History Never Happened
ON POETIC LIES
Ed. Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series.
A new monument stands in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A Soldier’s Journey, sculpted by Sabin Howard, is a 58-foot-long saga in undulating bronze. The sculpture follows one American soldier, along with some compatriots, as he fights through the battles of World War I.
Were we to judge solely by the artwork, or by the biblically toned words at its unveiling ceremony about the “sacrifice” of those who laid down their lives for others more than a century ago, we could easily believe that the Odyssean narrative Howard delivers is the truth about the Great War. He describes the monument as embodying “the grand symbolic story of the nation,” and he is hardly alone in that assessment. The patriotic pageantry festooning its bequeathal to the American public, and the enthusiastic reviews of Howard’s work by art critics and political pundits, suggest that many carry the contours of that same story in their hearts and minds. World War I had meaning, and we as a nation grew in stature and significance by taking part in it.
And yet, despite — and because of — the monument’s artistic triumph, those who view it as a representation of past events would be shocked could they go back in time to join the anonymous soldier on his “journey” across the hellscape of Western Europe. The fighting was typified, many firsthand accounts tell us, by mud, rats, lice, poison gas, rotting bodies, sleep deprivation, the fragging of officers, mental breakdowns, idiotic generals, and horrific cruelty toward war animals such as horses, donkeys, and dogs. Prostitution was rampant. So was rape. The Odyssean American soldier depicted in hard metal on the National Mall would, in the flesh, likely have been scourged by some combination of venereal disease, chemical weapons, bullets, bayonets, gangrene, trench foot, high explosives, and psychological torment. He almost certainly would have found unconvincing whatever rationale was offered him as to why he was in a ditch in France with artillery shells exploding all around him and dead comrades staring vacantly into the sky.
It wasn’t just the First World War that was meaningless in the moment. Veterans of virtually any campaign anywhere report that all they wanted to do was survive the fighting and get back home. That the journeying soldier depicted in the National Mall monument could not go home as he wished — that is, that he was Odyssean in the first place — was because the government that sent him to Europe would not allow him to escape the misery to which it subjected him in the name of political maneuvering and geopolitical aggrandizement. The soldiers who bled to death or were blasted to pieces were part of no grand Hegelian process. They were the pawns of schemers in national capitals. There was no need for the United States to be involved in World War I from the standpoint of national security. It was a useless and pointless waste of lives and money.
If the anonymous soldier in Howard’s monument made it home alive, he would probably have been wracked with guilt for surviving and choked with anger that others did not. And he would have been confronted with the same old problems in America as had plagued the country before he left. In A Soldier’s Journey the bronzed protagonist is shown flanked at times by black American troops. It is true that black Americans fought, and fought bravely, in World War I — though not side-by-side with white soldiers. The U.S. Army was segregated back then, as was the rest of the nation. To include black Americans in military hagiography is to elide, far past the point of deception, the racism that characterized the United States during the war years. Lynching was common in Mississippi, even as black Americans were being sent to die in Verdun. The president, Woodrow Wilson, who sent black Americans to Europe, was sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan.
None of this was exceptional among the powers fighting in Europe in the first quarter of the 20th century. Many more were killed in the Belgian Congo than in Belgium, for instance, and those who were killed in the former often were not soldiers. Many were children. But schoolchildren in America today will take trips to the National Mall and see black men in bas relief as actors in a patriotic play, not being garroted by sadistic Belgians but fighting alongside a white soldier (known, more revealingly than the artistic commission that sanctioned the monument probably intended, as “Everyman”) for some abstract version of today’s concept of freedom.
To detach all the complicating detail and present the killing and maiming of a generation of Europeans and Americans as an Odyssean quest for righteousness is, if I may be blunt, an exercise in aesthetic mendacity. And that is what makes A Soldier’s Journey truly historical. Much of history comprises poetic lies such as these, misdirections away from the chaos of the lived moment toward the composed order of the receding past. Recall that the Great War was not even the “war to end all wars,” as it was sold at the time. It was not even the only war of the 1910s. There was the Mexican Revolution, for instance, a civil war in Cuba, American actions in the Dominican Republic and Haiti (the latter occupied for some twenty years by Uncle Sam), and, of course, the Russian Revolution. By the time people started calling it “World War I,” due to the outbreak of another planetary slaughter that was being called “World War II,” the tragic stupidity of it all had already been forgotten. What took that stupidity’s place was “history,” or the lies we tell ourselves to explain the evil we and our forebears once did. In the present, we are blind and deaf, limping along aimlessly. But when we gather to remember our yesteryears, we fill one another’s heads with nonsense about such things as making the world safe for democracy.
Perhaps that is why monuments such as A Soldier’s Journey are needed. Men (and women — the nurses also depicted in the monument are celebrated, as they always are in wars, for mopping up the patriotic gore amid which the men dispatch one another) sent on a fool’s errand by a racist government, striving through muck, clambering over corpses, and huddling in trenches amid shell explosions — this is Hell vomited onto the earth’s surface. But in the hands of an artist with a commission, it becomes a panegyric in copper and tin. There is nothing remotely historical about it. And yet it is, by precisely the same token, the very epitome of history.
A startling truth emerges when we stare over our shoulders and really take a good look at the carnage: History never happened. It isn’t happening now. It will never happen. Nobody knows what the present means without the future, but by the time we get there, the present has bled into the lengthening past, chaos giving way to more chaos ad infinitum. The mind makes a story later about some of the scraps and calls it “history,” but no such story exists, not even in theory. It’s an act of sheer imagination. Walter Benjamin spoke of the “angel of history,” whose wings curve out and forward as he faces backward into the debris flying out of an explosion in the distant past. The angel of history tries to contain and order the calamity but fails. In the previous installment, I wrote about “The Small Origins of Big Things” (Oct.). At a certain remove, that seems true. But back up far enough, take in enough of the big picture, and history becomes the sprawling, grandiose origin of nothing. We suffered, and we made others suffer. It seems like history is worth it. Live long enough, though, and you’ll find that it’s not.
It’s one damn thing after another, history is, and the meaninglessness of it all is too much to bear. We need to blind ourselves, like Oedipus, to the horrible reality surrounding us. We create “history” because the past, like the present, is chaos, formless, a dense web of delusions and dead ends. We slog through it in real time, with little comfort in the heart and little hope for the soul. A man puts on a uniform, takes up a standard-issue weapon, and crawls through slop like an animal, seeking other brutalized men to kill. Each man in this drama is likely to feel any number of things, including, not least, pain and fear and the dread of eternal damnation. That his broken body is later laid down under grassy lawns studded with white marble headstones is both the beginning and the end of history. Only dead men tell tales — the tales we make them tell to soothe the terror we feel in the contingent present. It is a terror that only humans, not even angels, can know.
This terror is what separates the past from “history.” Darrick Taylor argues that the Americans killed in World War II “died for nothing” (CrisisMagazine.com, June 12). Some veterans of that war, he relates, say as much, having witnessed what the country they fought for has become. The indictment is sound, but Taylor’s conclusion hits the wrong note. The story told about their sacrifices is misleading, Taylor says, and so a new and better story must be found. But there is no better story about the past. We must tell such stories because otherwise we would not be able to do anything, admitting to ourselves in advance that what we were attempting would come to nothing. There is the past, and then there is “history,” and they have nothing to do with each other. We merely use the latter to keep the former at bay.
We live on a knife’s edge, each moment one of radical imbalance, possible disaster. We trust God, but will the misery of our days resolve into a narrative worth the darkness through which we pass? Either God means for us to go along the Via Dolorosa as Christ did — in which case, the mind cries up to Him, as Christ did, “Why?” — or there is no meaning in the slim band of decades we pass on this planet, and God will discount almost all our striving as immaterial when we stand before Him in Final Judgment. Do we suffer, then, in silence or in vain? The statues, the monuments, the textbooks, the museums — everything we have tried and keep trying to make sense of our experiences will be utter wastes of time, as pointless as the battles of the Marne and Passchendaele that we clothe in mystic reverence in a 25-ton slab of metallic lies on the National Mall. History never happened. It’s just millennia of detritus piling up as we shoulder through uncertainty into more of the same.
St. Paul tells us we must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. We can do little else, we might say in reply. It would seem, at a sunlit angle, that when we look on how things change over time, we are smiled upon by a benign Creator. Little by little, we might choose to believe, we are being guided upward by a gentle hand. But then we look closer and think harder, and we see that we have deceived ourselves, or have been deceived. What looked like shepherding was shearing. We thought we were going somewhere, but all the while we were being stripped of every externality. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. At the end of a history that never happened, we are thrown back into the pastless, futureless present, staring deep into an abyss about which all we know is that it is the very distance between ourselves and God. And the way across it, as the Man who turned history upside-down knew best of all, is black with pain.
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