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(excerpted from)
BLOOD GARDEN
AN ELEGY
Introduction to Blood Garden
My father, who was well old enough to have been my grandfather, was one of the first Americans to enter the First World War. A soldier of the regular Army’s 1st Division, he was part of the American Expeditionary Force, led by General Blackjack Pershing, which arrived in France in the summer of 1917. His career in the military had already taken him to the border wars between Mexico and the United States, where he fought the last hostile outburst of Poncho Villa. When he landed in France with his best friend from home, he was seventeen years old.
Sigfreid Sassoon, one of the gifted poets of the Great War generation, asked Have you forgotten yet? Almost a century later, we might answer yes and no. Only a few hundred veterans are alive worldwide; my father, dead 32 years, would have turned 103 in January, 2005. Those who survived the conflict were not encouraged to offer witness. In fact, the opposite was almost always the case as men returned to their lives with no way to express their experience. Ghastly nightmares he called night horses were all that surfaced of my father’s life in the trenches, and he suffered them until the day he died.
While the truths of the war for many remain blurred by time, we have other ways to remember—left as we are with genetic memory passed down through generations, just as surely as abuse within a family. Its effects permeate subtly yet deeply; the trauma, from every perspective, whether trench soldier, or member of his family, or the families of those he is ordered to kill, is intractable.
My research on the war itself, conducted over five years, included histories, novels, letters, memoirs, films, as well as poetry and prose by contemporaneous writers. I returned to Homer, the Greek plays, and to Shakespeare for classical insights on an ancient subject. I looked carefully, too, at cultural and social trends and transformations of the first two decades of the 20th century. My deepest intention is to demonstrate that at the molten core of this unique era was an event of the most staggering proportions, an event that spawned every human-made tragedy since—chemical warfare and genocide among them—yet one that has been eclipsed, perhaps, by the very progeny it produced.
I often was asked the subject of this book as it progressed, and when I responded World War I, many would reply Don’t you mean World War II?, as if the first war hadn’t existed, or at least not in the same way. As the ultimate pastoral irony, the “war to end all wars” brought into higher relief the absurdity of armed conflict, and at the same time created a grotesque paradigm marked by a level of violence and cynicism from which we have yet to recover.
Most crucial, perhaps, to our understanding of the intractable human issues of war and suffering are the eerie parallels to the socio-political landscape evolving today—ignorance and intolerance harnessed once again in the name of freedom and national pride, and the specter of fear manipulated to resemble the enemy.
Given that suffering is devastatingly inclusive, the following narratives are meant to reflect experience of combatants and non-combatants from all sides of the conflict.
Have you forgotten yet?
—Sigfried Sassoon
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This was the forest primeval, Milton’s fresh woods and pastures
anew, greenwood of myth and legend. Motherland, Fatherland,
Arcadia—all were being worked into a dead ocean of mud.
Almost nightfall, and though he does not see the doe
and her two young feeding—mute, indistinguishable
from what surrounds them—flesh, stone—he knows they are there,
just as knows the presence of water. Soon this certainty
will be effaced, and irony will takes its place.
~
The worst cases gibbered so violently each part of the body
seemed inhabited by its own demon demanding to get out.
Men stsricken during the months at the Somme were sent
to a rest station in Mondicourt, others to field hospitals.
The lucky ones were sent back to England, to Craiglockhart,
where nurses floated in and out of sparkling light from
high windows and the food was hot and plentiful, where
a gramophone blared John Peel to block out the men’s screams.
He has stopped clawing his mouth; thus begins
his rehabilitation. First, he is instructed in the homely art
of weaving, the loom a kind of primer for the small boy
he has become, nurse standing behind him to guide his hands,
warp to woof, with comforting regularity, a soothing message
to his excitable limbs. In a few days, after being helped
with his breakfast porridge, a small piece of cloth is placed
on his lap, pierced with a few large stitches from a saddle needle
and heavy thread. The nurse croons, wearily but kindly,
that he can do this too if he can just hold still. More
days of practice and now he is brought outdoors
to the corn field to help harvest the crop, and the next day
to the cow barn and shown how to grasp the teat firmly
but gently, and then, after a time, when he gets the milk
to flow, he learns again how to hoist the rifle just so
with both hands steady, and then to kill again.
~
Italian soldiers prayed to the Madonna for an American limb—
the farmer, for an enlarged sole to walk on plowed soil, or an arm
to grasp the reins of his horse, grips for turning a cream separator,
or a hook to hold the handle a plow. For the salesman, a Sunday arm,
when he needed to look his best. For those who’d lost an ear,
a model ear and jar of paste to match a man’s complexion.
Those whose faces were disfigured were sometimes sent to
rural settlements so that they could holiday together.
But masks give the greatest comfort—portrait masks—
so folks at home can better face the returning wound.
~
As the landscape turned melancholic, mysterious,
he knew he was near Asnabrüch, his home.
Villages of whitewashed, half-timbered houses
capped with thatched roofs, rushing streams banked
with bog myrtle, old lime trees in mottled abundance.
He’d struggled with his pack and rifle, so heavy
he could barely manage to keep them aloft. Two nights past,
on sentry, he’d listened to the unburied dead belch
and hiss, too far in no-man’s-land to retrieve.
When the French sent up a star shell, a headless corpse
jerked as if startled by the sudden illumination.
At last, the familiar latch, and at the top of the stairs,
fragrance of potato cakes, his mother and sister busy
with their Saturday cooking. A jar of whortleberries
squats on the worn wooden table. In the afternoon, he
sits under an aegis of the chestnut tree at his beloved
beer garden. The sun glints with purpose through
the branches onto his clean hand holding the mug,
and he can think of nothing but returning to the front,
to what he understands—death and stink, the mind-numbing
boredom, to the only life he now can live.
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