Along with my recent interest in Irish folk music, which I’m sure has nothing to do with Miss Northern Ireland, I’ve found a song called Willie McBride.
Ah the sun now it shines on these green fields of France,
The warm summer breeze makes the red poppies dance,
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds;
There’s no gas, no barbed wire, there’re no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard is still No Man’s Land,
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand…
The song moves me very deeply. World War I was madness… just madness. One million guys in trenches firing with everything they had – machine guns, gas weapons, artillery, bombs – at the other million guys entrenched a hundred yards away. And neither making headway. Mobility was achieved merely a few times during the war, on the western front.
“Did you really believe that this war would end wars?” they sing. The war to end all wars, indeed. Colonel Potter in M*A*S*H ironizes over it, remembering his fallen friends: The one who died in the “war to end all wars”, and the one who died “in the war after that”.
When Napoleon I set out to invade Russia in 1812, he began with an enormous army of 422.000 soldiers from all over Europe. They fought all the way to Moscow. Much like the German armies of World War II, they got caught in mud, bad weather, and when they entered the burned capital, the winter came. The retreat was an endless agony… men freezing, starving, dying in heaps along the way. The slow, agonizing retreat through the snow… and then the Russians move in with their cannons. In the end, less than 10.000 survived.
And Guy Sajer, the french man fighting for the Germans in World War II, tells his story in his book “The forgotten soldier”. Driving trucks endless miles through Russian winter and temperatures of -20 F to supply the enclosed sixth army in Stalingrad, hands, feet and faces burn from frostbite and people die from freezing. (Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the sixth army, only 6.000 returned home to Germany.)
Is there then no end to war? With every book I read, war becomes even more terrible. What happens to the collective soul and spirit of a nation that sees four hundred thousand of its young men lie dead like heaps of rubble, leaving fathers, mothers, wives, girlfriends, children behind?
And how enormously and terribly deformed will the heart of the nation be that sets out on a lunacy like this? What drives a nation to invade another without sane reason or purpose?
Did you leave ‘ere a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined? …
…or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enclosed forever behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn, and battered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?