Areopagus Volume XXIII

Welcome one and all to the twenty third volume of Areopagus, coming to you today on the 104th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War. On this most solemn of days I thought it might be appropriate to write about that conflict and its fallout.

Acts of remembrance can become abstract when disconnected from the thing they were supposed to commemorate, while the cold facts of history may distance us too much from the humanity of it all. Art and culture, however, can bring to life what has long since passed. I hope this week's Areopagus, if only for a moment, might do such a thing.

(For those new to the Areopagus - it isn't usually quite like this. You can read previous issues here to get an idea of what to expect in future.)

I - Classical Music

Pastoral Symphony (2nd Movement)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1922)

Why this piece?

I've included here only the second movement of the Pastoral Symphony, largely because of its lonesome and faintly (though intentionally) out-of-tune trumpet call, but I thoroughly recommend listening to the entire thing. It is better felt that way.

But why Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony at all? It's not an overtly dramatic piece of music; far from it. We do not the hear the thunderous drums of triumph, nor the sorrowful strings of defeat, nor the crashing cymbals of battle. The music itself doesn't really sound like war at all. But I think it's precisely this gentle, unsentimental tranquillity which makes the Pastoral Symphony so powerful. While much war music over the centuries has been either outright celebratory or, increasingly, has forced the listener to deal with war's destruction, horrors, and evils, Vaughan Williams' evocation of rural lands invites us to contemplate. I think this is a suitable way to deal with the subject.

There was, after all, a very literal sense in which the First World War destroyed the countryside. Those quiet Flemish fields once rolling with the grain that fed the great northern cities for centuries were obliterated by mechanised war. Hillsides turned into craters and forests became graveyards of blackened stumps. Cities were razed, of course, but it was along the innocuous slopes and solitary vales that those dreadful trenches stretched, and over cornfields that artillery boomed, churning up the soil and leaving the earth unrecognisably scarred.

And so the Pastoral Symphony, with its mellow tones and slow pace (reminiscent, perhaps, of the plough and the yoke) lead the listener to reflect on what was lost. While something like Britten's War Requiem asks us to face the interminable terrors of war, Vaughan Williams approaches the theme obliquely. Only in the faint notes of regret, of soft tragedy, like birdsong caught in the wind, do we hear anything like a dirge for the dead. Otherwise we are drawn to imagine a quiet country life: simple, though not foolish; innocent, but not ignorant; peaceful, transient.

Given that Vaughan Williams was inspired by the French (rather than the English) countryside, I chose to combine his Pastoral Symphony with a landscape called Meadow by Alfred Sisley, one of the original Impressionists.

What style is it?

The tradition of 'pastoral art' (i.e. referring to or based in a rural setting) is an old one. It has particularly literary roots, for writers would first write about shepherds and nypmhs before moving onto greater, weightier themes. Torquato Tasso wrote Aminta before Jerusalem Delivered, for example. There's also a long history of pastoral music, from Beethoven's own Pastoral Symphony to something like Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, which I've mentioned before in the Areopagus. By framing his as a war piece Vaughan Williams plays a remarkable sleight of hand, subverting our expectations and lending the typically timless vision of bucolic peace a moving fragility.

And so the pastoral work with which Vaughan William's symphony has most in common is probably the Eclogues and Georgics, written by the great Roman poet Virgil in the middle of the 1st century B.C. Virgil's poems are - at first glance - mere fancies, delightfully told, of country life. But, set against the background of civil unrest across Roman Italy and a wave of economic turmoil in which smallholders and local farmers were forcibly removed from their farms, a more tragic impression emerges.

Who was Ralph Vaughan Williams and why did he write the Pastoral Symphony?

Ralph Vaughan Williams is - perhaps - England's greatest modern composer. He was born in 1872 and enjoyed a long career at the forefront of 20th century music. In that modern era, freed from the constraints of previous generations, Vaughan Williams carved out a distinctive place for himself. Rather than pursuing the experimental trend of composers like Stravinsky or the Impressionist luxuriousness of a Ravel, Vaughan Williams looked to English folk music for inspiration, translating old tunes into symphonies and bringing an older vision of England to the modern world.

Despite being forty two years old when the First World War broke out, Vaughan Williams volunteered for service and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as an ambulance driver. And that striking trumpet in the second movement of the Pastoral Symphony was actually inspired by a moment during the war, when Vaughan Williams heard a practicing bugler who played several notes out of tune.

II - Historical Figure

W.N. Hodgson

A different sort of poet

Who was he?

William Noel Hodgson was born in January, 1893, part of a generation right across the European continent who could never have known, when they were growing up, what awaited them. The fourth and youngest son of an Anglican bishop, Hodgson could hardly have had a more "English" upbringing. He was a successful rower at his school in Durham and went on to study classics at Oxford University, where he was still studying when war broke out in 1914. Like so many of his contemporaries, Hodgson immediately volunteered. He fought with distinction at the Battle of Loos in July 1915 and was awarded the Military Cross after holding a trench for nearly two days without reinforcements. He also became a successful writer; Hodgson wrote for a number of magazines back in England about life in the trenches. And, under the pseudonym Edward Melbourne, he published poetry. It was on the 1st July 1916 that Hodgson died, caught by machinegun fire, along with so many thousands of others on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

Why is he interesting?

I came across the work of Hodgson in a book of poetry given to me by a friend. In school we studied the poetry of the First World War, but what we were given was almost exclusively the work of despair. Poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are by far the most famous war poets in Britain; their work is about the inconceivable violence, the futility, the brutality, the injustice, the cruelty, and the horrors. I never knew that anybody ever felt differently about the war.

But Hodgson was different. We can't say that he found in the war the sense of duty that so pervaded Rupert Brooke's famous sonnets, but Hodgon's poetry is still unrecognisable from the harrowing verses of popular war poetry. And yet Hodgson must evade any accusations of "idealism" or "naivity", as are often thrown at poets like Brooke. He saw action. He lived in the trenches. He fought. And still, through all, he never lost his steady composure and sense of dignity. As in the final stanza of Ave Mater:

I am content - our life is but a trust

From the great hand of God, and if I keep

The immortal Treasure clean of mortal rust

Against His claim, 'tis well and let me sleep

Among the not dishonourable dust.

Yet Hodgson was not an idealist; rather, it seems, he was a realist. At no point in his poetry does Hodgson speak of heroism, of any redeeming romance about the war. He saw it for what it was. Just consider these lines, from A Field:

Here sorrow has no beauty, death no greatness.
Where the dumb fields from Heaven to Heaven run
In a dull poverty of desolateness
Under a blind sky...

But he never gives way to despair and bitterness; his verses never dwell on the supernatural evil of mechanised war. Rather, he reads like a young man who had accepted his fate - this hellish war - and found in it something greater, even sublime. In Release Hodgson matches the pity of war with what he felt to be a deeper truth revealed by its violence. There is nothing celebratory here, but nor is it directly condemnatory. Through Hodgson's eyes we see the First World War in a different way:

We that have seen the strongest
Cry like a beaten child,
The sanest eyes unholy,
The cleanest hands defiled,
We that have known the heart-blood
Less than the lees of wine,
We that have seen men broken,
We know that man is divine.

In the end there's no better way to convey Hodgson's striking personality than by sharing his most famous poem. Before Action was published back in England on 30th July, 1916, just two days before Hodgson himself would die on the opening dawn of the bloody Battle of the Somme. Some have seen in it a premonition of death; others that Hodgson was simply ready for what seemed like an inevitable fate, writing with a humbling mixture of clarity and nobility. Without any trace of patriotic fervour or exculpatory sentiments, without any overriding sense of purpose, and yet without bitterness, without anger, Hodgson lays out his final, moving rhymes:

By all the glories of the day

And the cool evening's benison

By that last sunset touch that lay

Upon the hills when day was done,

By beauty lavishly outpoured

And blessings carelessly received,

By all the days that I have lived

Make me a soldier, Lord.

By all of all man's hopes and fears

And all the wonders poets sing,

The laughter of unclouded years,

And every sad and lovely thing;

By the romantic ages stored

With high endeavour that was his,

By all his mad catastrophes

Make me a man, O Lord.

I, that on my familiar hill

Saw with uncomprehending eyes

A hundred of thy sunsets spill

Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

Ere the sun swings his noonday sword

Must say good-bye to all of this; –

By all delights that I shall miss,

Help me to die, O Lord.

III - Painting

We Are Making a New World

Paul Nash (1918)

Why this painting?

Imagine a painting with the title We Are Making a New World. What does it look like? Probably not this. But Paul Nash was right. The First World War represents something of a watershed moment, a hard-line between two different eras. By every metric - cultural, economic, religious, artistic, demographic - Europe was never the same again. This painting captures all of that.

Nash's Cubist tendencies - strikingly geometric lines and hard blocks of colour, especially in the skyscape - lend a futuristic atmosphere to this scene. There's even a metallic sharpness about the landscape, while the grimy colours of the mangled, muddy hillsides are more reminiscent of industrial waste than nature. And the sun feels almost too bright. Rather than bringing warmth and fresh light to a world emerging from night, its solid whiteness is artificial; a sterile factory lamp rather than the golden star of the open sky. Indeed, its rays, usually represented in art as gilded threads and soothing shrouds, are now eerily reminiscent of searchlights probing the earth for targets.

But there's something else going on here. The stark shadows, those deep blacks in the trenches, the unnaturally bright highlights on the dead trees - they give us the impression that a bomb has just gone off, that we are witnessing a moment frozen in time at the precise second of explosion. Perhaps this is not a day-time scene, then, but one of a night whose barren landscape has been briefly illuminated by the searing light of bombs.

All that, we may suppose, was Nash's intention. It's a relatively simple painting when you look it, and that's why I find it so effective. To see nature not only destroyed but depicted so strangely tells us that there has never been anything like this before.

Who was Paul Nash?

Paul Nash (1889-1946) had studied at the Slade School of Art in London for a year before diving into the world of art and enjoying some minor success when war broke out. He volunteered for home service and, when he wasn't guarding the Tower of London, spent his time making sketches. Nash was sent to the Western Front in early 1917 and only narrowly avoided death when broken ribs had forced him back to England on sick leave - his entire unit was killed less than a week after his departure.

While recovering in hospital Nash completed some sketches he had started in France. They proved popular. So Nash received an appointment from the War Propaganda Bureau and became a war artist - one of many painters sent by the British government to the front lines as an official observer with a mandate to paint. But any notions of propaganda were banished when Nash returned to France - the landscape had been utterly and, he thought, irrevocably destroyed. This excerpt from a letter to his wife should suffice to convey Nash's new intention:

The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. They alone plunge overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave, and cast up on it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.

Nash would go on to become one of the most influential forces of Modernist painting in England, and though he surely ranks highly among the ranks of the landscapes artists, one can never call his paintings beautiful - they aren't supposed to be. While Claude Lorrain might melt our hearts with his Arcadian views and Caspar David Friedrich might stir our souls, Paul Nash captivates, compels, and chills us.

What style is it?

We Are Making a New World brings together several of the trends that dominated European art at the time. It was nascent Cubism in particular upon which Nash drew, with its increasingly abstract shapes and sense of unfolding, moving, machine-like geometry. (His other war paintings are even more Cubist than this, it must be said).

But this painting in particular brings together the style and substance of those experimental artistic movements at the beginning of the 20th century. For though artists had long since moved away from purely representational art, from art merely inspired by the Renaissance, it was the cultural and economic catastrophe of the First World War that truly pushed artists - not just painters but all creative voices - into what seems like a total disillusionment with the past, usually resulting in either an attempt to craft wholly different futures or in rejection of reality altogether.

And so we may say that Nash's first great painting was quite literally making a new (artistic) world. For Nash would go on, like many of his Cubist contemporaries, to become a Surrealist painter. That movement was, more than most, a direct reaction to the First World War.

IV - Architecture

War Memorials

From the soaring white spires of the Canadian War Memorial at Vimy to Sir Edwin Lutyens' sombre tower of brick arches at Thiepval, the battlefields of France and Belgium host an endless procession of war memorials, each striving in their own way to commemorate, to teach, to recall, to endure.

War memorials in the past had largely been triumphal; they were monuments to victory. Even the great stone reliefs of Assyria and Egypt, carved thousands of years ago, record the glories of conquering kings over their enemies. But the memorials of the First World War, scattered and clustered across the former battlefields of Belgium and France, are altogether different. Their sheer number is part of that - evidence of some great catastrophe. But their design is also different, stripped of ornament and anything superfluous, unbedecked by celebratory decoration. Even their shapes - large, imposing, sombre - evoke mourning rather than victory.

These memorials also call to mind the fact that "art" is rarely as dissociated from purpose as galleries might lead us to imagine. Indeed, even calling these memorials "works of art" might seem inappropriate. But why, then, do we gather those Assyrian reliefs in museums and called them ancient art? For these monuments are works of art. To call something art does not demean it, and art is - always has been - a route to understanding for humans. It is what transforms the world of pure fact into one of meaning. It is what helps us to make sense of the world, in this case to salvage something from the desolation of war.

But in writing this I'm reminded of something the great Stefan Zweig once wrote. When he visisted Ypres in the 1920s Zweig was shocked by the 'industry' that had descended on the town - an industry of war tourism. He was appalled by the organised tours which whisked people round like they were visiting museums or galleries, with lunch and dinner booked, every second of the day catalogued and planned. It was the gift shops which made him most indignant; they sold trinkets and souvenirs made from discarded ammunition and spent bullets. As he said about the masses of tourists arriving every day:

...a coming and going of such intensity constitutes a serious threat to the respect such environs inspire, and in the midst of the emotion felt, one experiences a sense of revolt against an organisation far too perfect, too precise.

But Zweig was taken by the Menin Gate, completed in 1927 to commemorate all the soldiers who had died around Ypres during the war and whose remains could not be found - 56,000 of them in all, whose names are inscribed on the gate.

A monument dedicated then not to victory but to the dead, to the victims, without the least distinction, to the Australians, to the English, to the Hindus and the Muslims, whose memory is perpetuated to an equal extent, with letters of identical size, in the same stone, so all are united in the same death. No portrait of the king, no mention of victory, no homage to the great generals.

See, whereas the triumphal arches of Ancient Rome (and those made in imperial imitation, such as the Parisian Arc de Triomphe) are monuments to the glory of emperors and commanders, of victory over a vanquished foe, the Menin Gate uses the motif of the arch in a totally different way. Here, as in the other memorials pictured above, at Vimy and Thiepval and in every other less-monolithic memorial, glory was not part of its purpose.

But not everyone loved the Menin Gate. The poet Siegfried Sassoon, who fought in the First World War, was one of them. Here's what he wrote about it:

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,

the unheroic dead who fed the guns?

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.

Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;

Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,

The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride

'Their name liveth for ever', the Gateway claims.

Was ever an immolation so belied

as these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

Which may draw us to consider what Zweig felt to be the ultimate monument of the war, a monument against war, in his words: the ruins of the great cloth hall of Ypres. This was a 13th century masterpiece of Gothic architecture, a vast civic building testament to the wealth and prestige of the great northern cities. It had stood for centuries, unblemished, the physical and economic and cultural heart of the town, only to be shattered by war. When Zweig visited Ypres the late 1920s it stood as it had been left by the bombs: in ruins. For him this was the ultimate memorial, not something specifically built to commemorate the war but something it left behind, a discomforting reminder of its brutality.

The great cloth hall of Ypres has since been rebuilt, brick for brick. Other scars do still remain, such as the vast Lochnagar Mine Crater, which without explanation must surely seem like a natural formation. It isn't.

And yet nature has, despite what Paul Nash feared when he returned to France in 1917, largely reclaimed its domain from the wastes of No-Man's Land. What remains, however, and for which nothing can truly prepare you, are the endless tombstones of the battlefields, arrayed in glittering white rows all across the land.

V - Rhetoric

Jingoism

This word is often bandied about in reference to those years and months that led up to the First World War. What does it mean?

Well, despite its rather jolly sound, jingoism conceals a dark and altogether ancient trouble. It is a particularly militaristic, aggressive, and naive form of nationalism. Europe in the opening years of the 20th century was full of it: a sort of bellicose rhetoric which combined deep national pride with the idea of war as a "great game" set against the backdrop of industrial-scale arms production, a contest of military and political oneupmanship between burgeoning European states which nobody ever really thought would end in all-out war.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was really just the spark that lit a bonfire which had been slowly building up for a decades, a bonfire in which the old European world would burn up completely - the great multicultural empires of the Ottomans and Austro-Hungary, for example - and from which the continent would never recover. But, in 1914, who could have foreseen that? It's too easy and too simple to call them naive, but eye-witness accounts of the fanfare that greeted the declaration of war are striking.

It was, at first, a war that seemingly everybody - not just the politicians but ordinary people across Europe - wanted to fight. Here are Stefan Zweig's memories of that fateful day in 1914:

The declaration of war in Vienna meant a kind of ectasy, a state of drunkennes. People had only known about war through books, they had not thought it possible that such a thing could happened again in these civilised times. Now, suddenly, there it was, and since no one had any idea just how horrible, how murderous it would be, the imagination suddenly aroused in these men brimming with infantile curiosity was inflamed, transforming war into a romantic adventure. Vast hordes streamed from houses and businesses into the streets to form enthusiastic columns; suddenly flags appeared, no one knew where from; there was music, people sang in chorus, cheered and shouted with joy, no one knew why. The young men massed before the offices to enlist. They had only one fear: to be called up too late and miss the great adventure.

And though the specific conditions of 19th century Europe conspired to create a perfect storm of jingoism, we would be well amiss to call this sort of militaristic nationalism a modern invention; it's as old as human civilisation itself.

One of the foremost examples - and one that led, for all involved, to tragedy - was the Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415 B.C. Politicians pushed for this great military excursion. Statesmen gave great and lengthy speeches about the glories and riches that awaited them. Alcibiades in particular was guilty of this, a man whose ambition for Athenian conquest knew no bounds. He was popular and his popularity showed, for soon enough the Athenian people had been whipped up into a hurricance of martial zeal. Plutarch shares the striking image of men, young and old, drawing maps of Sicily in the dust of the city's streets, playing out the future war in their minds and supposing in what order they would conquer the island's great cities. Only a few years later the entire Athenian invading force had been captured or killed, its leaders executed, its navy burned, and any hope of an Athenian victory in the Peloponnesian War (ongoing at the time with Sparta) dashed.

A word is devalued when its definition becomes overextended. Jingoism doesn't simply refer to any sort of militaristic nationalism. Rather, its central quality is that profound excitement which Zweig described so eloquently, which Plutarch evoked on the streets of Athens, of youthful passion exploited by ignorance and patriotism fanned by the flames of ambition.

VI - Writing

Poetry in Wartime

Touching again on what I wrote at the beginning of this week's Areopagus, I wish to convey just how powerful "creative" writing can be. I use the word creative cautiously there, because I think it rather underplays the world of poetry, of prose, of drama, and of those works which can't quite be called non-fiction.

Even more than the painters and the composers it is through the poets of the First World War that we truly begin to glimpse, even minutely, what it might have been like. For many of these poems were scribbled down in the very mud of the trenches, even beneath the ghastly symphony of falling artillery.

Not all, however. And so we begin with Rupert Brooke, known as "the handsomest man in the country", a living emblem of Edwardian England. His sonnet The Soldier was an instant hit when published in 1915. Brooke died of sepsis from a mosquito bite that year, just off the coast of Greece and en route to Gallipolli.

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Now, starkly contrasted with Brooke, we can read what Wilfried Owen surmised when reflecting on the propaganda he had been fed at the start of the war. This poem is called Dulce et Decorum est, written in the thick of action in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

(Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori translates from Latin to: it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country)

And then there are poets such as Edward Thomas, who addressed the war less directly, alluding to its consequences rather than the conflict itself. Like the aforementioned Vaughan Williams he was old enough to avoid any obligation to serve. But Edward Thomas enlisted and died in action on Easter Monday, 1917. Here's what he wrote two years before that.

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

Others, like Hamish Mann, had little time to dress up their thoughts and feelings in allegory, nor to compose complex prosody. As in The Soldier, which rings with disarming honesty:

'Tis strange to look on a man that is dead

As he lies in the shell-swept hell,

And to think that the poor black battered corpse

Once lived like you and was well.

'Tis stranger far when you come to think

That you may be soon like him...

And it’s Fear that tugs at your trembling soul,

A Fear that is weird and grim!

And it is also to Hamish Mann that I'll give the final, simple word; a thought expressed in hurried verse, reminding us perhaps of what W.N. Hodgson concluded about his fate. Mann, too, did not survive the war. He died at the Battle of Arras in 1917.

Let memories of me be brave and true:

I would not like to think the Life I gave

Had brought you woe. Be proud, not bent

With gloom, as though some frightful shame had spent

Its fury on your house.

I die... What then?

I am but one ‘mongst countless finer men.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

And now, to end, I wish to share these, the first-hand experiences of somebody who fought in the First World War. Though much can be said about and learned from art (whether music, painting, poetry, or architecture) there comes a point at which the thing itself, devoid of art's transmutative power, is called for.

So here are some excerpts from what Private Donald Fraser of the Canadian Expeditionary Force wrote in his journal during spare moments in 1916:

Tonight we had our introduction to dug-out life. The dug-outs were small, damp and cold and overrun with rats. It is needless to add once a fighting soldier leaves England he practically sleeps in his clothes till he gets back there again. Taking off our boots, there were three of us in the dug-out, we lay down between our waterproof sheet and overcoat and snatched as many winks as we could. There is a change of sentry every two hours, so the chances are you get wakened up between the shifts, either by your mate getting up or coming in or being wakened by mistake for guard. To interrupt your prospective slumbers, sometimes, the order to "stand to" for the night comes along which means you have to hold yourseif in readiness for eventualities, in other words, you have to be wide awake with equipment on, etc. An order to "stand to" is equivalent to expecting an attack. Many a time we wished those attacks would materialize so that we could get a half decent sleep afterwards. At sunrise and sunset there is a "stand to" every day, these being the times the enemy is liable to come over. When the order is given everyone is supposed to get out of his dug-out; get his equipment on and have his rifle handy. "Stand down" is usually passed along half an hour to an hour afterwards, when the day shifts start. In the daytime two or three guards are considered sufficient to keep watch.

...

We have been out all day fixing up the communication trench which has collapsed owing to the recent rains. From now on "Via Gellia" keeps us busy when out on rest. The weather had changed completely, raining almost daily and the ground is in a sodden condition. For want of sunshine and wind, it is impossible for the ground to dry up and after a while we learn that it is useless trying to keep the trenches passable. The rain loosens the earth and the sides cave in. With additional rain the bottom of the trenches become liquid mud which defies all efforts at drainage. We shovel, shovel and keep on shovelling but it is of no avail, the trench absolutely refuses to clean up. It is a hard proposition, the mud sticks to the shovel and after vigorous efforts to dislodge it, it only comes off to fall into the trench again. In time the bank becomes so high that we cannot fling the mud up so we have to get up on top and in a crouching attitude shove the mud further back, terracing it so as to ease the ground pressure and keep it from sliding down. In wet weather it is stupendous work and is about as hopeless as shovelling water. When a little progress is made posts are driven into the trench and are strengthened by being connected by wire with smaller posts on the parados. The sides are now revetted with corrugated iron which is placed behind the posts being kept in position by them and thus keep the sides from caving in. The pressure of earth, however, is often so great that it bulges the corrugated iron or snaps the posts. One can imagine, therefore, the enormous amount of revetting that is required and the immensity of work in connection with it.

...

As zero hour approached I glanced around looking for signs to charge. The signal came like a bolt from the blue. Right on the second the barrage opened with a roar that seemed to split the heavens. Looking along the right, about forty yards away, I caught the first glimpse of a khaki-clad figure climbing over the parapet. It was the start of the first wave, the 27th Battalion. More Winnipeg men followed. Then glancing back over the parados I saw Sgt. Teddy Torrens rise up from a shell hole and wave his platoon forward. So quick, however, were the men of the 31stl on the heels of the 27th that when I turned my head, those of my platoon beside Sgt. Hunter were actually up and over the parapet with a good five to ten yards start ahead of me. In a hurry to overtake them and carry the line as even as possible, I was up and over in a trice, running into shell holes, down and up for about twenty yards, until I found that if I continued this procedure and rate, loaded up as I was, I would be exhausted before I could get to grips with Fritz.

It was at this juncture that instinct told me to avoid the shell holes and move along the edges. I raised my head for the first time and looked at the Hun trench, and to my astonishment, saw Heinie after Heinie ranging along the line, up on the firing step, blazing wildly into us, to all appearances unmolested. Seriousness and grim determination took possession of me as I stared hard and menacing at those death-dealing rifles. Strange to say they all seemed to be pointing at me, an illusion but nevertheless that is how it appeared. My eyes were for a moment glued a little ahead to the right on Sgt. Hunter, who was leading with little Lt. Newlands beside him. He appeared a picture heroic in the extreme; his rush had dwindled to practically a walk, and he strode forward with body erect, rifle in the forefront, a target for innumerable shots. As I was fast levelling up on the left, it seemed a thousand miracles that he was not laid low.

My wits sharpened when it burnt deeply into me that death was in the offing. At this stage an ever changing panorama of events passed quickly before my gaze, and my mind was vividly impressed. The air was seething with shells. Immediately above, the atmosphere was cracking with a myriad of machine-gun bullets, startling and disconcerting in the extreme. Bullets from the enemy rifles were whistling and swishing around my ears in hundreds, that to this day I cannot understand how anyone could have crossed that inferno alive. As I pressed forward with eyes strained, to the extent of being half-closed, I expected and almost felt being shot in the stomach All around our men were falling, their rifles loosening from their grasp. The wounded, writhing in their agonies, struggled and toppled into shell holes for safety from rifle and machine-gun fire, though in my path the latter must have been negligible, for a slow or even quick traverse would have brought us down before we reached many yards into No Man's Land. Rifle fire, however, was taking its toll, and on my front and flanks, soldier after soldier was tumbling to disablement or death, and I expected my turn every moment. The transition from life to death was terribly swift.

Question of the Week

I appreciate that it may be rather jarring to go straight from Donald Fraser's journal to the Areopagus' question of the week. But, after all that weightiness, some mental gymnastics are hopefully welcome.

Last week's question to test your critical thinking was:

If you replace all the parts of something over time until none of the original parts are left, is it still the same thing?

For perhaps the first time you were in (sort of) unanimous agreement here.

Laura K's answer sums up the general position rather well, which was to distinguish between a thing's meaning and physical presence, while also touching on the complexity of "things" themselves, in this case comparing a piece of paper to a sports team:

If we consider that the identity of an object can exist on two levels: the physical properties and the associated story. For instance, a £10 note is almost wholly defined by its story, we do not consider it to be a piece of paper, but an abstract value. Therefore, two different £10 notes are interchangeable.

To use another more debatable example, what about the identity of a sports team. My partner was a huge Manchester United fan, but his interest has waned as the players of his childhood have departed. Hence, for him, the 'story' of the team was rooted in the specific players. But for another who is perhaps a life-long fan of a team, the identity of the team would arguably go beyond the composition of individual players.

Consequently, the answer to this question depends on whether the story of an object supersedes the physical components. As the story of an object is set by the observer, this is arguably a subjective view.

Or, as Aki succinctly put it, referring (as many of you did) to the slow replacement of cells in the human body:

I feel like this question only shows its relevance to simple objects. If you change a blade of a knife, then the hilt of the knife, over and over again, it won't be the same knife when you bought it the first time. But if we look at the function of the knife, it may very well be the same knife. Only with a different look. If you ask the same question but instead of something, you specified it to humans, it basically answers itself. Even if every cell in a person body got replaced with a new cell, the mind, the hearts, and the soul of a person will probably stay the same.

While Jill M sums up another position some of you took - to ask whether something is defined by its physical presence or function (rather than its meaning):

Is the thing defined by its atoms or by its function? Do we assume the new parts are equivalent quality to the original? A thing defined by its value as an object is not the same thing if all original parts are replaced. A thing defined by its function is the same thing, if replacement parts provide the same functionality as the original parts.

Donald M spoke, fittingly, about the reconstruction of cities after war as a real-world example of the Ship of Theseus:

Similarly, the reconstruction after WWII particularly in cities of Germany and Poland of civic space was vital to the repair of national and individual soul. One thinks of the Frauenkirche in Dresden as an outstanding example, whereas the Reichstag in Berlin was architecturally modified perhaps to show that more than the building had changed. In contrast the pastiche reconstruction of Babylon, millennia after its fall, lacks authenticity and was more about aggrandisement of the then Ba’athist regime.

And, to conclude, here is a rather moving musation from Anne van H:

I find it both highly beautiful and sad, this very typical need to preserve what cannot be preserved. To try to grasp onto what eventually will perish. This longing to give meaning to meaningless things. Perhaps we all succumb to this behavior during our lifetime. When we slowly over time change every room in the house we lived in for so long. When every piece of clothing in our wardrobe eventually gets replaced. When we slowly and unintentionally (or intentionally) change pieces of the basis of a friendship, family or love relationship. When we slowly but steady change our own thoughts an behaviors to fit a new part of our lives. Perhaps we like to hold on to the thought that everything (or that we) remained the same so much because the other option, admitting that there is no way back and the past is gone, is rather harsh and devastating. Perhaps we are all just pretending that our personal Theseus boat remained true and original. Perhaps we are all lying a little bit to ourselves

And for this week's question to test your critical thinking:

Can war ever be justified?

And that's all

I can't say this week was a delight, as it normally is, given the matter at hand. But I can certainly call it a privilege to write about the First World War and share my reflections with you. Farewell for now.

Yours,

The Cultural Tutor