Continuing along the theme of black and white, and buildings in Hobart, here is a photograph that I took in the Elizabeth Street Bus Mall this morning. I am not sure how I feel about it. I think that I like it, but it seems a bit solemn and sombre.
I think that this is because of the book that I had just finished on the way in had left me in that frame of mind. The book is Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War, by Michele Barrett. The book is not about the millions who died in the First World War; but rather it explores the experiences of countless numbers of men who lived as ‘long-term casualties’. That is, not those of profound physical trauma, but of the desolate trauma of the slaughter that they managed to escape alive.
To do this, Barrett explores the lives of five ordinary personnel who endured war, how they dealt with its horrors, both during and long after the war's end. Through this, she attempts to shed light on the nature of the psychological damage of war. I am not altogether convinced that she has been wholly successful, but it really does leave you with a profound sense of the impact of war on those ‘lucky’ to emerge physically unscathed. Even more profound is the context that each of these men returned during a time that psychological trauma was only grudgingly acknowledged, and assistance to respond to that was non-existent. Although the figures are impossible to pin down, suicide rates, alcoholism, homelessness, familial breakdown and so on were all significantly more prevalent in the experiences of veterans than those who did not serve.
Although the book perhaps asks more than it answers, it is well worth a look. I did want to include something that I personally found very moving though, arising out of the last ‘case study’ of the book, Captain Lawrence Gameson, a medical officer in the Field Artillery. A remarkable character, Gameson is notable in how he maintained a great sense of humanity despite his experiences. Driven to identify and appropriately bury the dead, he routinely took it upon himself to do what must have been a gruesome task.
One way of identifying victims was simply to rifle through their pockets for letters. The correspondence that moved me was found on a fellow killed in October 1916, in the village of Le Sars. Gameson came across the body of a British soldier, not of his division, unburied and decomposing. In the act of identifying the dead man, he was driven to copy down and keep the letters for many years after the war. The first was from the dead man’s mother:
Dear Son JohnGameson wrote of this one, “even had I not copied the letter one would have remembered the iambic music of the remarkable ‘John many a cry when I lay down for thou’, read for the first time beside John’s pitiful body.’
Just a few lines for your birthday. I have just been reading thy letter on to myself. I feel a bit dull today Sunday. I would like to post you a nice present but am getting a pair of stockings knit for though. John many a cry when I lay down for thou. I am such a bad letter writer. So no more. Short and sweet. God be with us until we meet again.
Love and many kisses,
Mother.
In John’s breast pocket there was a torn photograph of his young daughter and a letter from his wife:
God knows I have many a weary night and day for I never go to sleep but I see you somewhere or I am talking to you for my mind is so much upset for it is now we know how much we love each other but we will just have to hope for the best and trust you will come safely through it all. May God send you safely through this terrible war safe, from your own dear annie. XXXXXX. Goodnight. Love to Daddy from his Bubbles. (I hold her hand, but she wriggles too much)
In Gameson’s diary underneath this passage he records: “what in God’s name must the grand total be of ours and the enemy’s – if this one man had three generations to mourn him.
And when I read this (and now typing it out), I really am close to tears. I think about Jen, Henry and Ezra. And I think about my Grandfather, who’s father died in that very same war, on that very same front, leaving behind a wife and two children, one (my Grandfather) of whom he never set eyes upon.
So now I am a bit down. I think that I might post some photos of smiling kiddies later on to lift the spirits.
Comments
Everything I read and learn about WWI tells me it was a crucible of grim wisdom for isolated American country boys, usually overseas for the first time in their lives. The insanity of it all on a continental scale, on top of the epidemic disease, injected with exposure to cultures they never imagined would look and sound so different than their own. The American Field Service ambulance medics came back convinced that cross-cultural experience and education would be crucial to preventing such wars. They have now wholly given their name to one of the oldest "student exchange" programs for high schoolers, still going strong. The American Legion was formed specifically to provide a place where combat vets could have time together in mutual understanding of what their naive families could not imagine.
I'm a generation older than you, Kris. My grandfather served in the US Army during WWI, but he stayed stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington the whole time. Had his family not immigrated from Cornwall in 1904, he may have been conscripted into British service on the front.