Armistice Day 2023

It's funny how conservative you get over time. I've come to prefer "Armistice" to "Veteran's" to label the day, maybe because "Memorial Day" has been taken over as another day to have a spasm of declaring ourselves free because we resemble Rome (with its standing army) more than we resemble Athens (with its citizen soldiers called to battle only when the need arose).

Paths of Glory is the story for today. The story of a French general ordering a suicide charge by his own troops, and then issuing a order to shell his own troops to get them out their trenches and into the fusillade of machine gun fire that would surely cut them down like so many blades of grass.

To that I would add "All Quiet On the Western Front."  The new, German version of the story, on film.  The soundtrack makes it chillingly clear this is a horror movie, not a war movie.  War movies are martial and praise heroes bravely fighting noble battles.  Horror movies are about slaughter and a great evil that works implacably until it is stopped.  War is the great evil in "All Quiet," and it is only stopped by the Armistice.  But in the story a German general, displeased with the way the war ends (the Kaiser has abdicated, Germany as a fighting power is done), commands his troops, in violation of the armistice that declares no further activity will take place until the armistice officially ends the war at the 11th hour of the day, to attack the French lines.  It is, of course, a slaughter; and a more pointless one than any in the war. And emblematic of the nihilism James Carroll refers to.

Those are the movies for today.

"A voice says, 'Cry!" And I say: "What shall I cry? All flesh is grass...."

And grass is the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may

         see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

Growing among black folks as among white,

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,

It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,

And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,

And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

—Walt Whitman 

"Call the names. Call the names. Call the names."