And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death. - Rupert Brooke, October, 1914
For those who don't know, Rupert Brooke was a fast rising young poet in pre-WWI England who ended up dying as soldier during the war. In this poem, we capture a bit of the 1914 European point of view. Schooled by the full experience of World War One and gravely instructed by the arch-illuminators or evil, Lenin and Hitler, the concept that a man could thank God for matching him with a time of war, or crisis, is something that is incomprehensible.
For most of my life, the First World War has held a fascination for me - the fascination begins with the fact that the troops went off to war singing. No holding back in the intellectual and social elite, either. In 1914, throughout the belligerent Euruopean powers, men like Brooke joined as a body the armies being raised to fight the war. That war, however, was the homicide of a generation, and the suicide of a civilisation. Brooke died in 1915, still full of the sublime spirit of love and adventure - and by dying that early in the conflict, he wasn't seared as so many other sensitive, thoughtful men of his generation were. Men like Siegfried Sasson, who wrote:
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
It is that "hell where youth and laughter go" which came to be the only proper view of war. Winston Churchill, who greatly respected Sasson even while not agreeing with his point of view, observed that war, which had been cruel and glorious, had become cruel and sordid. As the century spread out from that central event, the First World War, the view of Sasson was merely reinforced again and again - in both intellectual and popular thinking, to make war was to make something inherently bad; something which, if it is to be engaged in at all, must be engaged in with distaste and an understanding that it will really be entirely destructive, especially of those young people who are forced directly into the fight.
I wonder, though, if we haven't lost something very important along the way.
Right now we've got more than a hundred thousand of our very best and bravest overseas engaged in battle with a relentless and cruel enemy. If we are to hold to our supposed view of war, then we have to work from the assumption that their lives are being wrecked - they are in that hell where youth and laughter go, and we'd better be long faced about it, and appropriate large amounts of money for mental health care at the VA for these poor victims once they come home. Meanwhile, the very existence of such men and women gives lie to our whole point of view about war.
War is a cruel and hard thing - but to get hung up on this or that particularly horrifying aspect of it is to lose sight of the larger issue. Nobody wants a young soldier to die, but we should not view such a death as an obscenity or as a shame. The life of a 20 year old soldier, cut down in battle for a just cause, is not a tragedy, but the final consummation of a sublime act of love and devotion. To me, it seems an insult to the memory of such men and women to consider it anything less than something of great worth and, indeed, beauty. We are all doomed to die, after all, and is it better to die at 80 after living the life of a coward, or die at 20 as the heroic defender of right and justice?
If there are any veterans of the First World War alive, then they are a vanishingly small number of men, none of whom can be less 106 or so. The world - and especially the Judeo-Christian, western world - pondered long over the men who had died in the First World War. It seemed such a tragic thing - so many men like Brooke pushed into a shambles of war, so much promise in so many fields cut short. People recoiled from it, and started looking for scapegoats, and for reasons to justify a desire - craven, at base - to not engage in war anymore, for any reason. Blame was assigned - to the military, to the businessmen, to the goverments; muck was flung, and it hasn't washed off after all this time. Born of that war was the concept that it was a cabal of arms manufacturers who made the war happen - and since that theory was first expressed, we've grown up a whole industry devoted to explaining everything wrong in the world in terms of a nefarious conspiracy. But the world got it wrong.
All of the men who marched off to war in 1914 are dead - both those who died in the war, and all of those who survived it. Death is the universal and the inescapable. Given this, the fact of their deaths - as a physical event - shrinks to nothing...what remains important is what cause they fought for, and whether they performed their duties well. Did the man fight for liberty? Did he do his best for his comrades and his country? Then he did well - and it doesn't matter if he died at Cambrai in 1917, or in a nursing home in 1977.
It is terribly unfair of the world to send men to battle with anything less than a conviction that what they are doing is a good thing - a sublime thing. The men and women we have in our military are willing, perfectly willing, to lay down their lives for us. They don't want to die right now; they hope and pray to come home and live their lives - but when given a choice between coming home a live coward or coming home a dead hero, they choose to be a hero. A few fall by the wayside - we see these cowards in their pathetic hundreds saying they won't do what they volunteered and swore to do - but most just keep right on with it.
I think we need to start honoring our warriors - to start thanking God that with this hour there are matched men and women who will lay aside the petty concerns of the day to day and go forth as heros to protect others from the cruelty and hardness of war. I confess to being tired of the endless parade of "everything is lousy" we get from all too many sections of our society these days. Things are not lousy - not for those who, to take from Brooke, don't have sick hearts and who are moved by honour. We will always have the half-men, but let us start to honour properly the full men - and the full women - who really make our society live, and worth living and dying for.
Posted by Mark Noonan at February 1, 2007 02:38 AM
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Have you no eyes that see? Have you no feeling in your heart for those who have been broken upon the altar of greed? Have you no soul eternal that aches for peace? We rise every morning from hunger and thirst. We rise in hunger for the Truth and thirst for Justice for lives wasted and Souls tortured. It is for these reasons We exist, that Mankind one day might quench Our thirst and sate Our hunger and Terra shall be at Peace over land and sea. Pain, On Reasoning, TerraImmortalis Codex 118, v.1
Posted by:
Cavalor Epthith, Esquire at February 1, 2007 09:32 AM
Wow. Great post, Mark.
I'm sometimes amazed by the synchrony of life. Last night, I was reading:
"The noble person will respect his enemy, and respect is already a bridge to love.... Indeed he requires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction, nor could he tolerate any other enemy than one in whom he finds nothing to despise and much to esteem."
This was written by the church's gadfly, Friedrich Nietzsche, decrying the way that values in his popular culture as received from the church had become nihilistic. A hundred years later, it is the religious and spiritual who see the value of the enemy, the value of conflict, the value in their enemy as a test of their mettle.
The religious and spiritual have overcome the popular nihilism by finding outlets for their life outside of their churches. The liberals have meanwhile sunk inward, seeking out a monastic existence in front of the TV to which they pray. They do not see war as something real and purposeful in its very nature as difficult, they see conflict itself as evil, they see nothing of value in it and thus are the modern nihilists defining their lives by what they oppose, all the while the modern religious and spiritual among us define our lives by the actions we embrace, our happiness, our faith, by what we stand for.
Don't get me wrong, we are wounded by what the terrorists do, but we suffer that wound rather than denying its significance. We embrace the challenge it represents rather than trying to undo the part of ourselves that embraces the guantlet they've thrown down. We accept the will of our enemies to fight rather than pretending it's the consequence of something that somewhere went wrong that can be corrected with enough negotiations and goodwill on our part. The Tao Te Ching talks about how masters must cherish their charges, teachers must cherish their students, and in this way if we affirm life we must embrace our enemies as a gift, not take the other road and feel guilty because we may overcome them.
Posted by: Morris at February 1, 2007 10:11 AM
Mark's words are heavy words. We may serve on the homefront, here in "blogworld", but we serve nonetheless. Just like those who serve "in winter trenches", we also serve, here at home. And we do NOT "sneak home and pray we'll never know" as "soldier lads march by". We DO fight, as well! In many ways, we are not unlike those who shoulder a rifle.
Thanks, Mark. A very eloquent ppost, indeed.
D.
Posted by: d. at February 1, 2007 12:17 PM
Cavalor,
Ah, but Terra is a passing thing; a blink in the eye, as it were. It matters not how or when we die, but how we lived. Of course, I believe in the life of the world to come - to not believe such is to become a half-man, entirely concerned with squeezing every drop out of this world.
Posted by: Mark Noonan at February 1, 2007 12:48 PM
Morris,
It is my view that only the religious can rise superior to the mundane. Lack religion, and eventually the horizons narrow down to a whine about lack of personal comfort. Have religion, and you can go thousands of miles from home to live in miserable conditions where you might get killed at any moment, and still retain good spirits, and a willingness to keep going.
This is not to say that the religious cannot get it wrong - our Islamist enemies are demonstrating, daily, that religion can go very, very wrong...but the fact of the matter remains that it is those who are not in the fight who are the most pathetic specimens of humanity. If there's nothing worth fighting and dying for, then there's nothing worth living for.
Posted by: Mark Noonan at February 1, 2007 12:52 PM
Posted by: Morris at February 2, 2007 09:41 AM
That explains why so many who believe like you Mr Noonan have made themselves so rich while so many more suffer in abject poverty. You and those who think as you do might have your eyes cast heavenward in joyous hope of an Eternal rewards but that does not stop you from making every effort to live like kings while on the verdant face of Terra.
And you so say sweet sooth in your line, "Ah, but Terra is a passing thing; a blink in the eye, as it were. It matters not how or when we die, but how we lived." This is Wisdom incarnate! For this is the bedrock upon which those who wish both a lavish time on Terra and a gold coin in their mouths after death!
As always Ser, it is a pleasure!
Qu'ul cuda praedex nihil!
Posted by:
Cavalor Epthith, Esquire at February 2, 2007 10:40 AM
Great post, Mark--
You do a great service to those currently in harms' way.
May your attitude be multiplied.
Sincerely,
-Leo-
Posted by:
Leo Pusateri at February 2, 2007 10:46 AM
Cavalor:
Well, you certainly have perfected pomposity, spiritual pride and indiscriminate condemnation, not to mention presumption, as your particular virtues. Nice job. All tenth-rate.
The "verdant face of Terra". Your archaisms are amusing, but lend no weight otherwise to a very trite and unfocused intellect. Elaborating trivialities with obsolete locutions belongs in the freshman drama class.
As for moral considerations, your most primitive and, in fact, embarrassingly silly principle that attention to the transcendant is responsible for "abject poverty", disqualifies you, in my view, from any further commentary on the subject. It's just preposterous.
When Marxism and other materialistic philsophies link up with the self-admiring mysticism of the park-corner preacher, this is what you get.
In any case, the post was about how we rationalize war, and the differences in the sleek sacficing mentality of Brooke, up against the stark understandings of Sassoon (and others, among them Robert Graves). As a combat veteran, and the father of three more, I understand and can comprehend the scope of our varying perceptions. My sons do too.
They, unlike you, will not seize upon the ethical complexities to make specious points about social justice.
Posted by: Rhod at February 2, 2007 12:13 PM
And by the way, Cavalor. If you're trying for Dr. Johnson, you sound more like Dr. John.
Posted by: Rhod at February 2, 2007 12:16 PM
Ever the excuse makers for having much and being the "patriot" desirous of sacrificing youth for Imperial dreams. Only those who see no value in life value war. This applies to both the fool in Washington and the fool in Tehran.
As did the Roman before the Sack and the Briton before the saltmakers took over with little violence in India, so too shall you, America, come to Waterloo and have your thirst quenched with the bitter waters of the river that rushes swiftly to bring the lofty low.
Whilst every American should thank you for your service and that of your sons I and mine shall wish for your skills martial to be utilized by those with clearer minds and better souls in the coming age of Humanity.
Qu'ul cuda praedex nihil!
Posted by:
Cavalor Epthith, Esquire at February 2, 2007 07:42 PM
Cavalor,
You mistake my meaning, and I see that my way of putting it makes it easy to do so...when I mean "how we live", what I mean is "did you do the right thing". If you are a decent person, then it doesn't matter if you live in a mud hut in Chad or a beach house in Malibu...
Posted by: Mark Noonan at February 3, 2007 03:08 AM
Cavalor,
And you've got that wrong - we value life as the highest of all things...after all, Our Lord came that we may have life, and have it more abundantly. We disdain death because it holds no terror for us.
Posted by: Mark Noonan at February 3, 2007 03:10 AM
Cavalor:
I'm unimpressed. I've read some of your trash elsewhere, Hellboy. Anyone wishing to understand this guy, Google him.
In spite of all that, a string of fatuous aphorisms nailed together by archaic constructions is not a philosophy. It's a smokescreen.
I'd answer you, but I have no time for buffooons.
Posted by: Rhod at February 3, 2007 06:58 AM
"Only those who see no value in life value war."
Actually, only those who see a value in war value life. War is the difficult, the challenging aspect of life. War brings an end to life and thereby emphasizes the other side of life.
You're trying to define life in a limited way, yet you're falsified by the power of myth. The myth of the 300 spartans, for example, lives on after millenia. Their lives had a power and strength that burns brightly, that is to say they live on in the memories and imaginations of people alive today. It's true their awareness of this world is different, but unless you've died and come back how can you speak for their awareness?
To define a life as ending when a person leaves this world is limited and selfish, for it denies the distinction of heroes who overcome the struggles we would be left to face had they not. Is a mother who dies saving her child not a hero? Does she not value life ever more greatly because her awareness of life goes beyond her self? Is not the person who dies with someone else in mind actually valuing life even more than those who live thinking solely of themselves? But you don't see that. So you'll pardon us if we do not think you are so aware of the nature of life that you can teach us when and where it doesn't exist. Life exists and has value everywhere, whether you like it or not. Just because you can't see it does not mean it doesn't exist (it just means you can't see it).
Posted by: Morris at February 3, 2007 10:32 AM
And something more. To say there is no reason to wage war either denies the obvious that there are people in the world who want other people in the world dead and are intent on making them so, or says that even in the such cases it is better to die and sacrifice my life, my family's lives, my friends' lives rather than sacrifice the idea that I should not kill, not make war. Yet if I am willing to sacrifice this one principle I may save lives, freedoms, oaths, everything but the one idea whose tyranny would have us living under the rule of Nazis or Stalinists or Maoists had we not waged war and been willing to kill so that we may live, so that everything we believe in may live, so that everything we experience may live in us and in those we love. To wage war is to say that there is something worth protecting, worth more than a life. That only seems like a small thing if you do not appreciate the gift of life.
Posted by: Morris at February 3, 2007 02:01 PM
Order Matt and Mark's book on Amazon or Barnes and Noble
Have you no eyes that see? Have you no feeling in your heart for those who have been broken upon the altar of greed? Have you no soul eternal that aches for peace? We rise every morning from hunger and thirst. We rise in hunger for the Truth and thirst for Justice for lives wasted and Souls tortured. It is for these reasons We exist, that Mankind one day might quench Our thirst and sate Our hunger and Terra shall be at Peace over land and sea. Pain, On Reasoning, TerraImmortalis Codex 118, v.1
Wow. Great post, Mark.
I'm sometimes amazed by the synchrony of life. Last night, I was reading:
"The noble person will respect his enemy, and respect is already a bridge to love.... Indeed he requires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction, nor could he tolerate any other enemy than one in whom he finds nothing to despise and much to esteem."
This was written by the church's gadfly, Friedrich Nietzsche, decrying the way that values in his popular culture as received from the church had become nihilistic. A hundred years later, it is the religious and spiritual who see the value of the enemy, the value of conflict, the value in their enemy as a test of their mettle.
The religious and spiritual have overcome the popular nihilism by finding outlets for their life outside of their churches. The liberals have meanwhile sunk inward, seeking out a monastic existence in front of the TV to which they pray. They do not see war as something real and purposeful in its very nature as difficult, they see conflict itself as evil, they see nothing of value in it and thus are the modern nihilists defining their lives by what they oppose, all the while the modern religious and spiritual among us define our lives by the actions we embrace, our happiness, our faith, by what we stand for.
Don't get me wrong, we are wounded by what the terrorists do, but we suffer that wound rather than denying its significance. We embrace the challenge it represents rather than trying to undo the part of ourselves that embraces the guantlet they've thrown down. We accept the will of our enemies to fight rather than pretending it's the consequence of something that somewhere went wrong that can be corrected with enough negotiations and goodwill on our part. The Tao Te Ching talks about how masters must cherish their charges, teachers must cherish their students, and in this way if we affirm life we must embrace our enemies as a gift, not take the other road and feel guilty because we may overcome them.
Mark's words are heavy words. We may serve on the homefront, here in "blogworld", but we serve nonetheless. Just like those who serve "in winter trenches", we also serve, here at home. And we do NOT "sneak home and pray we'll never know" as "soldier lads march by". We DO fight, as well! In many ways, we are not unlike those who shoulder a rifle.
Thanks, Mark. A very eloquent ppost, indeed.
D.
Cavalor,
Ah, but Terra is a passing thing; a blink in the eye, as it were. It matters not how or when we die, but how we lived. Of course, I believe in the life of the world to come - to not believe such is to become a half-man, entirely concerned with squeezing every drop out of this world.
Morris,
It is my view that only the religious can rise superior to the mundane. Lack religion, and eventually the horizons narrow down to a whine about lack of personal comfort. Have religion, and you can go thousands of miles from home to live in miserable conditions where you might get killed at any moment, and still retain good spirits, and a willingness to keep going.
This is not to say that the religious cannot get it wrong - our Islamist enemies are demonstrating, daily, that religion can go very, very wrong...but the fact of the matter remains that it is those who are not in the fight who are the most pathetic specimens of humanity. If there's nothing worth fighting and dying for, then there's nothing worth living for.
Well said, Mark.
That explains why so many who believe like you Mr Noonan have made themselves so rich while so many more suffer in abject poverty. You and those who think as you do might have your eyes cast heavenward in joyous hope of an Eternal rewards but that does not stop you from making every effort to live like kings while on the verdant face of Terra.
And you so say sweet sooth in your line, "Ah, but Terra is a passing thing; a blink in the eye, as it were. It matters not how or when we die, but how we lived." This is Wisdom incarnate! For this is the bedrock upon which those who wish both a lavish time on Terra and a gold coin in their mouths after death!
As always Ser, it is a pleasure!
Qu'ul cuda praedex nihil!
Great post, Mark--
You do a great service to those currently in harms' way.
May your attitude be multiplied.
Sincerely,
-Leo-
Cavalor:
Well, you certainly have perfected pomposity, spiritual pride and indiscriminate condemnation, not to mention presumption, as your particular virtues. Nice job. All tenth-rate.
The "verdant face of Terra". Your archaisms are amusing, but lend no weight otherwise to a very trite and unfocused intellect. Elaborating trivialities with obsolete locutions belongs in the freshman drama class.
As for moral considerations, your most primitive and, in fact, embarrassingly silly principle that attention to the transcendant is responsible for "abject poverty", disqualifies you, in my view, from any further commentary on the subject. It's just preposterous.
When Marxism and other materialistic philsophies link up with the self-admiring mysticism of the park-corner preacher, this is what you get.
In any case, the post was about how we rationalize war, and the differences in the sleek sacficing mentality of Brooke, up against the stark understandings of Sassoon (and others, among them Robert Graves). As a combat veteran, and the father of three more, I understand and can comprehend the scope of our varying perceptions. My sons do too.
They, unlike you, will not seize upon the ethical complexities to make specious points about social justice.
And by the way, Cavalor. If you're trying for Dr. Johnson, you sound more like Dr. John.
Ever the excuse makers for having much and being the "patriot" desirous of sacrificing youth for Imperial dreams. Only those who see no value in life value war. This applies to both the fool in Washington and the fool in Tehran.
As did the Roman before the Sack and the Briton before the saltmakers took over with little violence in India, so too shall you, America, come to Waterloo and have your thirst quenched with the bitter waters of the river that rushes swiftly to bring the lofty low.
Whilst every American should thank you for your service and that of your sons I and mine shall wish for your skills martial to be utilized by those with clearer minds and better souls in the coming age of Humanity.
Qu'ul cuda praedex nihil!
Cavalor,
You mistake my meaning, and I see that my way of putting it makes it easy to do so...when I mean "how we live", what I mean is "did you do the right thing". If you are a decent person, then it doesn't matter if you live in a mud hut in Chad or a beach house in Malibu...
Cavalor,
And you've got that wrong - we value life as the highest of all things...after all, Our Lord came that we may have life, and have it more abundantly. We disdain death because it holds no terror for us.
Cavalor:
I'm unimpressed. I've read some of your trash elsewhere, Hellboy. Anyone wishing to understand this guy, Google him.
In spite of all that, a string of fatuous aphorisms nailed together by archaic constructions is not a philosophy. It's a smokescreen.
I'd answer you, but I have no time for buffooons.
"Only those who see no value in life value war."
Actually, only those who see a value in war value life. War is the difficult, the challenging aspect of life. War brings an end to life and thereby emphasizes the other side of life.
You're trying to define life in a limited way, yet you're falsified by the power of myth. The myth of the 300 spartans, for example, lives on after millenia. Their lives had a power and strength that burns brightly, that is to say they live on in the memories and imaginations of people alive today. It's true their awareness of this world is different, but unless you've died and come back how can you speak for their awareness?
To define a life as ending when a person leaves this world is limited and selfish, for it denies the distinction of heroes who overcome the struggles we would be left to face had they not. Is a mother who dies saving her child not a hero? Does she not value life ever more greatly because her awareness of life goes beyond her self? Is not the person who dies with someone else in mind actually valuing life even more than those who live thinking solely of themselves? But you don't see that. So you'll pardon us if we do not think you are so aware of the nature of life that you can teach us when and where it doesn't exist. Life exists and has value everywhere, whether you like it or not. Just because you can't see it does not mean it doesn't exist (it just means you can't see it).
And something more. To say there is no reason to wage war either denies the obvious that there are people in the world who want other people in the world dead and are intent on making them so, or says that even in the such cases it is better to die and sacrifice my life, my family's lives, my friends' lives rather than sacrifice the idea that I should not kill, not make war. Yet if I am willing to sacrifice this one principle I may save lives, freedoms, oaths, everything but the one idea whose tyranny would have us living under the rule of Nazis or Stalinists or Maoists had we not waged war and been willing to kill so that we may live, so that everything we believe in may live, so that everything we experience may live in us and in those we love. To wage war is to say that there is something worth protecting, worth more than a life. That only seems like a small thing if you do not appreciate the gift of life.