of the visitor who approaches the new Jewish university. As in Soviet Russia, so in Palestine, not many Jews laid down their lives for the cause: there were plenty of Gentiles for that purpose.
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Dr. J. Abelson, of Portsea College, in discussing the status of "small nations" as a result of the Great War, says: "The Jew is one of these 'smaller nations,'" and claims for the Jew what is claimed for the Pole, the Rumanian, and the Serbian, and on the same ground - that of nationality.
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Jewry emerged from the war more strongly entrenched in power, even in the United States, than it was before. And in the world at large the ascendency of the Jew, even where he was in control before, is very marked.
A Jew is now President of the League of Nations.
A Zionist is President of the Council of the League of Nations.
A Jew is President of France.
A Jew was President of the committee to investigate the responsibility for the war, and one incident of his service was the disappearance of vital documents.
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Another matter that would be not only of interest, but of great usefulness in explaining the gathering of a Jewish government around the President during the war, is the question of Bernard M. Baruch's acquaintance with Woodrow Wilson. When did it begin? What circumstances or what persons brought them together? There are stories, of course, and one of them may be true, but the story ought not to be told unless accompanied by the fullest conformation. Why should it occur that a Jew should be the one man ready and selected for a position of greatest power during the war?
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As a matter of fact, Baruch could probably do a better job than Trotsky did. Certainly, the recent experience which he had in governing the country during the war was a very valuable education in the art of autocracy. Not that it is by any means Mr. Baruch's possession alone; it is also the possession of scores of Jewish leaders who flitted about from department to department, from field to field, receiving a post-graduate course in the art of autocracy, not to mention other things.
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"I probably had more power than perhaps any other man did in the war; doubtless that is true." (Bernard Baruch)
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"Copper" made tens and hundreds of millions out of the war and it is not at all inconceivable that if "copper" had not been so completely in control of the government operations of purchase, the profits might not have been so great, and the burdens which the people bore through taxation, high prices and Liberty bonds might not have been so heavy.
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The Federal Reserve System is a system of private banks, the creation of a banking aristocracy within an already existing autocracy, whereby a great proportion of banking independence was lost, and whereby it was made possible for speculative financiers to centralize great sums of money for their own purposes, beneficial or not.
That this System was useful in the artificial conditions created by war - useful, that is, for a Government that cannot manage its own business and finances and, like a prodigal son, is always wanting money, and wanting it when it wants it - it has proved, either by reason of its inherent faults or by mishandling, its inadequacy to the problems of peace. It has sadly failed of its promise, and is now under serious question.
Mr. [Paul] Warburg's scheme succeeded just in time to take care of war conditions, he was placed on the Federal Reserve Board in order to manage his system in practice, and though he was full of ideas then as to how banking could be assisted, he is disappointingly silent as to how the people can be relieved.
[...] Mr. Warburg, it will be remembered, wanted only one central bank. But, because of political considerations, as Professor Seligman tells us, twelve were decided upon. [...]
The reason was that one central bank, which naturally would be set up in New York, would give a suspicious country the impression that it was only a new scheme to keep the nation's money flowing to New York.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnISWZJSkhjUFZzYkE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmXH0z8uH_w
Andrew Carnegie
Perhaps in his haste to be the reliable cynic, H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956) decided to ignore the haphazard nature of industrial warfare and indulged in some Darwinian thinking. There is no doubt that this column must have infuriated the Gold Star Mothers of W.W. I, who were still very much a presence at the time this opinion piece appeared, and it can also be assumed that the veterans of The American Legion were also shocked to read Mencken's words.
THE SMART SET
November, 1920
War and its effects
(H. L. Mencken)
I lately read an article arguing that the United States was the only Great Power to come out of the war a winner, inasmuch as the others all lost the flower of their young manhood, whereas the American losses were so trifling as to be almost indiscernible. The theory has a fine plausibility, but I have a notion that an examination by a Galton or a Karl might reveal some holes in it. A long and difficult campaign, with wholesale butchery, might have actually done the country more good than harm - by holding the population within bounds, by reducing the number of professional war veterans and, above all, by stamping out hundreds of thousands of the relatively unfit.
The risk that man runs in war, remember, is not simply the blind chance of getting shot; it is also the risk of succumbing to disease, of wearing out through hardship, of coming to his end through ignorance and stupidity. This second risk is probably far greater than the first. A veteran army, after four or five years of hard war, is composed of very superior men, as everyone knows. They have not only been relatively lucky; they have been relatively quick-witted and tough - in brief, relatively superior.
The American army came home substantially as it went abroad. Some of the weaklings were left behind, true enough, but surely not all of them. But the French and German armies probably left them all behind. The Frenchman who got through those bitter four years was certainly a Frenchman far above the average in vigour and intelligence; all of his brothers who were below the average were dead. In the German army it was found that,as year followed year in the field, the death rate from disease sharply and constantly declined, and with it the death rate from the enemy fire. The weaklings and the fools gradually disappeared; the men left were very vigorous men and, what is more, men with a natural talent for protecting themselves, which is to, say; men of superior sense.
The notion that long wars exhaust a people is probably only partly true. They leave scars, but they also leave certain very valuable benefits. The Napoleonic series of wars, it is said, shortened the average stature of Frenchmen by three inches. Maybe it did - but it also made them tough. Is it so soon forgotten that the same people who were so tremendously butchered in the Thirty Years' War - perhaps the most sanguinary and exhausting contest in history - were ready in the next century to fight the Seven Years' War - a combat waged with superlative vigour and skill, and against the largest imaginable odds?
* * *
Trechos de O Livro Dos Insultos (1988), coletânea organizada por Ruy Castro.
LIVRE ARBÍTRIO (1918)
O livre arbítrio, segundo consta, continua um dogma essencial à maioria dos cristãos. Sem ele, as crueldades de Deus esticariam a fé até um ponto de ruptura. Mas, fora do aprisco das ovelhas, parece estar caindo gradualmente em desuso.
[...] Quanto mais se examina o assunto, mais o resíduo do livre arbítrio parece encolher, até que, no fim, torna-se impossível seguir-lhe a pista.
[...] As consequências se seguem aos fatos, implacavelmente, sejam eles voluntários ou involuntários. Na guerra, morrem tanto os soldados convocados à força quanto os voluntários.
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MULHERES FORA-DA-LEI (1921)
As guerras fugiram ao controle dos homens superiores - os únicos capazes de julgar sem paixão, mas com inteligência, as causas por trás delas e as consequências que advirão. Agora passaram a ser declaradas assim que se põe uma multidão em pânico, e só terminam quando já esgotaram sua fúria. Neste ponto, o efeito da civilização foi o de reduzir uma arte que era o repositório da coragem, e da vocação inata de alguns dos melhores homens, ao nível de um assalto a um bordel ou ao de uma briga no cais. Todas as guerras são agora repelentes e degradantes; sua condução passou das mãos dos nobres e cavaleiros para as dos demagogos, agiotas e camelôs de atrocidades. Para podermos reconstituir a guerra em grande estilo, como a concebiam o príncipe Eugène, Marlborough e o velho Dessauer, temos que recuar aos povos bárbaros.
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O HOMEM MÉDIO (1922)
[...] a covardia. De uma forma ou de outra, ela é visível em todo ser humano; serve também para separar o homem de todos os outros animais superiores. A covardia, acredito, está na base de todo sistema de castas e na formação de todas as sociedades organizadas, inclusive as mais democráticas. Para escapar de ir à guerra ele próprio, o camponês dava de mão beijada certos privilégios aos guerreiros - e destes privilégios brotou toda a estrutura da civilização. Vamos recuar mais ainda no tempo. Foi a propriedade que levantou a lebre de que uns poucos homens relativamente corajosos foram capazes de acumular mais posses do que hordas de covardes - e, como se fosse pouco, de mantê-las depois de acumuladas.
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BEETHOVEN (1926)
Beethoven foi um daqueles homens cuja estatura, vista em retrospecto, só parece crescer. Quantos movimentos não surgiram para pô-lo definitivamente na prateleira? Pelo menos uns dez nos cem anos desde a sua morte. Houve um em Nova York, em 1917, lançado por críticos bocós e estimulado pela febre da guerra: pregava que o lugar de Beethoven seria tomado por profetas das novas luzes, como Stravinski. O saldo daquele movimento foi o de que a melhor orquestra da América foi à falência - e Beethoven sobreviveu sem um arranhão.
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AMBROSE BIERCE (1927)
Bierce foi o primeiro escritor de ficção a tratar a guerra com realismo. Antecipou-se inclusive a Zola. Costuma-se dizer que ele saiu da Guerra Civil americana, na qual lutou, com um profundo e persistente ódio à matança, e que escreveu seus contos de guerra como uma espécie de pacifista desiludido. Ninguém que o tenha conhecido, como eu o conheci em seus últimos anos, acredita nisto. O que ele extraiu de sua participação na guerra não foi um horror sentimental a ela, mas uma espécie de cínico deleite. Parecia-lhe quase um reductio ad absurdum de todo o romantismo. O mundo via a guerra como algo heroico, glorioso, idealista. Pois bem, ele iria mostrar como ela era sórdida e suja, estúpida, selvagem e degradante. Embora isto não queira dizer que ele a desaprovasse. Ao contrário, Bierce via na guerra uma oportunidade de ouro para discutir com maligna satisfação sua ideia fixa: a da infinita imbecilidade do homem. Não havia uma gota de leite da gentileza humana no velho Ambrose; ele não ganhou o apelido de Bitter (amargo) Bierce por acaso. O que mais o deliciava na vida era o espetáculo da tolice e covardia do homem, o qual ele classificava, intelectualmente, entre uma ovelha e uma vaca, e, como herói, ligeiramente inferior aos ratos. Suas histórias de guerra, mesmo quando lidam com o heroico, não descrevem os soldados como heróis; mostram-nos como bobos perdidos, fazendo coisas sem sentido, submetendo-se a violências e torturas sem resistir, e finalmente morrendo como porcos.
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OS AVANÇOS DA CIVILIZAÇÃO (1931)
De todas as grandes invenções dos tempos modernos, a que me deu mais conforto e alegria é aquela da qual pouco se fala: o termostato. Fiquei surpreso, há algum tempo, ao saber que tinha sido inventado uma geração atrás. Ouvi falar dele a primeira vez durante a guerra de 1914-8, quando um amigo me sugeriu que jogasse fora o forno a carvão que aquecia a casa e instalasse um forno a gás. Naturalmente, hesitei a princípio, pois assim funciona a mente humana. Mas o dia em que finalmente sucumbi ficará gravado para sempre em meus anais, porque permitiu que eu me mudasse do inferno para uma espécie de paraíso. Não havia um único carvoeiro na minha vizinhança: todos estavam trabalhando nos estaleiros, a 15 dólares por dia. Assim, eu tinha de escavar pessoalmente o carvão e, como se não bastasse, peneirar as cinzas. E, o que é pior, minha casa vivia ou muito quente ou muito fria.
O termostato mudou tudo isto num instante. Ajustei-o para 22° e fui tratar da vida. Quando a temperatura da casa subia ou descia, o termostato se encarregava de fazê-la voltar aos 22°. Comecei a me sentir como um homem que escapou da forca. Nada de carvão para escavar, nada de cinzas para peneirar. Minha casa ficou tão limpa que eu podia usar a mesma camisa cinco dias seguidos. Recuperei o ânimo para trabalhar e rapidamente produzi uma série de contribuições imperecíveis para as letras nacionais. Meu humor melhorou tanto que minha família começou a suspeitar de caduquice precoce.
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CAPITALISMO (1935)
Quando os bolcheviques, uma chusma de bestas quase comparável aos homens que pensam por nós, tomaram o controle dos negócios na Rússia, tiveram que jogar no lixo imediatamente uma das regras cardeais do seu credo ostensivo. Segundo esta regra, todos os males do mundo se deviam ao fato de que, sob o capitalismo, os trabalhadores tinham perdido a propriedade dos seus meios de produção. Todas as autoridades clássicas do socialismo, de Marx e Engels para baixo, enfatizaram esta perda, e, na Utopia que eles vislumbravam, o trabalhador receberia estes meios de volta, iria se tornar um produtor independente, trabalhar apenas para si e não dar nada de sua produção para um capitalista cretino. Mas, no momento em que tomaram o poder, os bolcheviques devolveram tudo isto para a prateleira e, desde então, não se tocou mais no assunto, exceto por uns simplórios americanos. Ansiosa por administrar a Rússia como seu quintal particular, aquela equipe esperta de chicanistas viu instantaneamente que sua principal função seria a de acumular capital, para que metade de suas vítimas não morresse de fome. O velho capital tinha sido devorado pela guerra. Uma maneira fácil de consegui-lo seria tomar emprestado de outros países, mas, como ninguém abria a mão, os bolcheviques tiveram de acumular o seu próprio capital fresco.
O que conseguiram pondo os trabalhadores russos para suar de uma maneira jamais vista antes na terra ou, pelo menos, nos tempos modernos. Os trabalhadores resistiram, especialmente os camponeses, e, quando em consequência aconteceram as duas grandes fomes, o chapéu teve de ser passado entre os países capitalistas para alimentar os famintos. Depois, chacinando os camponeses rebeldes à coletivização e organizando os desempregados num gigantesco exército, os bolcheviques conseguiram dominar todos os trabalhadores russos. Desde então, esses pobres diabos têm trabalhado como prisioneiros forçados, com mais ou menos os mesmos salários. Todo o produto de seu trabalho, pouco acima do nível de subsistência necessário aos ratos, vai para os cofres dos bolcheviques. Com isso, estes acumularam uma bela soma de capital novo, que usam não apenas para construir fábricas cada vez maiores - infestadas de operários que nada possuem, exceto suas mãos -, como também para construir luxuosas mansões para si próprios, inclusive uma embaixada em Washington, tão extravagante que faz inveja a todos os banqueiros da cidade.
Assim, um dos princípios fundamentais do marxismo foi reduzido ao absurdo na casa dos seus supostos discípulos. Podem não passar de uns patifes, e sem dúvida o são, mas têm também uma considerável esperteza para perceber que nada que se possa chamar de uma civilização moderna pode prescindir do capital. E, por capital, quero dizer precisamente o mesmo que eles quando o atacam para consumo externo - ou seja, o lucro acumulado, não nos bolsos dos trabalhadores, mas nos das pessoas que lhes fornecem os meios de trabalho; não sob o controle daqueles que o produzem, mas sob o controle daqueles que o dominam. Os políticos desprezíveis, os pedagogos pueris e os advogados desocupados que não param de cacarejar em Washington desde 1933 [começo do New Deal] fariam a mesma coisa se pudessem. Alguns deles talvez sejam realmente estúpidos para acreditar que o mundo poderia continuar sem o capitalismo, mas outros devem enxergar o suficiente para ver o que se passou na Rússia. Mas, sejam eles simples idiotas ou espertos trapaceiros, todos se julgam com autoridade para falar sobre a decadência do capitalismo, e mesmo aqueles que alegam estar tentando salvá-lo referem-se a ele como se estivesse nas últimas. Para silenciar o seu oco blablablá, basta dar-lhes um emprego no governo.
Não há sentido na coisa. O mundo moderno pode dispensar tanto o capital acumulado quanto pode dispensar a polícia ou as ruas pavimentadas. A maior transformação imaginável foi a que aconteceu na Rússia - a transferência do capital, que passou dos proprietários particulares para os políticos profissionais. Se você pensa que isto faria algum bem ao indivíduo, basta perguntar a qualquer carteiro americano. Ele trabalha para um supercapitalista chamado Tio Sam - e terá prazer em contar-lhe o que tem de suar e dar duro para cada mísero níquel que ganha.
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DEMPSEY VERSUS CARPENTIER (19??)
Durante os anos 20 e 30, fiz diversas reportagens especiais para jornais. Uma delas foi a cobertura da luta entre Jack Dempsey e o francês Georges Carpentier pelo título mundial de boxe, no Boyle's Thirty Acres, em Jersey City, N. J., dia 2 de julho de 1921. Carpentier era o favorito, não apenas da torcida, mas também dos repórteres, porque Dempsey tinha fugido ao serviço militar na Primeira Guerra Mundial.
Fonte:
http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/hl_mencken_on_world_war_one
Mais:
http://www.jfredmacdonald.com/worldwarone1914-1918/german-17ludendorff.html
http://www.historicfilms.com/search/?q=mencken#p1t222i315o333
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpGzpqU-b04
http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/anti-ww1-editorial_article
Trechos de Poilu - World War I Notebooks (1978), de Louis Barthas.
The End of the Nightmare: August 11, 1918-February 14, 1919
After signing in on the official register - the true cogwheel of militarism - I went to the garrison, which was the headquarters of the three regiments of infantrymen of which the city of Guingamp was so proud.
The barracks was reserved for the future heroes of the conscript class of 1920, which was finishing up its apprenticeship in the noble profession of arms. As for us, the graybeards, the leather-skins, the tough old guys of every shade and hue, we had to be content being housed in what had been the stables for remounts. There were no more than a half-dozen stallions still there - the care of which required the presence of three or four dozen embusqués.
I didn't receive a very warm welcome at the office. It seemed that I was arriving three days late. I had left home the day after my convalescence leave had expired. But there were several days which the dictator Clemenceau, to get the sick and the wounded back to the front lines more quickly, had decreed that any delays in travel would henceforth be included in the home leave or convalescence.
I didn't know that. But no one is allowed to be ignorant of the law, even a decree. So they told me that I would be called before the generalissimo of all the troops in Guingamp, who would decide whether or not I'd be considered a deserter!
Next day I was sent to the barracks for the obligatory medical exam. Despite a gruff exterior and sour manner, the major [medical officer] harbored a kind heart and did everything in his power to help the poilus. Observing my skinny body, my haggard features, the bags under my eyes, and learning that I'd been evacuated for the first time in four years, he said to me, "Good man! Go get your gear, you're coming to the infirmary, you'll help work in the garden."
The next day I began my peaceful duties as assistant gardener, watering the cabbages and lettuce, pulling up potatoes, all kinds of things which appealed much more to my pacifist temperament than handling a rifle, grenades, and other homicidal devices.
- - -
I left that very evening. This time passing through Paris I visited the Palais des Invalides, but I couldn't see the red marble tomb of that great battler Napoleon I because it was covered with sandbags to protect it from enemy bombs.
That would have been quite a paradox, if the murderer who had never suffered a scratch during more than a hundred battles would have been touched by a piece of metal, a century later, in his coffin.
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That September 8, the same day I got back from home leave, along with thirty corporals, sergeants, and adjutants, I took the train to Vitré.
At Saint-Brieuc, the station crew told us there was a forty-minute stop. I shared my compartment with two corporals whose names I've forgotten.
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Where would our knapsacks, canteens, and weapons have gotten to?
We would have been in a fine mess.
At nine in the evening we showed up at La Trémoille barracks, where our arrival took the guard detail completely by surprise and disturbed their sleep.
The teams of instructors weren't supposed to arrive until the next day. As a result, we didn't get a very warm welcome. We had to skip supper, and slept on beds without mattresses. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we'd seen plenty of those.
The day after, [...] from dawn to twilight, we were either in the barracks courtyard or snaking our way across the training field, with barely an hour of rest, hardly enough time to wolf down something to eat, write a letter, look at a newspaper - all at full gallop.
We spent hours doing to-the-left-march, right-face, showing off for a boss who was never satisfied with how smartly we clicked our heels, marching past him in full salute twenty times in a row, while he shouted commands to us so loudly as to burst a vein in his neck.
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Every day there were choral sessions, and we sang going to and from the training field. It was forced cheerfulness. We had two priests with us who sang La Madelon, Margoton, La Boulangère so often as to give you a headache.
Vitré is a city of about ten thousand inhabitants. The people are Bretons because they're part of Brittany. But they aren't Breton in their customs or their language.
They speak only French. And it would be a pretty good French if they didn't say, for example, "Vitren" for "Vitré," "marchen" for "marché," "Sévignen" for "Sévigné," etc., for every word ending in "é." Right in the city is the ancient, admirably conserved castle of the Seigneur de la Trémoille, the big brawler whom Vitré holds dear to its heart. At the base of this castle flows the Vilaine river, which deserves its name [vilain: ugly, nasty]. It's not pretty to look at, with its muddy water, dirtied, they say, by factories located upstream.
Vitré's local celebrity is Madame de Sévigné, who lived in the Château des Roches-Noires, a few kilometers outside town, a place of excursion and even pilgrimage for any traveler passing by.
In the public garden at Vitré they've raised a statue of Madame de Sévigné. She's shown with an inoffensive pen in her hand. I much prefer that to a brandished sword, battle-ax, or rifle.
One day our officers were nice enough to drive us to the former Château des Roches-Noires. We could see the writing room of the person who made this place famous. Everything was exactly the same as she left it. In one corner, her tiny wooden shoes were there to show how small her feet were. In the park there was a sort of grotto which produced unexpected echoes. I shouted "Vive la paix!"
One afternoon we were driven to the theater of Vitré, not to see a performance but to hear a speech about American war aid, so as to boost our morale which risked being sapped by the pacifist or, as they called it, defeatist, campaign which was rife at this time.
So here was this young officer, embusqué, this charlatan of morale, pouring into our ears fantastic numbers of cannon, airplanes, tanks, Yankees armed to the teeth flooding in. At the end of each tirade, to conclude it, he cried out two or three times, "C'est formidable!"
First came the smiles, then the muffled laughter, then the guffaws bursting forth irreverently. The officers had a hard time keeping a straight face, and the successor to de la Trémoille himself, the military governor of Vitré, chewed on his big gray mustaches. At the end, the speaker himself was caught up in the laughter which rocked the hall, and the conference ended in the midst of general hilarity. The funniest thing was that this emissary of Clemenceau had no idea about the reason for this hilarity and continued to punctuate each of his sentences, full of conviction, with "C'est formidable!"
- - -
1918. Armistice! Liberation!
Meanwhile the great drama was reaching its conclusion. Alone against twenty nations baying after her in a fantastic clamor, Germany, so proud in 1914, now on its knees, asked for mercy, asked for armistice.
But this way of fleeing the war didn't appeal to the striped sleeves, who didn't have their fill of crosses, medals, stars, stripes, ribbons, honors and glories.
For these folks, war had to end with total disaster for the German army, against which Jena, Waterloo, and Sedan would be mere skirmishes. Thousands of captured cannon, hundreds of thousands of captured Boches, shattered enemy forces streaming back across the Rhine bridges, pursued with bayonets at their backs by our soldiers, our regiments entering the great cities beyond the Rhine, flags fluttering, bands playing - here was the apotheosis dreamed of not only by our great warriors but also by the government, almost all the press, all the embusqués, and, back in the rear, all those who had nothing more to lose, or who had more to gain by continuing the war.
- - -
During this time, in an orgy of murder, bloodletting, and burning, the whole front was in flames, from Ypres to Belfort. Without exception, all the regiments were thrown into the assault on German machine guns.
The German armies bent back on all the points of contact, without letting their line be broken, and their retreat didn't turn into a rout.
They had to cede the floor to the diplomats. But I'm not going to pretend to write history here, by recounting the dramatic, agonizing twists and turns which led to the signing of the Armistice, November 11, 1918, at five in the morning.
- - -
It was noon when the news reached us in the Vitré barracks. There wasn't a single soldier left in the rooms. It was a devilish stampede down the corridors and down to the police station, where they had just posted a telegram announcing, in two laconic lines, the deliverance of millions of men, the end of their tortures, the imminent return to civilized life.
How many times had we thought about this blessed day, which so many did not live to see.
- - -
We stood there looking at each other, mute and stupid.
But we were called back to reality by the cries of Rassemblement! and the whistle blasts of the adjutants on duty, to head out for exercises as usual.
What, to exercises? On such a solemn day, which will be unforgettable in future centuries - that was a joke. Grumbling, we set out for the training field, and the next day, too. Finally some striped-sleeve type, less stupid than the others, put an end to these exercises which had lost their purpose.
- - -
I soon obtained a leave of fifty days - as a barrelmaker - and returned to duty at the garrison on 10 January 1919.
Passing through Paris, I visited the Jardin des Plantes and walked past the Opéra and the Louvre.
One more month separated me from my liberation. I spent it standing guard at the 48th Regiment's barracks [at Guingamp] and at a hospital where German prisoners from all over the region were being cared for.
They were installed by themselves in two big tents at the end of the hospital's garden. If you were too sick, you died, and there's one less Boche.
- - -
Finally my long-awaited day arrived: February 14, 1919.
That day, at Narbonne, after multiple formalities imposed upon the demobilized and visits from one office to another, a desk-bound adjutant handed me my discharge papers with the words, as long awaited as the Messiah, "Go, you're free."
I was free, after fifty-four months of slavery! I was finally escaping from the claws of militarism, to which I swore such a ferocious hatred.
I have sought to inculcate this hatred in my children, my friends, my neighbors. I will tell them that the fatherland, glory, military honor, laurels - all are only vain words, destined to mask what is frighteningly horrible, ugly, and cruel about war.
- - -
They lied when they said that we, the poilus, wanted to continue the war in order to avenge the dead, so that our sacrifices would not be useless.
- - -
Victory has made us forget everything, absolve everything.
- - -
In the villages they're already talking about raising monuments of glory, of apotheosis, to the victims of the big butchery, to those, as the phony patriots say, who "have voluntarily made the sacrifice of their lives," as if those unfortunate ones could have chosen to do otherwise.
- - -
Returned to the bosom of my family after the nightmare years, I taste the joy of life, or rather of new life. I feel tender happiness about things which, before, I didn't pay attention to: sitting at home, at my table, lying in my bed, putting off sleep so I can hear the wind hitting the shutters, rustling the nearby plane trees, hearing the rain strike the windows, looking at a starry, serene, silent night or, on a dark, moonless night, thinking about similar nights spent up there...
Often I think about my many comrades fallen by my side. I heard their curses against the war and its authors, the revolt of their whole beings against their tragic fate, against their murder. And I, as a survivor, believe that I am inspired by their will to struggle without cease-fire nor mercy, to my last breath, for the idea of peace and human fraternity.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7K1yqCuTgg
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrWPsj6fVbeXlwbafa8GYHgEenDH9MmTF
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/valery.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC4siPTFsziRvpzLxHT8Pjhh7VWBbQEai
Trechos de Paga De Soldado (1926), de William Faulkner.
Julian Lowe, número ..., que foi cadete aviador da Força Aérea no Esquadrão tal e tal, mais conhecido como "Asa Solitária", contemplava o mundo com desgosto, como um doente de icterícia.
- - -
Triste e desgostoso, recostava-se sobre o assento, sem desfrutar sequer da prerrogativa de viajar em um vagão Pullman, dando voltas, sobre o polegar, ao chapéu e sua tantas vezes amaldiçoada fita branca.
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[...] - Fui vítima de um ataque de gases quando limpava as latrinas, e desde então não enxergo muito bem. A Berlim! Sim, claro! Vamos a Berlim!
- - -
Sob uma sobrancelha levantada em ângulo, o olho do cadete Lowe fixava-se em um ponto acima.
- Ouça: o que está bebendo?
- Irmão, não sei. Na terça-feira passada, no Congresso, deram uma medalha ao sujeito que faz esta bebida, porque ele apresentou um plano para acabar com a guerra: reuniria todos os holandeses do exército e faria com que bebessem, durante quarenta dias, tanto deste licor quanto pudessem aguentar. Percebe? Para arruinar qualquer guerra! Entende o que se propôs?
- - -
Largado no chão, entre os dois assentos, achava-se o companheiro de viagem de Yaphank, lutando para acender um cigarro úmido e quase desfeito. "Como a devastação da França", pensou o cadete Lowe deixando correr sua memória sobre as espinhosas reminiscências de um tal capitão Bleyth, piloto da R.A.F., enviado especialmente para reforçar durante algum tempo a democrática esquadrilha.
- - -
- Vamos! Despertem! Aqui está o general Pershing, que vem tomar um trago com seus pobres soldados. - Dirigindo-se ao cadete Lowe: Observem-no! Não lhes parece que se debate afundado na depravação?
- A "Batalha" de Cognac - murmurou entre dentes o que estava adormecido no chão -. Dez homens mortos, talvez quinze. Talvez uma centena.
- - -
Não lhe restava outro remédio a não ser deixar-se banhar em licor ou bebê-lo, de modo que optou pelo último. Enquanto retinha o líquido na boca, suas entranhas subiam-lhe pelo esôfago, redemoinhavam na garganta e logo baixavam às sacudidas, arrastando junto o nauseabundo líquido.
- Viu? Não é nada do outro mundo, certo? Leve em consideração que sinto mais pena do que você em ver como diminui o meu bom licor. Ainda que eu deva admitir que tem certo gosto de gasolina.
O ultrajado estômago do cadete Lowe agitava-se entre suas amarras musculares como um balão cativo. Arrotou e seus intestinos enroscaram-se em um êxtase apaixonado. Seu amigo voltou a meter-lhe a garrafa na boca.
- - -
- O que quero dizer é que eu gostaria antes de dar uma olhada nesta nação pela qual combatemos.
- Demônios! Não posso! Desde o dia do armistício, minha mãe me manda diariamente um telegrama para recomendar-me que voe baixo, com muitas precauções, e que regresse para casa tão logo esteja desmobilizado. Aposto com você como ela é capaz de ter telegrafado ao presidente, pedindo-lhe que me dispense do serviço o mais rápido possível.
- - -
- Que venha essa garrafa, general!
E enquanto Lowe enchia os copos, murmurou-lhe ao ouvido:
- Não se preocupe, ele não faz por mal. Creio que necessita deixar que seus pensamentos corram por outros lugares para não cair no turbilhão das recordações. Todos temos recordações horríveis da guerra. Eu mesmo perdi uma vez oitenta e nove dólares em uma partida de dados e, além daquela derrota, tive que perder a de Chatoterri, como é público e notório, segundo dizem os literatos. Portanto, bebamos um pouco mais de whisky.
- Saúde! - murmurou o oficial sem sequer levantar o copo.
- O que quer dizer com isso de Château-Thierry? - perguntou Lowe.
- - -
Durante escassos nove dias, o tema obrigatório das conversas no povoado foi o regresso de Donald Mahon. Os vizinhos, curiosos e amigos foram vê-lo...; os homens mantinham-se em pé ou sentados diante dele, respeitavelmente joviais e alegres: sólidos pilares do banco e do comércio, homens de negócios que só se interessavam pela guerra como um subproduto da ascensão e da queda do senhor Wilson e, ainda assim, apenas por sua produção em dólares e em centavos de dólares, enquanto suas mulheres discutiam entre elas sobre modas, por cima das cicatrizes e da face retorcida do pobre Mahon. Alguns dos conhecidos mais casuais do pastor também foram vê-lo, com a gola da camisa democraticamente desabotoada, mascando fumo e negando-se humilde, mas firmemente, a tirar o chapéu. Não faltaram muitas jovens bonitas com as quais ele havia dançado, as quais ele havia cortejado nas noites de verão, mas vinham para observar-lhe a cara e retirar-se depois, rapidamente, com náuseas reprimidas, para nunca mais voltar, a menos que na primeira visita o rosto dele estivesse oculto (em cujo caso buscavam ocasião de vê-lo descoberto). Vinham os rapazes da escola sonhando com aventuras impossíveis, e ficando desiludidos porque ele não queria contar-lhes história alguma da guerra. Todos iam e vinham, enquanto Gilligan, seu fiel e enojado serviçal, manejava-os com habilidade imparcial e desalentadora.
- - -
- Eu vivia em um povoado pequeno, como este, e já estava farta... - ouça bem! - farta de ficar em casa a manhã inteira, vestir-me à tarde somente para caminhar pelo centro e depois passar as noites fingindo me divertir nos bailes, reuniões e passeios com os rapazes do lugar. Todas as manhãs, as tardes e as noites de todos os dias, de todos os anos, eram iguais. Quando a guerra foi declarada, pude convencer alguns amigos de meus pais para que me conseguissem um posto em Nova York. Assim entrei na Cruz Vermelha. Você já sabe como se trabalha lá. Entreter os soldados servindo-lhes refrescos, dançando com os camponeses encabulados que haviam sido arrebatados de suas terras para entrar no quartel e, tendo uma hora de licença na grande cidade, queriam passá-la o melhor possível. Nada tão difícil como isso em Nova York, se não se sabe como procurar.
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- Um dia, em uma breve nota, anunciou-me que iria à cidade para permanecer ali até que partisse com destino a ultramar. [...] quando o vi chegar com seu uniforme resplandecente, todo tiras e estrelas, quando vi outros soldados saudando-o com respeito, fiquei admirada e enfeitiçada, imaginando que não poderia existir outro exemplar masculino mais esplêndido e poderoso. Você deve lembrar como estavam as coisas naquele momento: a guerra era uma loucura, uma histeria coletiva. Todo o país era um grande circo.
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Mas o Destino, utilizando o Ministério de Guerra como instrumento, enganou-os de cabo a rabo.
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Por alguma razão inexplicável, a chuva cessara e no ar úmido ouvia-se debilmente esse ruído inconfundível que fazem os batalhões e os regimentos quando descansam; um silêncio ordenado, mais agudo que o clamor de um tumulto. Já do lado de fora, Madden sentiu em seus pés a presença familiar do lodo, reconheceu a escuridão molhada, o odor de excrementos e de suor de homens sob um céu remoto, demasiadamente afastado para que pudesse distinguir a paz ou a guerra.
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Muitas vezes pensou no capitão Green enquanto cruzava o território da França. Costumava pensar nele quando contemplava a cortina prateada da chuva, sempre acompanhada de álamos, à maneira de um friso eterno para uma eterna tela semitransparente que deixava adivinhar paisagens formosas e fecundas: caminhos e canais e aldeias onde os telhados brilhavam violentamente; torres e árvores; povoados, uma cidade; e depois, caminhões e tropas nos cruzamentos dos caminhos. Costumava pensar nele vendo as pessoas que iam à guerra, agitadas, febris, como homens de negócios nas grandes cidades; vendo os soldados franceses jogando "croquet" com seus manchados uniformes azuis; viu os soldados norte-americanos que o observavam jogar e presenteava-os com cigarros; viu, também, soldados ingleses e norte-americanos lutando entre si, mas sem que ninguém se importasse com ele. Afastados, estavam os M. P. (Polícia Militar). Para que um homem queira se tornar um M. P. é preciso que tenha um parafuso a menos. Zona de guerra. As coisas seguem como de costume. A Idade de Ouro dos não-combatentes.
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Naquela época, haviam-se acostumado ao troar distante dos canhões (que estavam disparando contra homens) e ao sinistro relampejar no horizonte, pelas noites; haviam sido metralhados por um aeroplano alemão quando estavam em fila em frente à cozinha, esperando a refeição, diante do pessoal de uma bateria francesa camuflada, que os observava sem interesse, lá das casamatas e trincheiras; além disso, receberam muitos e valiosos conselhos dos soldados que voltavam do front.
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Entre os muitos conselhos gratuitos que receberam, recordavam particularmente que deveriam deixar-se cair no chão ao escutar o estrondo de um canhão ou o silvo de uma bomba; assim foi como, no instante em que uma metralhadora começou a disparar, ali pelo flanco direito, fazendo saltar a lama podre que os enterrava, alguém lançou o corpo à terra, outro tropeçou nele e logo todos se arremessaram ao solo como um só homem. Alguns dos oficiais amaldiçoaram-nos com palavras grosseiras e outros soldados deram-lhes pontapés para que se levantassem. Depois, quando estavam parados junto ao muro de terra molhada, apertados na escuridão, farejando a morte, o tenente ia e vinha correndo diante da fila de homens, proferindo um discurso breve e amargo.
- Quem diabos disse a vocês para que lançassem o corpo à terra? [...] Sargento, empreendamos a marcha, e se outro homem se deixar cair, que os demais sigam andando e pisem-no até deixá-lo enterrado no lodo!
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O sargento Madden voltou a pensar no capitão Green alguns dias depois, quando avançava com seus homens entre o arame farpado, perto de Cantigny, dizendo:
- Adiante, bastardos, adiante! Acham que nunca irão morrer?
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Donald Mahon despertara ao ouvir vozes novas.
- Quanta gentileza a sua em ter vindo! - dizia a senhora Powers - Todos os amigos de Donald portaram-se muito bem com ele. Especialmente os que tiveram filhos ou parentes na guerra. Eles sabem o que é isso, não é mesmo?
(Ah, pobre homem! E seu rosto contraído, quebrado, cheio de cicatrizes! Madden não me disse que sua face estava assim, Donald!)
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O "Dia do Jovem", quer dizer, o dia dedicado ao ser humano de tão pouca sorte que não tinha idade suficiente para alistar-se no exército quando eclodiu a guerra. Durante os dois últimos anos, aqueles desafortunados passaram-nos tão negros como se houvessem estado no campo de batalha. Naturalmente, as moças utilizaram-nos durante a escassez de homens, mas sempre com indiferença, de uma maneira impessoal. Oh, uniforme! Oh, vaidade! Foram plenamente utilizados pelas moças, é verdade, mas tão logo apareceu um uniforme, terminaram abandonados e decepcionados.
A partir daquele momento, os uniformes triunfaram em todas as ocasiões; eram vistos em todas as partes, andando daqui para ali, exibindo-se, e não apenas eram considerados "na moda" e românticos, mas também que eles próprios mostravam-se muito dispostos a gastar o dinheiro que traziam, e, portanto, iam longe demais e rápido demais para que os desafortunados jovens pudessem segui-los.
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- Isso quer dizer que também existe cinema na França.
- Sim. Para nos entretermos em nosso tempo livre.
- Com certeza vocês passaram muito bem por lá - a moça oferecia a ele seu perfil abstraído - enquanto nós trabalhávamos como escravas enrolando ataduras. Espero que nós mulheres possamos ir para combater na próxima guerra; eu, pessoalmente, prefiro marchar e disparar rifles que costurar. Você acha que nos deixarão lutar na próxima guerra? - perguntou, enquanto observava um jovenzinho que dançava contorcendo-se como um bicho-da-seda.
- Tomara que vocês tenham que ir para combater, se desejam tanto assim que estale outra guerra - retrucou James Dough levantando sua perna artificial para cruzá-la e esfregando dissimuladamente o braço direito, entre os ossos do qual passara uma bala.
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- Lembre que diariamente você os via nas instalações da Cruz Vermelha: os mesmos que estão ali; pobres rapazes; tão bons, tão jovens, tão tristes porque iam para a guerra: e só porque iam para a guerra é que nós as moças éramos atenciosas com eles. Mas agora não têm guerra aonde ir e veja como elas os tratam. Foram abandonados.
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- As coisas incríveis que aprendemos com as mulheres da França! Vocês pretendem me dizer que estas garotas aqui sabem aquelas coisas? Impossível! Não podem ter mudado tanto!
- Não! - respondeu Gilligan com ênfase - Isso não as agradaria.
- É claro que não as agradaria! Estas são moças decentes. Serão mães da futura geração.
- Talvez haja alguma que se agrade... - insinuou Gilligan.
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- Sim, fui soldado e até lutei um pouco - respondeu Jones.
- Ah! - exclamou inesperadamente a senhora Saunders - Você esteve na guerra? Que interessante!
Mas já perdera o interesse pelas proezas militares de Januarius Jones, e perguntou:
- Quando esteve na França não teria encontrado por acaso com o tenente Donald Mahon?
- Não, senhora. Dispunha de tão pouco tempo para falar com os demais que não recordo ter tido alguma conversa agradável durante a contenda - respondeu gravemente, apesar de que nunca estivera na França e sequer vira a Estátua da Liberdade.
Mais:
http://southernliterature.umwblogs.org/2010/10/31/faulkners-military-experiences
http://torontodreamsproject.blogspot.com.br/2011/10/william-faulkner-drunk-in-cockpit-of.html
Humphrey Bogart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25wWkDE2KI4
"Claude Debussy, musicien français": les années de guerre d'un compositeur
(Bénédicte Percheron)
«Avec ou sans patriotisme, la guerre c'est du désordre accumulé. J'ai horreur du désordre, donc: je n'aime pas la guerre. [...].» C'est par cette réflexion adressée à André Caplet que Debussy dévoile ses sentiments sur les douloureux événements qui secouent l'Europe au milieu de l'année 1914. Patriote, il l'est pourtant dès les premiers jours de la guerre dans ses propos, mais aussi dans sa composition. Quant au désordre, cette irruption de l'imprévu dans son quotidien, il en subit les lourdes conséquences à plusieurs titres: la guerre le pousse hors de chez lui, bouleverse sa vie sociale et musicale, lui arrache des êtres chers, etc. Plusieurs soucis de santé provoquent dès cette période un ralentissement de sa production artistique, jusqu'à ce qu'un désordre plus intime et plus handicapant, un cancer, finisse par l'emporter en 1918.
Sur le plan artistique européen, l'avènement de la Première Guerre mondiale réveille et affirme des antagonismes culturels préexistants. Les oppositions entre écoles nationales musicales ne sont cependant pas spécifiques au XXe siècle; les célèbres querelles du XVIIIe siècle avaient déjà souligné une volonté de «nationaliser» des esthétiques musicales. Dès le
début du conflit, des deux côtés du Rhin, la culture de l'ennemi est dévaluée et rejetée. Pourtant dans le domaine musical, la musique allemande, notamment l'écriture wagnérienne, a fortement imprégné la composition française du XIXe siècle. La musique française de la Belle Époque s'est bien souvent inscrite dans une démarche post-wagnérienne, soit par filiation, soit par rejet. Claude Debussy a eu la particularité de se positionner tour à tour dans ces deux perspectives. Au début du siècle, il se détache de la composition allemande pour s'aventurer dans d'autres esthétiques, en empruntant, entre autres, à des harmonies extraeuropéennes. Avec l'avènement de la guerre, Debussy s'adonne à un fervent nationalisme qui se traduit aussi bien par des propos perceptibles dans sa correspondance, que par des compositions musicales. Mais en quoi cette forme de nationalisme contribue-t-elle à redéfinir son écriture?
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Avant la mobilisation générale du 1er août 1914, Debussy souffre de problèmes de santé qui l'empêchent pendant trois mois de travailler. Il s'est blessé un doigt dans une porte de train, souffre d'un zona et commence à ressentir les manifestations d'un cancer du rectum. Il prend ainsi du retard dans ses commandes musicales et accumule les dettes. Dès l'annonce de la guerre, Debussy éprouve une forte anxiété face à l'actualité. Le 3 août, à son éditeur, Jacques Durand, il précise son état d'esprit et évoque les «jours d'affolement» qui le plongent dans une profonde angoisse. Debussy, âgé de 52 ans, ne risque pourtant pas la mobilisation générale, l'âge limite des réservistes étant fixé à 48 ans. Il regrette cependant de ne pouvoir participer physiquement à la défense du pays et arrive presque «à envier Satie qui va s'occuper sérieusement de défendre Paris en qualité de caporal». Mais il avoue à J. Durand son «manque de sang-froid» et d' «esprit militaire». Son inquiétude se porte principalement sur le gendre de son épouse, Raoul Bardac, et sur le mari de Dolly, la soeur de ce même Raoul Bardac, tous deux mobilisés.
Fin août, devant la poussée des Allemands, le gouvernement quitte Paris pour Bordeaux. Les Parisiens s'inquiètent et beaucoup prennent le chemin de l'exil. C'est le cas de la famille Debussy qui obtient un sauf-conduit pour Angers le 4 septembre. Le voyage en train est pénible, mais durant les heures que Debussy passe confiné dans un wagon, il «couvre le document fourni par les chemins de fer» d'annotations musicales qui préfigurent ses Etudes pour les notes répétées, éditées en juin 1916 au sein de ses Douze Etudes pour piano. Le séjour à Angers dure un mois pendant lequel Debussy lit la presse et regrette la capitale. Rentré à Paris au début de l'automne, il accepte de réviser les oeuvres de Chopin pour les éditions Durand. Ce travail lui plaît, car il lui permet de retravailler dans un contexte qui le perturbe significativement et avec une santé déjà très détériorée. Le compositeur n'arrive pas à créer sereinement alors que la guerre a déjà provoqué de nombreux décès. Il se refuse de même à rire et abandonne la composition de son oeuvre initialement intitulée Le Palais du
Silence. Il explique ainsi à Jacques Durand qu'il ne souhaite pas que l'on joue cette musique «avant que le sort de la France ne soit décidé, car elle ne peut ni rire, ni pleurer, pendant que tant des nôtres se font casser héroïquement la figure!»
En décembre, il daigne enfin se remettre à la composition, mais uniquement pour se livrer à une sorte d'effort de guerre: l'écriture d'une Berceuse Héroïque «pour rendre hommage à S.M. le roi Albert 1er de Belgique et à ses soldats». L'oeuvre existe tout d'abord pour piano, puis pour orchestre, en décembre 1914. Debussy s'est en quelque sorte résigné à
écrire cette oeuvre sur la demande du Daily Telegraph. Le journal anglais s'était en effet attelé, sur l'initiative du romancier britannique Hall Caine, à publier un ouvrage en trois langues (anglais, français et néerlandais), regroupant des contributions de personnalités artistiques, politiques et philosophiques visant à rendre hommage au roi des Belges, Albert Ier, et à ses soldats, pour leur comportement héroïque pendant les premiers jours du conflit. Debussy n'a, malgré tout, pas composé une oeuvre guerrière. Bien au contraire, c'est une oeuvre sombre et inquiète. Les appels de trompette évoquent les combats et introduisent sa seule concession au patriotisme, une citation de l'hymne national belge, La Branbançonne.
Mais le compositeur a avoué avoir eu des difficultés à écrire cette pièce, car, selon lui, «la Brabançonne ne verse aucun héroïsme dans le coeur de ceux qui n'ont pas été élevés «avec»».
Dès cette période, Debussy s'attriste de voir la montée d'une certaine forme d'utilitarisme musical. La lecture de sa correspondance montre qu'il souffre particulièrement de dépression au tournant de l'année 1914-1915. Les événements, cumulés à la mort de sa mère, Victorine, décédée en mars 1915, lui font oublier la musique, voir la rejeter. En décembre, il confie à son ami, Tony Guéritte, les conséquences de la guerre sur sa vie. Il évoque ainsi une incapacité à travailler et précise: «Pour la musique, j'avoue avoir été des mois à ne plus savoir ce que c'était; le son familier du piano m'était devenu odieux [...]».
Quelques jours après la mort de sa mère, la famille Debussy est cette fois-ci confrontée au décès de la mère d'Emma, la seconde épouse du compositeur. Il reprend des activités musicales officiellement dès le mois d'avril. Malgré son dédain pour la musique allemande, en avril 1915, il accepte de réviser des oeuvres de Jean-Sébastien Bach pour les éditions Durand. Bien qu'Allemand, le compositeur trouve encore grâce aux yeux de Debussy. Toutefois, lors de l'achèvement des sonates pour violon et piano, en avril 1917, il précise à Durand que ce travail pour lui a été «décevant», voire ennuyeux. Il a ainsi révisé «quelques centaines de pages où il faut se promener entre haie de mesures sans joie, qui défilent sans pitié, avec toujours le même petit coquin de «sujet» et de «contre-sujet»». Bien que Bach soit reconnu comme un maître universel de la musique, Debussy n'arrive pas à contenir son nationalisme et son rejet de la culture allemande. Dès le mois d'août 1914, sa correspondance est marquée par ce nationalisme, qui jalonne non seulement la pensée et les actes du compositeur, mais aussi son travail.
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Dès le mois d'août 1914, Debussy exprime dans une lettre adressée à Inghelbrecht une forme de dédain pour la musique contemporaine allemande. Il clôture ainsi son courrier par un postscriptum hautement acerbe:
P.S. En 70, ils avaient Richard Wagner.
En 1914, ils n'ont plus que Richard Strauss.
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Au début de la guerre, il sombre dans un anti-germanisme violent qui se traduit par des paroles haineuses. En août il énonce:
Depuis que l'on a nettoyé Paris de tous ses métèques, soit en les fusillant, soit en les expulsant, c'est immédiatement devenu un endroit charmant. Et l'on [n'] y rencontre vraiment plus que le minium de mufles! [...].
Debussy exagère les faits, car il n'y a pas eu d'exécution à cette période, mais sa haine de l'ennemi se traduit bien souvent par des envies de meurtre, d'autant plus que celles-ci ne peuvent être qu'inassouvies puisqu'il ne peut participer physiquement à la guerre.
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En mars 1915, il fait publier un article dans L'Intransigeant intitulé «Enfin, seuls»! En quelques lignes, il résume sa pensée des années de guerre. Il déclare ainsi: «Depuis Rameau, nous n'avons plus de tradition nettement française... Nous avons adopté les procédés d'écriture les plus contraires à notre esprit... et nous étions à la veille de signer des naturalisations bien plus suspectes encore lorsque le canon demanda brusquement la parole!».
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Au début du mois de juillet 1915, Debussy quitte Paris et part en villégiature sur la côte normande, à Pourville, où il séjourne dans une villa prêtée par un ami. Il peut enfin se remettre à l'écriture musicale. Il y débute la composition d'En Blanc et Noir, une pièce pour deux pianos en trois mouvements, qu'il achève le 20 juillet. La première audition a lieu en janvier 1916 chez la princesse de Polignac. Le second mouvement est dédicacé à Jacques Charlot, le neveu de l'éditeur Durand, décédé sur le front le 3 mars 1915. Une fanfare évoque le lieutenant mort sur le champ de bataille. Pour symboliser l'Allemagne, Debussy place un choral luthérien, Ein feste Burg, qui finit cependant pas être supplanté par une mélodie à la française, simple et claire. À la sortie de la pièce En Blanc et Noir, les critiques viennent aussi du côté des Français, notamment de C. Saint-Saëns, qui y voit le pendant musical du cubisme, dont les peintres sont, selon lui, capables d'atrocité. Il n'y a ainsi pas d'union sacrée musicale. Les divisions existantes avant-guerre se poursuivent.
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Avec les Trois Sonates, écrites entre 1915 et 1917, Debussy propose des compositions dans le style qu'il qualifie de «français». Son dessein initial était d'écrire six sonates, à la manière des concerts de Rameau, mais il n'aura pas le temps d'achever son projet. Il souhaite en outre signer ce cycle du nom de «Claude Debussy: musicien français». Il écrit très rapidement la première sonate pour violoncelle et piano, puisqu'il la compose en juillet et août 1915, et la présente à son éditeur comme un hommage «à cette jeunesse de France fauchée stupidement par ces marchands de Kultur».
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En décembre 1915, il écrit une courte oeuvre pour piano, Elégie, et son chant intitulé le Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison. L'oeuvre remporte un franc succès et est jouée plusieurs fois pendant la guerre, mais Debussy a conscience qu'elle peut paraître racoleuse. A Paul Dukas, il confie:
Vous voyez ça d'ici: la maman est morte, Papa est à la guerre; nous n'avons plus de petits sabots; nous aimons mieux du pain que des joujoux; et pour conclure: «La victoire aux enfants de France». Ça n'est pas plus malin que ça! Seulement, ça entre tout droit dans le coeur des citadins.
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À la fin de l'année 1915, il est officiellement diagnostiqué comme souffrant d'un cancer du rectum. Il doit alors subir une intervention chirurgicale qui le force à s'aliter pendant de longues semaines. Son activité artistique est ainsi conséquemment réduite au cours de l'année 1916. Il est en plus attaqué judiciairement par son ancienne épouse, Lilly Texier, qui lui réclame la pension qu'il ne verse plus depuis 6 ans. En septembre et octobre 1916, la famille Debussy se rend en villégiature, au Moulleau, près d'Arcachon.
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Après cette dernière oeuvre qui connaît toujours un franc succès chez les musiciens, il n'écrit que deux petits opus: une courte pièce pour piano, en février-mars 1917, Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon sur un texte de Baudelaire et une composition vocale, Ode à la France, sur un texte de Louis Laloy, qui reste inachevée. Il donne ses deux derniers concerts à Biarritz en septembre 1917. Il est par la suite trop affaibli pour continuer son activité artistique et décède le 25 mars 1918. Enterré tout d'abord dans un caveau provisoire du Père Lachaise, il est ensuite déplacé au cimetière de Passy. Au revers de sa stèle funéraire figure l'épitaphe: «Claude Debussy, musicien français».
Fonte:
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01403762/document
Mais:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy#Death
http://docs.google.com/file/d/1ux4LJwx7EI26k1ipRBCem-j3Lx6kOfL3
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIRHByWXdqcXNiaXc (IMDb)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvFH_6DNRCY
Trechos de The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life And Times Of Dennis Wheatley (2009), de Phil Baker.
To Wheatley, it [WW1] was "the greatest tragedy that has befallen mankind since the Goths and Vandals brought about the Dark Ages by the destruction of the Roman Empire."
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The third of August 1914 was a Bank Holiday, and Wheatley went out on his motorcycle to see Douglas Sharp and Cecil Cross, who were both troopers in the Westminster Dragoons.
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Wheatley, of all people, should have had misgivings about the war. Germans had been kind to him, he had loved them, and he had had close German friends even while he was in England. But he was as caught up in it as the rest. His enthusiasm was inexplicable, he wrote later; but everyone in the crowd was "completely war-mad ... swayed by that most terrible of all evils - mob psychology."
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The excitement died down over the next few days, to be replaced by anxiety among the middle classes. There were fears of a run on the banks, and worries about trade. Wheatley's father had built up a thriving business as the agent for a German mineral water called Moselaris (the Wheatley letterhead at this period proclaims "Moselaris Sparkling Natural Table Water" in a flourish of red lettering). All that was ruined.
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Wheatley attempted to join the Westminster Dragoons so he could be with his friends, but it was necessary to ride. Wheatley lied (he had once been on a donkey at Margate, and that was the limit of his experience) but the truth became embarrassingly obvious when they put him on a horse. The Westminster Dragoons were decimated at Gallipoli in a Crimea-style tragedy of slaughter followed by disease, and he later felt he had been lucky.
Wheatley's enthusiasm for his motorcycle inspired him to reply to an advert asking for motorcycle owners to act as despatch riders in France, but he never received a reply. Once again, this came to seem lucky when he met a man who had been involved in organising the motorcyclists; most of the first batch had been killed or captured in the first few weeks.
The HQ of the "Artist's Rifles" was near the Wheatley business, and Wheatley tried to enlist there, but he was too short, at five foot eight. It tells a grim story about the death rate that within a year or two the Army would form "Bantam" regiments, recruiting men under five feet tall.
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The early days of Wheatley's soldiering were distinctly amateur, and very different from what had been going on in Germany. The men had no uniforms, and would march in motley order wearing bowler hats, straw hats and cloth caps.
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Wheatley was proud of his new uniform, and before long his tendency to dandyism came into its own.
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Several of Wheatley's fellow officers were memorable, like "Frothy" Hurst, so called because his violent temper made him froth at the mouth. One of the oddest was Wheatley's battery commander, Major William "Shitty Bill" Inglis, "a very queer individual." Wheatley believed Inglis to be "a sexual maniac", a man whose drive for women became a "pathological abnormality": "the way he used to eye any fresh young woman who was introduced to him was positively nauseating."
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Despite being a married man in his mid-forties and a commanding officer, Inglis would go out with second lieutenants Wheatley, still only seventeen, and Bertie Davis, eighteen, with the aim of picking up young women. This was unprofessional, to say the least, as Wheatley realised at the time. Their favourite hunting ground was the long slope up Richmond Hill, leading towards Richmond Park, with its superb view and its old pubs. In those days it was thronged by young people from all over London; "a moving crowd as thick as one would see on the Parade at any popular holiday resort."
Picking up women was easy with an officer's uniform and the excitement caused by the war, with its suspension of normal standards. Many of the crowd had come with the intention of getting off with somebody. At one point a policeman looking over the crowd said to Major Inglis - one uniform to another, as it were - "There's miles of it, sir. Miles of it, just for the asking."
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If the girls were agreeable then after drinks they might go to Richmond Park and disport themselves in the grass. Wheatley kept a list of women he'd had relations with between 1914 and 1921, most of them probably prostitutes. Some of the women in Wheatley's list have ticks beside them, and the end of the list he scores himself forty out of seventy, corresponding to forty ticks out of seventy women.
It seems likely these ticks mean full intercourse.
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Wheatley was growing so bored with horses and artillery and training that in November 1915 he volunteered to join the Royal Flying Corps. "One doesn't fetch horses in the RFC," he told Hilda, having no idea that the pilots' average life expectancy would be around two weeks.
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Wheatley's main recreation was reading, but more communally it was singing; the officers had an upright piano. They liked the indecent songs of the period such as "Bollocky Bill the Sailor", "Charlotte the Harlot", "Abdul El Bulbul Emir", and "Never let a sailor get his hand above your knee." Few of these have aged well, and "She wouldn't do just what I wanted her to (so I socked her in the eye)" less than most.
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The idea of an amoral woman making her way in the world fascinated him, like Georgina Thursby in his own Roger Brook books, or Amber St. Clare in Kathleen Winsor's once controversial bodice-ripper, Forever Amber, which he owned.
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As we shall see, the degradation of women was a highly charged subject in Wheatley's imagination, whether as sadistic threats in the thriller fiction, orgiastic rituals in the black magic books, anxieties within his own family, or even national prospects in his wartime defence papers. This was so fascinatingly awful that it could never be allowed to happen, but the possibility always had to be raised as fulsomely as possible.
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Compared to the horror taking place in France, Wheatley was having an absurdly pleasant time. The Battle of the Somme had now started, with 57,000 British casualties on the first day, 19,000 of them dead.
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Two deaths hit Wheatley closer to home around this time: his grandfather, William Yeats Baker, died in August, and Wheatley's old best friend, Douglas Sharp, died in Egypt from blood poisoning after a camel bite. Far from glorious, Sharp's death was still sustained on active service, which seems to be the serious point in the otherwise comic poem Wheatley wrote about the two of them and the two girls glimpsed in Streatham.
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It became increasingly clear that at last Wheatley was going to get to France, but it was an incomparably less exciting prospect than it had seemed four years earlier.
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Next morning, Wheatley took the train from Victoria to Southampton. And the day after that, August 8th 1917, he finally left for France.
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Wheatley had gone over to France with a friend from Luton, Captain Colsell. They were camped just outside Le Havre, where the evening streets were full of men in khaki and French prostitutes.
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Wheatley went to the 36th Division Ammunition Column at Vlamertinghe. These were landscapes he never forgot, and years later he was drawn back to make a motoring tour, which he wrote up in a leather bound 'Motor Trips' notebook from the Times Book Club.
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On the road from Ypres he remembered "up this road had to go every ounce of food and ammunition ... an unending stream of traffic never ceasing day or night as thick as Piccadilly at midday and the Boche never ceased to shell it as he knew that it was the only road by which supplies could be got up ... the sides were lined with a thousand and one broken motors carts lorries waggons just thrown over the side so that the stream might keep moving."
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Wheatley wrote to Hilda that on his first night "a German 8in [shell] landed quite near and the bits flew through the tent in which I was sleeping, and covered everything in mud" and then a few nights later (in his autobiography he remembers it as the first night, conflating several events) they were bombed. A bomb landed twenty yards from the Officers Mess, and on running out to see what had happened Wheatley saw his first dead man, his body twisted beneath a wagon where he had dived for shelter.
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Wheatley's first six weeks in France were his worst, although he was grateful he had escaped the fate of the infantry at Passchendaele.
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Wheatley was put in charge of the 4th Corps ammunition dump at the ruined Somme village of Ytres, and looked after it through September 1917. A railway wagon would arrive each night, and Wheatley would supervise the placing and camouflaging of the unloaded ammunition.
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Their destination was the village of St. Simon, which they reached via the small town of Ham. It was at Ham that Napoleon III had been imprisoned, but made his escape disguised as a workman; escaping monarchs always caught Wheatley's imagination.
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Wheatley had minor discipline problems, but he was backed up by a solidly professional Sergeant-Major, a Boer War veteran, and over the next ten days, having lost touch with his Major, he was effectively in charge of around a thousand men, including stragglers and even deserters.
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Wheatley's bronchitis may have been aggravated by the presence of gas, since the Germans were using gas shells.
[...] Wheatley's army career had not been glorious, but he had done his duty; no less, if no more. He was well-liked by the men, seemingly because he was cheerful and humane.
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His leave got him into London four days after the Armistice, with the "mafficking"-type celebrations still going strong. People roamed the streets waving Union Jacks and singing, and great bonfires were lit in Trafalgar Square, damaging the lions at the foot of Nelson's Column. These bonfires were still alight when Wheatley arrived on the scene.
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Leafing through the French Fascist paper Gringoire, George Orwell noticed no less than thirty eight advertisements for clairvoyants. He remembered this when he was trying to fathom the relationship between occultism and right wing politics. For one thing, occultism replaces the idea of progress and the untidy reality of change with a timeless and reassuring vision of eternal myth, instead of real history, as if nothing essential had changed since the days of ancient Egypt. Secondly, occultism and fascism share a sense of spurious elitism, esoteric knowledge being the dominion of a special few and the guarantee of their superiority. More than that, it offers a transcendence of ordinary life, and an idealist fantasy of pure mental power without normal economic or social restraints.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIS0pJbHFIVVZkXzQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjKkMzziP2Q
http://www.denofgeek.com/27687/a-look-back-at-dennis-wheatleys-black-magic-novels
