To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (7)

Dr. Lengel,

I appreciate your reluctance to moralize about war. You could safely say that war is hell (to quote Sherman) or, less safely, that it has an “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (to quote the Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien). But since you weren’t there, that wouldn’t be history; that would be ideology. You can only go on what the soldiers say.

There’s more to be said on that, but I’d rather, and I’m sure you’d rather, we moved on. Toward the end of To Conquer Hell, you write that “the Meuse-Argonne opened a lasting perception gap in American society. On one side stood the combat veterans; on the other, everyone else.”

Of course, that perception is nicely illustrated in our deciding to leave the nature of war up to those veterans. But it’s more than that, obviously. What you describe is an environment eerily like Vietnam-era America, where returning soldiers were shunned, where they felt out of it for all that they had seen and could not explain their experiences to their loved ones. “I became a citizen,” one Doughboy recalls, “but not a good one.” “War does something to a person,” another soldier testified. “We were scared, but we had to develop a numbness and an unfeeling attitude toward it all. Otherwise, we would have lost our minds.”

In the end, most soldiers just kept quiet—but not, you argue, “because they didn’t want to talk, but because nobody seemed willing to listen.” War memoirs were huge in Europe and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was translated into English in 1929. But while high quality books by American veterans were being written and published, the American public just wasn’t buying them.

Why do you think that is? And why do you think, for instance, that Vietnam was different? After all, that war launched many a writer, Tim O’Brien not least among them. Whatever the answer, the resistance to the war that you’ve mentioned more than once seems to be a phenomenon that started right away. And that fact, for me anyway, makes it no less in explicable.

The upshot, you write, is that the Doughboy “never became as fixed in the American public imagination as the Tommy in Britain, the digger in Australia, or the Poilu in France.”

Who was he? At the war’s beginning, he was like any other American soldier in any other era—young, confident, naïve, eager for adventure, and mostly believing in the cause and country for which he fought. Perhaps the only thing that set him apart in 1917 was his immigrant roots. By the end of 1918, however, he had become something very different and unique. Of all the soldiers in American history, the Doughboy is the first to have experienced industrialized warfare. He did so without preparation of any kind—military or psychological—and suffered terribly as a result. Yet no other solider in American history or perhaps the history of the world learned how to fight in such a short period of time. Over a period of just a few months, four million volunteers and draftees endured, adapted, and finally overcame all obstacles to become first-rate soldiers. In the process they lost some of their youth, confidence, and naivete. But they had shown, far more than any number of generals, diplomats, or politicians could ever have done, that America had an important role to play on the world stage.

This strikes me as an eloquent tribute to the long-neglected Doughboy. The dominant narrative in American pop and political culture is that we saved the Europeans’ butts in the First World War and then again in the Second. Your tribute, and your book, are no worse for complicating that portrait.

Thanks for participating in this conversation, and I very much look forward to your talk next week.

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6

IMAGE: American recruiting poster

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.

Comments

[Poor child]

great! thanks for sharing!