Tag: world war i

Posted on

‘The Fateful Game’

Published by the Oakland Tribune late in the summer of 1917 after the American Expeditionary Forces had landed in France to join the war against Germany. It’s a weird combination of nationalistic pride and fantasy: the war as a game in which baseball-playing Americans would enjoy a peculiar advantage in slinging “chunks of death” (grenades) at the enemy. (And we’ll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.)

The text:

That American Base Ball Arm

“They say the French poilus stared when they saw how the Americans could throw a bomb, and no wonder. Who should be able to throw if not the Americans? What was all that baseball for if not to teach the youngsters of the United States how to hurl a missile straight and true? Of course we can’t all be pitchers. The real pitcher will be the star bomber wherever he is placed. But any ball-playing American lad will be able to give a good account of himself when it comes to one of those dramatic crises when a chunk of death must be planted, and planted quickly and accurately, in the enemy’s midst. A world is in the bleachers to watch the fateful game. And what a shout will go up when all “our boys” make their home run!”

Posted on

November 11: The Notebook

Item 1: I’ve wondered to myself at what point I’ll consider deer roaming around central Berkeley as unremarkable as, say, crows. A picture of a deer in the front yard comes to mind, maybe eating some choice vegetation (though the plants in yards to either side of us are probably a lot more delectable). It seems we’re getting pretty close to that day. During our late evening walk, The Dog and I had two encounters with big hooved springing mammals. The first was a little startling as an adult-sized deer bolted from a front yard across the street and make a pretty good racket as it crossed a couple of hedges. Then it did that sproingy run that deer do all the way up the street into the dark. A few blocks away, The Dog got alert to something across the street, and two more deer went clattering up the pavement, paused at the next corner, then hung a right and vanished. I wonder who the next arrivals in the neighborhood will be. Mountain lions looking for a snack? No — coyotes are a lot more likely.

Item 2: Sometime in the last couple months, an old colleague of mine called attention via Facebook to a remarkable series of articles in the Ann Arbor Chronicle–what I’m guessing is an “alternative weekly.” The serial is running under the title “Washtenaw Jail Diary.” The Chronicle hasn’t announced a publication schedule, but a new installment seems to appear every couple of weeks. Elsewhere, I said I look forward to the new chapters the same way mid-19th century Londoners probably looked forward to the next piece of “A Tale of Two Cities.” But this jail diary isn’t fiction. It’s a story of an anonymous 40-something middle-class white guy who gets tossed into the county lockup. What makes the stories riveting is the writer’s skill in narrating his sudden passage from what he took to be “normal life”–telling the boss he’d be in late for work while he takes care of some business–to felony inmate. The Number One asked question about the series: What did the author do to wind up in jail? He hasn’t said yet.

Item 3: It’s November 11th. Veterans Day. Armistice Day. Remembrance Day. An occasion to reflect on a war so monstrously costly that a sequel was unimaginable. Today, we can imagine anything except, perhaps, an end to the killing.

Posted on

Guest Observation: Tom Kettle

Two or three weeks ago in my Irish history class, we were going over the World War I years. One of the things the professor does is weave in poetry and song; he has even sung a song or two despite the palpable discomfort of many of his auditors. For the poetry, his habit is to declaim a stanza or two unless the piece is quite short. During the World War I lecture, he brought in a sonnet by a man well-known in Ireland but little known elsewhere: Tom Kettle.

Kettle was an Irish nationalist of the Home Rule stripe. Meaning: He hoped for an independent Ireland, but supported a campaign to create an Irish government that would still be part of the British Empire. Just as that goal was about to be realized, the European war broke out. When the fighting began, in August 1914, Kettle was in Belgium trying to buy guns for Irish nationalist militias. Instead, he spent several months helping the Belgians in their futile bid to hold off the German onslaught. Prompted largely by what he had seen, he volunteered for service in the British army when he returned home and recruited fellow Irishmen into the ranks. Among radical nationalists, who held to the age-old position that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, Kettle’s position was akin to a sellout. When the nationalists launched the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Kettle was devastated; though in poor health, he asked for a front-line combat position. He was sent to France to join an Irish unit in the Battle of the Somme.

It was there that he wrote “To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God”:

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime,
In that desired, delayed incredible time,
You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby’s throne
To dice with death. And, oh! they’ll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

The poem’s postscript reads: “In the field before Guillemont, Somme. September 4, 1916.” Kettle died leading his troops into action five days later.

Technorati Tags:

Posted on

Today’s Top Research

My foray into matters of Irish Americana tonight has me reading about the Irish community, German Americans, and World War I. Yes: Irish Americans and German Americans made common cause to try to keep the United States out of the war. Ireland’s longstanding grievances against Britain motivated the Irish; support for the Fatherland inspired the Germans. I’ve found lots of interesting and informative stuff on the topic, but I wound up searching the New York Times archives for stories about William Jennings Bryan’s role as an advocate of U.S. neutrality.

I found one precious item from June 1915, a week or so after Bryan had resigned as secretary of State because he could see by President Wilson’s reaction to the Lusitania sinking that his argument didn’t stand a chance in the administration. The item is about a speech that Bryan was supposed to make in Chicago to the Sons of Teutons. The group had invited Bryan, thinking he would inveigh against U.S. ammunition shipments to Britain and France and renew his call for an embargo. But when the Sons of Teutons found out that Bryan instead intended to urge the warring parties to enter peace negotiations, they met him at the train station and said the speech was canceled. At least that was the Times’s version of events.

I came across a more recent item, too: a March 1967 piece by historian Barbara Tuchman (“The Guns of August,” etc.) published in The New York Times Magazine and titled simply, “How We Entered World War I.” I haven’t read Tuchman’s books for decades, but this article is a reminder of why her histories are so accessible: she was a great writer (and yes, a capable historian, too). I found this in her description of the American and German diplomatic struggle over limits to submarine warfare: “Each time during these months when the torpedo streaked its fatal track, the isolationist cry to keep Americans out of the war zones redoubled.”

“… The torpedo streaked its fatal track.” I’ll remember that one for awhile.

Posted on

Eleventh Hour, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Month

Armistice/Veterans/Remembrance Day

“… So they gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed,

And they shipped us back home to Australia.

The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane,

Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla.

And as our ship sailed into Circular Quay,

I looked at the place where me legs used to be,

And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me,

To grieve, to mourn and to pity.

“But the band played ‘Waltzing Matilda,’

As they carried us down the gangway,

But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared,

Then they turned all their faces away. …”

From “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” by Eric Bogle (audio).