Keep the home fires burning

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
November 9, 2014

This year marks the 100th anniversary of World War I. How did it change our world? How might we hold in our hearts some of its lessons?

In the early 1900’s, technology was changing the world in Europe and Russia. People became more ready to think about doing things other than what they’d been “born” to do. Electricity was more widespread. The automobile enabled more travel. The strictures began to lift.

One peasant was able to travel from the countryside to St. Petersburg to see the Tsar. He wrote about his disappointment after coming face to face with the man. The Tsar in my mind was the container of wisdom, the glory and the history of Russia. What I saw, he said, was an ordinary little fellow on ordinary legs. It was as if he suddenly realized that ordinary people were running things.

All of the heads of state were cousins, related to Queen Victoria. Nickolas, the Tsar of Russia was related, as was his wife Alexandra. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was her grandson. He used to visit her in the summers, admiring the ships that ruled the seas and vowing to himself to have a navy as grand as his grandmother’s when he grew up. He was ashamed of his left arm, which did not work, and which he was shamed for as a child. The German culture prized physical perfection, and he had been injured by the forceps at his birth.

Germany was newly a nation, wanting to be part of the colonizer group like France, Great Britain and Holland.

Germans were convinced of the superiority of their culture. Socialists wanted change. The Kaiser was riding around in cars. wearing a cavalry uniform. Everyone was reading Nietzsche. The cities were the great melting pot, and in order for revolution to come, they reasoned, the cities had to explode.

The people of Europe were doing better than they had been. It is not when the people are at their lowest that revolution happens. It is when things start to get a little better that revolution happens. The structures of class had seemed set in stone. The way things had always been were in a terrible tension with what was coming into being. Artists had visions of a looming storm. Something felt clogged that had to be freed. If that meant war, some said, so be it.

“A war with Austria would be a splendid little thing for the revolution.” Lenin

Anarchists were people who wanted change, but did not believe that working within the systems that existed would be possible. They had no power in those systems. When people feel powerless is when they start breaking things. Emma Goldman, in the US, was advocating civil disobedience and planning an assassination to send a message to the way things were. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Serbia, a man named Gavrilo Principe had been rejected by the Serbian army for being to small.

“Wherever I go people think I’m a weakling. Even though I’m not.” In the Serbian Army some officers who believed they needed regime change. The old ruler was on his way out and the Archduke Ferdinand was going to take the throne. He had already had his portrait painted wearing the Emperor’s medals. These officers, who called themselves The black Hand, stirred up a few of the Anarchists. Told them the route the procession would take, supplied them with pistols. Security got wind of something threatening changed the route. The driver took a wrong turn and drove the Arch Duke and his wife to face the assassin.

“By far the cleverest thing I ever did in my life was to marry my Sophie. She is everything for me: my wife, my doctor, my advisor – in a word my whole happiness… And then our children! They are my whole pride and joy. I sit with them all day long in amazement that I can love them so much. And then the evenings at home when I smoke my cigar and read my papers. Sophie knits and the children tumble about, knocking everything of! the tables. It’s all so cozy and precious…”

Smashing Serbia became the manly thing to do. Appearing strong in the moment of crisis. It’s a test of character rather than of national interest.

Instead of a small war with Serbia they got all the allies.

When he realized that he was now going to be at war with Great Britain, France and Russia he tried to back away. The general head of the military said we’re going to war.

A well loved leader named Jean Jaures tried to stop it. “What will the future be like, when the billions now thrown away in preparation for war are spent on useful things to increase the well-being of people, on the construction of decent houses for workers, on improving transportation, on reclaiming the land? The fever of imperialism has become a sickness. It is the disease of a badly run society which does not know how to use its energies at home.”
— Jean Jaures

This eloquent antiwar orator was assassinated before the war started.

Honor had to be satisfied. Serbia must be punished. People demanded it. It was embarrassing to do nothing. It looked weak. Unmanly. Diplomacy was for sissies and weaklings. Kaiser William would Strike, helping the Austrians punish the Serbs, and get it over with.

“We’ll have Paris for lunch, St Petersburg for dinner” However. alliances had been formed. Treaties had been signed. Too late they all realized that, if they struck Serbia, the Russians would come defend them. And the French. And the British. Kaiser Wilhelm tried to walk it back, along with his cousin Nicholis, Tsar of Russia, but the military folks were dead set on war. He couldn’t stop them without looking foolish.

No one could fathom the gruesome brutality of this war. The Irish and Russian boys thought their bravery and panache would see them through. Apparently their commanders did too, as some soldiers were sent into battle without rifles. The helmets, for the first two years of the war, were leather covered in cloth to protect the leather from mud splatter. It’s two years later when, horrified by all the head injuries, they started issuing soldiers steel helmets.

Both sides dug trenches, some dug whole underground complexes, to protect the soldiers. Both sides lobbed bombs over. Flamethrowers. Poisoned gas. Sometimes there were raiding parties sent over the walls, and boys were slaughtered this way. You can think of giving your life for your country, but a boy’s war hero dreams don’t usually include giving up a leg or an arm, the nose on your face or your eyes and lungs.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
N a mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Dulce et Decorum est(1)
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double. like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed. coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. many had lost their boots,
But limped on. blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Nine million people died. It was good for the economy. For some, the war was the best part of their lives. Companionship. Bonding.

People grieved their loved ones. Began being interested in spiritualism. Communicating with the dead. Arthur Conan Doyle one of the leaders of Spiritualism. Lost his son Kingsley in the war. People searching for answers to why. “It is almost incomprehensible to me’, Kathe Kollwitz wrote, ‘what degrees of endurance people can manifest. In days to come people will hardly understand this age. What a difference between now and 1914… People have been transformed so that they have this capacity for endurance…

Worst of all is that every war already carries within the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.’

It is nothing but the inevitable, logical center of the whole system of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and I stand for it absolutely. If it should ever in any important respect be impaired, I would feel like asking the Secretary of War to get the boys who went across the water to fight,… and I would stand up before them and say, Boys, I told you before you went across the seas that this was a war against wars, and I did my best to fulfill the promise, but I am obliged to come to you in mortification and shame and say I have not been able to fulfill the promise. You are betrayed. You have fought for something that you did not get.

Woodrow Wilson

Does It Matter?
by Siegfried Sassoon

Does it matter?-losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter?-losing your sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter-those dreams in the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

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