09 November 2003

Crystal Night

Man, this is one intense morning. The cold bites. It is crisp and clear but brittle, like the cold asphalt under my in-line skates. When it is cold the nylon wheels chatter over the hard black tar that only last week was soft and pliant as I sped along. Change of seasons. Time for it, I suppose, approaching the Ides of November. We are on the eve of Krystalnacht, the anniversary of the night of Broken Glass in Hitler's Germany. There are dead soldiers from the 82nd Airborne in Baghdad and there were three massive car-bombs in Riyadh. One or two Americans civilians were killed there, and mostly it was Saudis who favored the relaxed lifestyles of the walled compounds who were killed or injured. Five dead, including two Lebanese children and nearly a hundred wounded. A British trooper was wounded in an incident in Basrah, and all this after the deadliest weeks since all this began.

Last night the moon was as hard and bright as crystal until the shadow of the earth devoured it, turning the brilliant cutting lumen to a dusky orange of banked passion. It flew ghostly, a barely distinct disc in the wispy cob-webbed clouds, returning later, high over the balcony, but smaller, as though diminished by the ordeal, a more distant crystal presence in a deep and chilly velvet night.

I need to get going. I cannot make the direct connection between the horror of the first war and what the Nazis did, wrapped in the cloak of retribution for the unjust defeat. The Nazis were racialist whackos, but they got their chance to do what they did because the burgher-in-the-street wanted his pride back.

But I don't have time to explore that this morning. Damn! It is Sunday and there is already no time! The damned new contract needs to have some sort of work done on it and I need to look interested and I have to draft a White Paper for the meeting late this coming week with Health and Human Services and the VA. But what I want to do is pound something out and go to the office and get it over with. I am thinking 1000- run a load of laundry and write something about the eclipse.

There was a nice piece on Wilfred Owen in the Times this morning. He was the great poet of the trenches who was blown up in the last week of the Great War, which is what they called their first installment of the mini-series of our awful century. The telegram announcing Wilfred's death reached his mother the day of the cease-fire, Nov. 11th, when at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month the slaughter stopped. He had joined up all enthusiastic, but his views became mordant the more he saw of the business of carnage. At the beginning of the war he thought that it was sweet and proper to die for his country. "Dulce et decorum est, pro patrium mori." Something a citizen of a Great Empire would think, just like a Roman.  Later on, after combat fatigue and concussion, he observed a wounded soldier and wrote that he was  "heavy like meat/And none of us could kick him to his feet."

But he was not a pacifist and neither am I. Some things, odious and inelegant as they are, should be completed since the alternative is worse. Try not to lose wars or empires and try to think of any great power that hasn't. The one WWI Vet I knew personally, Pop Metcalf, typified the view. He said there had been a corpse buried in the trench wall where his Ohio unit was posted. Part of him protruded into the narrow passage. In the morning when they went out into the dragon's teeth to relieve the night posts they would shake hands with what was left. And once I saw him deep in a vision as he tried to cook his scrambled eggs. He looked at me in a panic attack, sixty years after it happened. "I couldn't shoot him!" he said. "I couldn't shoot him!"

"It's OK, Pop." I said, helping him put down the skillet. "It's OK."

Anyhow, the Great War was followed only by a strategic pause, our Hundred Years War taking a break.

It is almost a hundred years, dead on. You can make the case that the Friendly Alliance- the Entente Cordial- between old Adversaries British and France was the start of it, making Germany the odd man out. The Brits and the French had been ready to go at it at Fashoda, the crossroads of East Africa as recently as 19895. The Brits were insistent on Cecil Rhoades vision of a British East Africa, Cape to Cairo. The French wanted to break the chain, cutting from the Francophone West to the Indian Ocean. There was an uneasy showdown in the deserts hundreds of miles from anything except sleepy Fashoda. But the French blinked, and withdrew. So the players in the conflict were uncertain right up to the end of the century. There was an agreement between Paris and London that it was the land-power of Germany that was the greatest threat. And so they joined in an alliance, the sons of Napoleon with the sons of Wellington against the heirs fo Blucher, the savior of Waterloo.

It was the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905 that lined out the rosters for the war to come.

France wanted to add Morocco to it's empire so that it might act as a bulwark for the colons in Algeria and acquire the strategic location at the Straits of Gibraltar. Germany, oddly foreshadowing American insistence on freedom of navigation, objected. The Kaiser was building a fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, and Morocco was an opportunity  to test the strength of the Entente. The Entente held, and the Kaiser backed down. War was avoided that year but ill feeling remained. Six years later- another eleven!- French troops in Morocco are attacked by rebels. The Kaiser saw an opportunity and dispatched a gunboat to the little port of Agadir. The German naval building program begun in 1898 was not sufficiently mature. Britain responded by sending the Royal Navy from the main operating base at Malta. Again, Germany had to back down. 

The second Moroccan Crisis was another probe by the Kaiser against the Entente. Because the British reacted with fire-power, Germany escalated the ship building program, reasoning that while Great Britain had a global empire to protect, all Germany had to do was produce a superior number in a single place. Accordingly, fork-bearded Grossadmiral Tirpitz was directed to redouble his efforts to produce a high-seas fleet second to none.

Which reminds me, with all the "elevens" coming around again, I will have to write something about the rail car at Compeign Forest, the one they used for the Germans to capitulate. It was then used as a sort of shrine until 1940, when Hitler ordered it dragged out for the French to capitulate in. I don' know what happened to it after that, blown to peices. It would have been too delicious to use it again. I'll bet the departing Germans dynamited it to make sure.

I am a believer in finishing what you start out to do, particularly if it is brutish and unpleasant. That is why Vietnam sat so uneasily on us. I did my time, gave at the office. I am the furthest thing from a pacifist. But I am thrilled that I don't have to go to Baghdad.

And more than a little apprehensive that my kids are 19 and 21, in the heart of the envelope. I hope they don't get sucked into the machine.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra