Mass Murder by Any Other Name
Inscription over the gates of the American War Memorial in Normandy, France
I hope there’s never another war of any kind, as long as humans continue to suck the life out of this imperfectly rotating shitball we call Earth. As a word, ‘war’ is insufficient. If you think about it, three tiny little letters stuck together meant to convey, for example, the 70 million people that were exterminated during World War I & II. I don’t even believe in an afterlife. I do however, know for a fact that when you die your bones and your flesh rot away and for the most part humanity wipes you from its memory as an individual with preferences and habits and ideas. That’s so awful to us that we make giant graveyards with thousands of little white headstones for men whose bodies were never even found, because their very bones were obliterated by shoddy bombs filled with scrap metal; literally, clockworks and false teeth. Brains sprayed out over muddy, corpse-ridden fields and then a telegraph home to your mother with devastating words printed on it. So we create mausoleums and have national days of mourning. You never recover from death and you can’t pretend grubs and worms and little grub- and worm-eating songbirds won’t get fat off everybody you know, eventually.
A few years back I visited the coast along Normandy. Did you know the D-Day landing bays are still stuck out in the sea? The cliffs are riddled with bomb craters (photos below). It looks like a drunk person designed a really bad golf course. I went, amongst other interesting places, to the Juno beach museum and looked at the frozen dioramas of these teenage male genocide victims, their yellowed notebooks with tiny, perfect calligraphy. Rust-specked tins of inadequate rations supposed to feed grown men. Powdered milk you had to make up with mud-water teeming with rat shit and tuberculosis. Have you ever imagined, really imagined, if it had been you, and you were ordered to murder as many strangers as you could, during your teens? Do you think you could have done it or would you die of fright first?
Normandy is so tremendously beautiful you can’t imagine it as a stage for mass devastation. It’s so fresh there, the sky goes on endlessly for miles and even its grey clouds are spectacular. Yes I know the sky goes on and on for miles everywhere, but in Normandy, it’s really more “the Heavens” rather than your average lame old sky. You’ll see, I posted some pictures below.
Recently I wrote a review of British poet Robert Graves‘ autobiography, “Goodbye to All That“, which recollects how he survived World War I. I might post it. It’s a moving book. I won’t pretend to comprehend the deep loyalty he felt for his fellow soldiers. Only 20 years old or so, he was nearly killed and the mental effects of the gas and the murder and the depravity almost broke him, and eventually he was sent home, injured. But he contrived to be sent back because he couldn’t bear the thought of his buddies out there suffering alone. Survivor’s guilt, it can really slay a guy. Sometimes farmers in Flanders still dig up bones of dead soldiers while out ploughing fields.
Then I went to a museum to morbidly gawp at World War I stuff. Relics of death and what not. It struck me as I looked at a particularly apocryphal looking German gas-mask: someone wore that and maybe they died horribly. Robert Graves said they were given gas masks that didn’t work, plus he was a boxer and had a permanently fucked nose so it would have suffocated him to put it on even if it hadn’t been defective. You didn’t complain, you just got on with it.
I think about my younger brother and imagine if he was murdered by someone because of his nationality, in some sort of mass, organised way where a government obliged you to learn how to use guns and tanks and cannons with the hopes you’d exterminate other people instead of being exterminated yourself. And sleep amongst rats bloated and many from feeding on the corpses of your dead friends, your hair and clothes hopping with lice. Would someone stick a sharp knife in the flesh between his ribs until the life was extinguished from his eyes? Would it be a bullet in his head so only part of his skull would blow off but he’d still live on for a few hours, agonisingly, where nobody could get to him to finish him off? His dying body strung out on barbed wire in No Man’s Land? That happened to plenty. When you make it personal, it becomes a whole lot more than three letters stuck together in an insignificant and insufficient noun.
I visited Dachau when I was 12 and saw the rows of empty bunks where emaciated, frozen men and women and children lay. I thought to myself “They were real people, actual mothers and fathers and dead babies”. I read Ian Kershaw’s “Hitler, The German’s and the Final Solution” and I thought about a mother holding her innocent little child in the back of one of the first experimental lethal gas vans, stripped naked of her clothes, mouth bleeding, gold teeth ripped out of her head to be melted down for a trinket for some SS guy’s wife and the terror and powerlessness of the foreknowledge of death ahead. I think if it were me I would rather my child died first so she wouldn’t see me dead and be alone waiting to be gassed or starved to death. Millions such cases. I also once visited a military fort that had been an internment camp for the deportation of Jews, Gypsies and disabled people. It was run by psychopaths and was renowned for vicious torture of inmates. Now it was a living mausoleum with grim cells still stained with black mildew, rough brown sacks of hay for mattresses. A woman was one of the worst torturers. She liked to hurt. It was so oppressive in there that I had to leave and I cried outside. I will never go back, it’s too sad.
Here’s some photos. First the magnificent sky in Normandy (I told you):
In this beautiful, serene spot, decades ago, dead bodies of hundreds of young men lay littered around. Here I am, the happy macabre tourist.
Landing bays still lying out at sea: Warships fired at the cliffs where the Germans were dug in with massive cannons, and during the night, soldiers attempted to climb up the steep cliff faces undetected.
Wire cutters from World War I – to cut the barbed wire in No Man’s Land maybe? I guess you had to schlep this around with you at all times, in case you needed to cut your ripped flesh off some barbed wire and wade through mud and corpses to ‘safety’. Maybe hoping a bomb would get you, and you could be out of all this, maybe not.
World War I Gas Mask. Imagine some fella coming at you wearing one of these? I’d be dead of fright long before he got anywhere near me.
Nearly 12,000 of the half a million that died in Flanders Fields during WWI are buried here at Tyne Cot cemetary – most of whom were never identified.
A Dead Boche
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
Related articles
- A riveting and sobering lesson on World War II (kansascity.com)
- Canada, World War II and the European Theatre, Part I (amirtabarglobal.com)
