One Hundred Years Ago: The Power of The Great War Lives On

What were you doing during the June of your 19^th year?  Excited to be finished your first year of University/college?  Looking forward to the beach and the bar – finally able to get a drink without lying about your age?  Pining over your first love?  Falling into your first love?

One hundred years ago yesterday, in the June of his 19^th year, Gavril Princip succeeded where others had failed - he gunned down the dour Franz Ferdinand and his beloved Sophie Chotek as they drove past his post at the Soho café, situated in a narrow side street in Sarajevo. 

This frustrated, disgruntled teenager decided that he would, along with three of his associates from the Black Hand nationalist organization, take the future of his people into his own hands.  He wanted to free his people at any cost.

The arrogant, aristocrat had to die.  Ferdinand had to act as a symbol to all other nations  - other would be oppressors of Serbia – that Princip’s tiny country would no longer be pushed around. Princip made a statement, and in so doing, dragged the entire planet across the threshold into the modern age…the age of terror and destruction and death.  The age of shell shock and machine guns and gas.  The age of poetry and paintings and photographs.

We are, as a species, forever changed by this war.  It made us bitter and cynical in a way that did not exist prior to the Great War.  Of course humans have been critical and questioning of leadership prior to this time, but it was not institutionalized until now.  Questioning authority based on the observation of its wholesale failure was not fashionable or necessary until now. Raging against the machine did not come at so high a price until now.

Millions of beautiful, talented, brilliant young men were sacrificed, on both sides, to feed the militaristic/imperialistic machinations of countries, of kings, of gamblers whose arrogance and ignorance blinded them to the realities of the battlefield and politics, geography and psychology, public opinion and private disgust.

The Great War created, as T.S. Eliot observed, a wasteland of corpses, souls, and societies.  It created a junk yard on the poppy-filled fields of France.  It created a hole in our collective psyches, our collective unconscious, our genetic memories.  We have felt the pain through our ancestors’ photos, letters, and diaries.  We make pilgrimage to those poppy-filled, corpse-filled fields of France to find our beloved ancestors buried, nameless, with millions of others.

We stare at the Great War from the wrong end of a spy glass – it seems so very far away and yet, when we put the glass down, we realize it has been within our arm’s reach all along.  We have been afraid to reach out and touch it once more, afraid to re-ignite the memories, afraid to be shell-shocked all over again.

Charles Hamilton Sorley

John  McCrea

Isaac Rosenberg

Ivor Gurney

When we stand among the ghosts of Sorley’s “…millions of the mouthless dead…” few of us even remember them anymore, outside of the day on which the Armistice was celebrated.  Few of us remember that they were once someone’s son, father, husband, brother, lover.  Few of us hold McCrea’s torch, remembering to not “…break faith with us who die…” so that the dead may finally sleep.  Few of us, outside of academia, remember the pain of Rosenberg’s isolation, Gurney’s madness, Graves’s aloofness, Owen’s sensitivity, Sorley’s irreverence, Brooke’s beauty, or Sassoon’s rebellion.  Their words, visions, and resignation barely reach us now outside of Oxford Poetry collections or literature classes.  They are given to us like prescriptions rather than gifts or balms.

Robert Graves

Wilfred Owen

Siegfried Sassoon

Rupert Brooke

Over the next four years, and after, let us take the time to research and acquaint ourselves with at least one warrior…one soldier…one poet we did not know before.

When we read their work, tell their stories, say their names, we breathe life into them once more.  We let them live through us.  Given the weight of their sacrifice, do we not owe them at least that?

So begins my continued homage to the Fallen of the Great War.

Blessed Be all of their names.

“…they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”  (from For the Fallen  by Laurence Binyon)

Laurence Binyon