To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (3)

Dear Dr. Lengel,

You write with evident frustration that the First World War “has poor entertainment value,” but I’m wondering why you think that. (Or, rather, why do all the editors and publishers out there think that?) Does it stem, as one commenter suggests, “from the unpopularity of the war in the U.S. at the time, and from the fact that there isn’t any exciting television/film footage of WWI like there is from WWII and later”? I have my own ideas, but first I want to know what novelist could resist the following bits of history?

Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian revolutionary who started the war by murdering the Austro-Hungarian archduke, managed to complete his mission only by accident. (Two wrong turns don’t make a right, apparently.) And Franz Ferdinand, unlike so many other European royals, tended to support peace, not war. His death was, perhaps, one of the great ironies of history and worth a novel in itself.

Speaking of novels, it seems perfectly novelistic that the rulers of Germany and her great enemy Russia were cousins and themselves related to the king of England. The queen of Romania, meanwhile, was British and the queen of Austria-Hungary French.

Or how about this? The German Kaiser had a withered left arm. Was his zest for battle an elaborate overcompensation of sorts? An extra-firm handshake on a geopolitical scale? Psychoanalysis may be unworthy of history, but that’s my point. It is worthy of a good story. And speaking of psychology, one of the Kaiser’s top generals, Erich Ludendorff, slowly went mad during the war. When, in March of 1918, he finally punched through the Allied lines, he had no idea what to do next—certainly one of the great military blunders of history. But it was his presumed nervous breakdown a few months later that led him to call for an Armistice—although he then refused to participate in peace negotiations or shoulder any responsibility for Germany’s defeat. (He left that to the politicians and the Jews.)

The war ended as strangely as it had begun.

And this is not the half of it, of course. (French mutiny! Lawrence of Arabia! The Red Baron! The Bolsheviks!) Could it be that the United States, despite such huge losses at the Meuse-Argonne, was too distant a player in these dramas to sustain popular interest almost a century later? Was the world map too unfamiliar in 1914 for us to really grasp now how fundamentally it changed at Versailles? I mean, what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire anyway? And why should we care about its end?

Perhaps the Great War is as foreign and confusing to Americans as European football. We’ll watch a little of it on television, but after that, we’d prefer Gettysburg and the Battle of the Bulge, thank you.

Brendan

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2

IMAGE: German general Paul von Hindenburg, the Kaiser (with bad arm hidden), and Erich Ludendorff

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.