Hello Reader,
Back again?
Today’s prose and poem takes up where last week’s prose and poem left off.
Short Essay
Quotation
Long Poem
Short Essay
My parents survived the Great Depression. I survived the Great Flood of 2013—That’s when we had to evacuate the downtown. It would not have been so bad, if after the last “once in a century flood” of 2005, the city authorities, from their being “common sense challenged,” had not, after a city report was finished, classified as secret the report on the flood for five blankety-blank years! (Who knows what flood control efforts could have been enacted before the waters rolled in again in 2013)
The U.S. civil war, 1860’s, saw fighting between wooden warships covered with iron: The ironclads. The Great War was 1914—1918. Ordinary people back then thought it was a war totally surprising and unprecedented, because—because the learned authorities had neglected to notice the “total war,” (not “army versus army”) the trenches, and the machine-age weapons of the US civil war. Worse: They ignored H.G. Wells—and I don’t mean his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds with metal fighting machines (like tanks) and Black Smoke. (like chlorine gas)
Wells wrote a 1903 short story about The Land Ironclads manned inside by commoners with a practical education, such as chemists, mechanics and electricians. The theme was that these little peace loving chaps could stand against upper class warrior-bred fellows, with their silly swords, their calvary horses and their titles like Von in their name, fellows very arrogant and very rich, but also very ignorant.
After Wells wrote, inventing land battleships should have been a no-brainer for both allies and axis. But no. Last week I mentioned the How and Why Wonder Book of WWI where both sides sought to break the trench deadlock with a secret weapon. I wrote then how the Germans ignored the common sense idea of being prepared for an offensive deep into enemy territory: They didn’t begin by stockpiling their secret equipment. (gas masks) The allies, for their secret weapon, would be equally unprepared. (General Baden-Powell, the Boer War hero with the motto of “Be Prepared,” had already left the army, at the request of his king, to run the Boy Scout movement)
The allied secret weapons were shipped over from Britain, concealed in great containers marked “tank.” Hence the short word, “panzer” in German, that forever replaced “land battleship.” Did the British proceed to prepare for a breakout by stockpiling rations, ammunition and an army of tanks? And maybe, perhaps, spare engine parts too? No. Although only a precious few tanks had arrived yet, they were nonetheless used in the next battle. The good news? For once, church bells rang all over Britain, rejoicing for the Battle of Cambrai—the biggest victory so far!—as the tanks rolled right over machine gun nests, supporting the army to advance through a lunar landscape for an amazing distance… of …six miles!
But without stockpiling? Once the few tanks had all broken down or been disabled—that was it. No breakout. Of course it didn’t take long at all for the Germans to rush in elephant guns and small direct-fire cannons and to invent elegantly simple and practical anti-tank ditches. (Angled so the tank’s nose would face into the dirt—full stop)
(Elephant guns? Sure. Today huge .50 calibre machine guns, firing slowly, like you see mounted on tank turrets and Arab Toyota trucks, can punch a round into armoured cars to bounce around inside, while the normal sized .30 calibre, firing rapidly, can take out surrounding personnel)
Obviously both sides, Allies and Axis, were as “common sense challenged” as our own city hall which classified our flood report.
In our 21st century, if Canadians didn’t join their US cousins in declaring War on Terror, or join them in Iraq, maybe it’s because Canadians, even the ones who were history-challenged, knew their government’s limitations. Meanwhile, despite seeing their cousin’s “farce” (as the Toronto police chief labeled it) of their War on Drugs, the average Canadians, while knowing the difficulty of counter insurgency, never imagined the sheer colossal incompetence, the “fiasco,” if one might speak plainly, of the U.S. war effort “to instil democracy” in Iraq.
(Early in the “occupation,” before the Americans had the guts to call their liberation an “occupation”—Iraqi’s seeking employment would warn each other not to use that word around Americans—someone wrote a thick book called Fiasco, that obviously not a single U.S. official paid any attention to)
Americans didn’t even involve their own State Department! Too bad, because State, of course, would know a lot about nurturing freedom.
(State would know that former colonies, upon achieving independence in Africa and Asia in the 1950’s and 1960’s, did not come instantly, overnight, to understand democracy—And no, you can’t teach democracy with a simplistic sound bite of ‘you just need freedom and elections’—anymore than you can simplistically tell American farm boys, for their domestic war, ‘you can just say no to drugs’ or tell a South Vietnamese rice farmer, ‘you can just say no to communism.’
State would know exactly what an embassy filled with naive Americans would not know: You can’t reach “the hearts and minds” with a mere sound bite… Two patriots wrote a best-selling book called The Ugly American, a book I’ll wager not one American in the Iraq embassy enclave, the Green Zone, ever read… Yes I’m angry, thinking of lives wasted in goddam Vietnam)
Quotation
He was a young man, healthy enough but by no means sun-tanned, and of a type of feature and expression that prevails in His Majesty's Navy: alert, intelligent, quiet. He and his engineers and his riflemen all went about their work, calm and reasonable men. They had none of that flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a hurry, that excessive strain upon the blood-vessels, that hysteria of effort which is so frequently regarded as the proper state of mind for heroic deeds.
The Land Ironclads (1903)
Poem
As you may recall, last week’s poem ended after the young narrator has cried and sadly fallen asleep in the top of a church steeple, unaware of what would happen as he slept. The drama resumes:
Survivor of the Black Smoke
I awake with dry tears,
lying stiff in the old wooden steeple
on the floor that smells like a church,
I hear silence.
Strange, deathly silence.
I crawl up,
stand up.
I don’t glance down—I enjoy seeing a few fresh stars.
But—is something wrong?
Nothing heard.
No lorries groaning on the far highway,
their engine retarders going turrrap-tup-tup-tup.
No motor rumbles from right below.
No horns of motorists navigating narrow streets.
Something is pressing at my mind,
and I don’t want to open that door.
I look down.
Nothing.
Only blackness.
No amber street lamps in friendly rows.
No red-white moving lights of motorists heading home.
Nothing but a black void,
formless, muffled,
where the light shineth not.
A bat zigs past—I say, “Don’t go!”
Don’t go down into that dark fog.
The bat does not hear,
heaven does not heed.
Lonely,
in an empty steeple,
above the silent dead.
After three days
I could descend.
Sean Crawford
Calgary
June
2019
Footnotes:
~Wells was such a thinker! A forward to a modern (I forget which) edition of The War of the Worlds points out that Wells (in 1898) was the first to predict refugee columns, such as would (in 1914) swell the roads during the opening of the Great War, during that hopeful autumn before anyone realized the war would become horribly Great.
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