World War I: Poetry, Ideology, Society

Sergio Zenere

World War I: Poetry, Ideology, Society Sergio Zenere

Humanities Degree Dissertation (level III) University of Exeter

April 2009 ISBN:978-1-4478-4999-5

FOREWORD This e-book first appeared as an undergraduate degree dissertation titled “World War I: Poetry, Ideology and Doctrine” submitted to the University of Exeter (UK). As submitted to (and evaluated by) the University of Exeter, the dissertation was awarded a mark of “first” according to the University's grading scale. This e-book is considerably larger and represents the dissertation as the the present writer had originally intended it. Some parts had to be edited before submission for no other reason than that of meeting the strict word count the University imposed.

A thank you to the internet publishing company that made possible to bring this e-book to the general public's attention at no cost.

SERGIO ZENERE ISBN 978-1-4478-4999-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword

Page 2

Table of Contents

3

Abstract

4

Introduction

5

Belle Epoque

8

Minions, Victims and Minion-Victims

38

Change

43

The General Atmosphere

50

Victims, Traitors and Watchmen

61

The Four Feathers

67

Conclusion

77

Bibliography

79

ABSTRACT Why did eminent critics sharply reject some war poems? Why did critics and war poets mention opposition between the home and the battle front? Why was the mass of war veterans so disquieted after the war to stand behind the swift of diverse Fascist movements in various European countries? How did a war that seemed just another regional war turn into a geopolitical and social catastrophe comparable to the French Revolution? Why did war poems question the received notions of the socially acceptable? This study explores change in its most abrupt form, which spared nothing raising from the ashes of the unrepentant Belle Epoque positivism. From gender relations to societal fabric and emotional, financial and bodily integrity: the foundation of European civilization was at stake.

What kind of ethos characterized the Victorian/ Belle Epoque era, and why did the war tend to work it out of commission? Romantic militarism, ethics of sacrifice, spiritualism and the occult, homoeroticism, conspiracy theories, martial illusions and gentlemanliness are examined to understand the pressure soldiers were subjected to, as the 1901 novel The Four Feathers will help to understand. The clutch of merciless social ethos is also examined, which tended to cast out and leave behind those who did not conform, as the treatment of neurasthenia and of Italian prisoners of war demonstrates.

INTRODUCTION^*

This study tries to put the era of the first world war ( WWI ) in perspective to

better

analyze

those

times

in

the

tripartite

understanding 1

( Mentality/Ideology/Doctrine) of a then largely unscathed long term mentality, mostly British in the case in point, but largely European as well, coming to terms with and ultimately igniting under the weight of more recent and circumscribed ideologies and doctrines. Furthermore, another goal is to link this to other pertinent readings in an eminently discursive and broadly social and historical analysis. Poetry is here considered in terms of psycho-social artifact and not in terms of versification and artistic value2. Broadly put, this study's purpose is to examine the atmosphere before, during and immediately after WWI; to see what kind of social or cultural pressure and which expectations targeted men (in general) and then soldiers, in order to understand against what exactly many war poets rose indignantly, and why some eminent critics rejected war poems.

The section “Belle Epoque” paints a succinct portrait of the period and its positivist ethos emphasizing continuous progress and thus stability and optimism; optimism whose abrupt end during WWI is the key to understand deeper and longer term socio-political dynamics essentially triggered by disorientation. Decay (decline etc) as ages-old medieval legacy or object of sarcasm in satire acquires new meaning

^ The sign “” indicates quotes from a text, while the sign '' indicates emphasis on my part to mean “so called” or “so to speak”. * Some portions of this text may recur in other publications and/or writing by the same author.

1 I borrow the tripartite account mentality, ideology, doctrine from Moro (1989). Moro applies the tripartite account to French Ancien Régime, but the present writer thinks it suits the topic here well. To give a correct example of such tripartite account, I can cite the mentality (predominant in the United States ) of superposing the interest of the United States with the supposed interests, the “cause” of freedom; within such long-term consideration I can locate the shorter term ideology of the confrontation (ideological, that is ) with the Soviet Union; on a still narrower temporal horizon, within said “ideology of confrontation”, the various doctrines (for example Foster Dulles' Roll Back doctrine in foreign affairs ) persist.

2 All poems are found on JTAP Virtual Seminary website.

through the war and its effects 3, in an era already haunted by spiritualism, occultism, phrenology and aliénisme4, and ancestral revivals that at times took the form of conspiracy theories. It all exploded in the clash between principles championed publicly and the real outcome of a war that basically started as another Victorian war between a clique of consanguineous monarchs over ill-defined interests and ended in a geopolitical and social catastrophe similar to the one the French Revolution had once wrought. “Minions, victims and minion-victims” summarily examines propaganda and the effects on soldiers, juxtaposing it with the war poets' critique and denunciation of the war's horror; the role of homoeroticism in its long-term legacy -and in its new dimensions related to war- is also discussed. The section “Change” goes to the core of the debate analyzing various forms of abrupt, disquieting change that the war brought about; change that war poets never stop emphasizing and that was all the more shocking considering the apparent stability of the European order. Change deeply affected gender relations, with women being enlisted en masse to keep war economies fed at home; it also saw fringe female militant groups entering in a unholy alliance with a 'sexist' regime to advance their cause 'helping out' in various police and enforcement roles: such changes could only disquiet the mass of veterans who had been indoctrinated into championing a 'traditional' society. The Victorian ruling classes were basically working their own ethos out of business by fueling and funding (as a war strategy) a series of '...isms' they'd later identify with their ultimate nemesis. “The general atmosphere” starts with Yeats' severe rejection of some war poems to discuss the abode of the 'socially acceptable and recommended' that Yeats championed and some war poems seemed to challenge. The role of wartime propaganda and its overtone of crusade is discussed; the dynamics behind the Italian and American intervention are summarily discussed as well. A discussion of “romantic militarism”, “gentlemanliness” and “rhetorics of sacrifice” follows, interspersed with comments on the tragic results of 3 For thorough -yet general- discussions of war and war psychology, see Eliminating the Causes of War , no date and Jones (2006).

4 The original French name for psychiatry.

war: men who fail to conform5 to social expectations are cast out and opposition between the home and battle front brews. Next, “Victims, traitors and watchmen” examines neurasthenia and the social and medical attention paid to the phenomenon.

Stern social discipline is also mentioned, equating (mentally) ill soldiers and war prisoners with cowards and malingerers: case in point, Italian prisoners of war cast out, maligned and abandoned to death by starvation in foreign camps. “The Four Feathers” discusses Mason's extremely successful novel in the broader light of propaganda and the clutch of social norms; under the veneer of heroic escapades of colonial undertones detailing the fall from grace and subsequent redemption of a British officer hides the most powerful and merciless form of conformism, which is what war poems target with their macabre realism, once again documenting the opposition between home and battle front.

5 Still (especially?) to this day discrepancies in the interpretation of the wartime patriotic register lead to heated discussions, see Taras (1995) detailing the debate around Canadian documentary films on WWII in 1992.

BELLE EPOQUE The mentality of the Belle Epoque is typically Victorian, with a pronounced emphasis on positivism and ultimately progress as slow but steady race towards the best of all worlds, and romantic images are very popular in the antipodal rendition of romantic ideas: Victorian “bumptious -...- [optimism] exemplifying achievement without moral responsibility”6 ;”J. R. McCulloch, for example, underwrites the unregulated, industrialized market with statistics that suggest that England is possessed of inexhaustible supplies of resources -...-. Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale promised that national cleanliness would eradicate disease, dissent and disorder” 7; Darwinian eugenics also was an accepted way to look at society 8 . For one, Twain could convey in 1897 that more progress had been made during Queen Victoria's life than throughout the entire English history. As a mere example, readers may consider the ballet/theater performance Excelsior in Italy; this extremely elaborate, lavish, popular extravaganza remained on stage from 1881 (in 1913 a movie would be filmed) to the beginning of WWI. It celebrated never ending progress, technology and growth; the city of London -for one- grew from 2 million inhabitants in 1837 to about 6 in 1901; the success of the popular press skyrocketed. All this in an epoch otherwise haunted by great poverty and epidemics:”Spurred by cholera epidemics, and building on the evaluation of individuals’ productive capacity in terms of health and longevity that political economy had naturalized, sanitarians and medics began to conceive the population as an entity subject to certain common influences on mortality and morbidity”9 . Nuvoli (2005) argues that the ballet Excelsior represented/catered to the socio-economic interests, the intellectual horizon and the situation of wealthy bourgeoisie10, thus embodying a new aesthetic preferring (arti)facts to mere ideas: 6 7 8 9 10

Fishwick 1959:278.

Freedgood 2000:3.

Young 1980.

Gilbert 2004:9. “ L’idea è sostituita con il fatto; al posto dell’idea del bello si pone l’opera d’arte, al posto della metafisica i fatti storici. E’ una società che comincia a trovare una propria identità all’interno degli eventi, soprattutto di quelli

another cosmogony celebrating progress, whose success warranted a tournée in various foreign countries, including the USA, Austria, Russia: In the Victorian period, as in our own time, with the rise of the intelligent machine human beings came to worry that they were little different from the complex machines of their age. The Victorians began to imagine themselves as intricate self-regulating mechanisms and as energy-generating engines. -...- No single event so epitomizes the Victorian celebration of the machine as does the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations that opened in the center of London in 1851” (Sussman 2009:38,54).

Among others, the beginning of the century (1908) saw for example the discovery of a full skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex, which made its debut on film in 1915: science, inquiry and thus rational understanding seemed unstoppable. It is actually important to discuss this because readers can make no sense of the disorientation, trauma and ultimate loss WWI caused if they do not understand the stability and optimism that came (abruptly) to a bitter end.

Nevertheless, German communities were undergoing rapid cultural polarization, especially in the Austrian Empire. The German ruling class felt increasingly outnumbered in a multinational Empire facing mounting pressure from various groups that vastly outnumbered ethnic Germans. Furthermore, German bureaucracy in the Austrian Empire had to start functioning more and more in grandiosi come le Esposizioni Universali. Questi eventi cominciano a determinare un gusto, una classe sociale nelle sue espressioni di vita, in quelle artistiche, nel suo modo di essere, di concepirsi, di rapportarsi al mondo. La classe borghese trova nello spettacolo, nel pubblico, nella merce, i fondamenti della propria ideologia, ed in questi elementi si ritrova rappresentata, pur essendone al contempo attrice principale. In questo meccanismo di contemporaneità fra il ruolo di attore e quello di spettatore, diventa preponderante il “colpo d’occhio” che vuole aggredire, che vuole determinare. E’ qui che si possono ritrovare i germi stessi della consapevolezza e delle potenzialità di un immaginario visivo. Il teatro diventa luogo significativo dell’arte borghese, luogo prediletto di una società che ha bisogno di vedere e di farsi vedere. -...- Excelsior nasce all’interno di una classe privilegiata: si rivolge alla borghesia ricca della Milano di fine Ottocento. Manzotti è un coreografo al servizio della monarchia e della classe dominante, quella stessa che in fin dei conti frequentava i teatri e che nello spettacolo amava identificarsi. Excelsior, in fondo, è l’autocelebrazione di quella società che, grazie al progresso da lei sostenuto, è convinta di aver creato i presupposti per una vita migliore. L’Oscurantismo è tutto ciò che, fino allora, ha impedito lo sviluppo tecnologico, ha provocato l’arretratezza, l’ignoranza, cose da sconfiggere e che la società borghese del Nord industriale crede di avere finalmente vinto. ” (Nuvoli 2005:no page )

languages other than German; non-German clergymen were also called to pastor German churches. As a result of this unease, German cultural associations flourished and Pan-germanism -the idea that advocated the reunion of all Germans under one political authority- gained new momentum: German communities in the Austrian Empire could have probably felt on the verge of either assimilation or annihilation 11.

There is no doubt that Zionism flourished in the supercharged atmosphere of cultural and ancestral revival (for example: rediscovering the runes; Richard Wagner's legacy, etc ) typical of German communities and constituted the Jewish alternative to German ancestral movements preaching various doctrines of blood and soil in a mixture of theosophy, occult beliefs etc. Set aside the influence of XVIII century Gothic and libertine literature, Hillard12

contends that folk tales and legends saturated the

Victorian era, being remodeled to stand for various anxieties. The motif of death was also a subject of choice in Victorian fiction 13, and such a representative author as T.Hardy “depicts a universe in which humankind is cursed from birth, resides on a cursed earth and is denied the possibility of salvation or redemption� 14 . At any rate, those are not just the conjectures of our day's critics, for one wrote in 1914: [Hardy's Satires of Circumstance embodies ] the tragedies of whole lives and the long fatalities of human relationships [that] seem to stand revealed-...- [almost as] the turning-point in a realistic psychological novel -...-. the melancholy of regretful recollection, of bitter speculation, of immortal longings unsatisfied -...-. If there is joy in these pages, it is joy that is long since dead; and if there are smiles, they are sardonical. -...- the desolation is complete (Strachey, cited in Cox 1979:443-446).

As a matter of fact, WWI and the preceding period were true laboratories of social alchemy and psychical surgery.

11 Isac (no date:10) presents a ethnographic map of the Empire in 1910: Germans: 24% (presumably includes the Jewish communities ); Czech: 13%; Italian 2%; Hungarian 20%; Slovak 4%; Slovene 2%; Polish 10%; Romanian 6%; Croat/Serb 11%; Ruthenian 8%.

12 2004.

13 Stewart 1983.

14 Stotko 2003:no page.

But there was a radical and perilous ambiguity -...- in two ways -...-. on the one hand, it suggested [romanticism] , as both an aesthetic and a moral aim for the individual, the effort to enter as fully as possible into the immensely various range of thought and feeling in other men. It thus made for the cultivation, not merely of tolerance, but of imaginative insight into the points of view -...-, the subjective experiences of others -...-. but the idealization of diversity -...- thus led also to a conscious pursuit of idiosyncrasy, personal, racial, national -...-. (Lovejoy 1936:304-310) 15 Paul Fussell (1975-1)16 establishes a direct filiation between contemporary “situational irony”17, Bildungsroman – the present writer adds - with its terminally ill, mentally unstable or otherwise tormented and oftentimes doomed (anti)heroes, and an attitude surfacing later in war poems and reaching – so the present writer supposes – centuriesold depths reminiscent of medieval “death dances”, ever present death imagery 18 , and related obsession with decay in both bodily and spiritual form that dated back from the epidemics19 that had culled over time a huge percentage of the European population.

Actually, astute “situational irony” was just another way to deconstruct commonly held beliefs and attitudes and to announce to the world that “the Emperor was naked”. The Victorian/Belle Epoque's collective psyche was also haunted by a threat more dangerous and closer to home: Krumm20 establishes a parallel between the fear of what is 'other' 15 “ But there was a radical and perilous ambiguity -...- in two ways -...-. on the one hand, [romanticism] suggested , as both an aesthetic and a moral aim for the individual, the effort to enter as fully as possible into the immensely various range of thought and feeling in other men. It thus made for the cultivation, not merely of tolerance, but of imaginative insight into the points of view -...-, the subjective experiences of others -...- as recognition of the objective validity of diversities of valuation -...-. for the artist -...- romantic poetry -...- must be universal, not -...- seeking uniformity of norms and universality of appeal, but in -...- aiming at the apprehension and expression of every mode of human experience -...-. but the idealization of diversity -...- thus led also to a conscious pursuit of idiosyncrasy, personal, racial, national -...-. by 'individuals' Schleiermacher elsewhere explains, he does not mean solely persons; there are also collective individuals, such as races, nations, families and sexes“ (Lovejoy 1936:304-310).

16 cfr chapter 1, pp.3-35. Fussell refers to T. Hardy's poems Satires of Circumstance (1914).

17 Fussell (1975-2, no page ) further defines satire of circumstances in terms of “situational irony” to handle capital concepts such as death.

18 Kiening 1995, passim.

19 “L'explication la plus courante pour la reproduction extraordinaire des cadavres et des squelettes se réfère aux catastrophes épidémiques comme la peste noire par lesquelles le Bas Moyen Age était profondément ébranlé” Kiening 1995:1160 20 La hantise quasi-obsessionnelle de la syphilis est un topos repris par maints auteurs qui, tous, respectent le tabou nominatif. -...- La syphilis, documentée pour la première fois à l'orée du XVIe siécle, prend rapidement des

seen as a 'beast within' and the obsessive fear of syphilis, an illness that was spreading like wildfire.

Decay epitomizes best what was happening, unbeknown to the masses. It is difficult not to equate with decay the descriptions of disabled veterans in Owen's 'Mental Cases' or 'Disabled' (in JTAP 1996); or, if we prefer, decay takes the form of a never ending “purgatory” to atone for the sin of having served the 'best of all causes' that turned men into grotesque shadows.

The theme of the three dead and three living men connects the horrible motif of putrefaction with that of the death-dance. -...Anyhow, the dance of the dead has been acted as well as acted and engraved. The duke of Burgundy had it performed in his mansion at Bruges in 1449 (Huizinga 1972:140)21 More precisely, we can say that the mobilized and hyperactive society exhibits three features that need to be examined: the suspension of civility, the role of the vanguard, and the subordination of civilians (Borgmann 1992:14).

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?

Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked? (W.Owen, 'Mental Cases' in JTAP 1996, lines 1-4) proportions calamiteuses; la maladie est d'autant plus virulente qu'elle est nouvelle. -...-Elaine Showalter affirme, chiffres à l'appui, que la dernière décennie du XIXe siècle est l'age d'or de la syphilis: en 1880 on recense 5000 nouveaux cas par an à Paris. En 1900 20% de la population male serait atteinte, en 1902 l'estimation est à un million de cas. -...-Dans The Literature of Terror, David Punter constate que "the discovery of Darwin combined with psychological developments produced.., a fear that the Other thus postulated may relate to the bestial level which evidences human continuity with the animal world. '' Ce dont l'homme a peur c'est de la réapparition de cette bete (Krumm 1995:6-9) 21 “The theme of the three dead and three living men connects the horrible motif of putrefaction with that of the death-dance. This theme, too, seems to have originated in France, but it is unknown whether the pictorial representation preceded the scenic or the reverse. The thesis of monsieur Emile Masle, according to which the sculptural and pictorial motifs of the fifteenth century were supposed as a rule to be derived from dramatic representations, has not been able to keep its ground, on critical examination. It may be, however, that we should make an exception in favour of the death-dance. Anyhow, the dance of the dead has been acted as well as acted and engraved. The duke of Burgundy had it performed in his mansion at Bruges in 1449 “ (Huizinga 1972:140 ).

Paul Fussell devotes a sub-chapters to “threes” (1975:125 ) to discuss the importance of the number three in the war.

Spiritualism ( along with occultism and esotericism ) also played a significant role in setting the atmosphere in the Victorian and Belle Epoque era. While the Victorian-

Belle Epoque era is typically associated with an ethos of male dominance (with the pathetic imagery this might warrant), Cames22 argues that secret societies were especially appealing to men as a way to escape the overwhelming power of women inside the household.

As a matter of fact, esotericism and spiritualism returned in the works and in the message of various cultural groups and societies, often headed by self-proclaimed seers, psychics and mystics dabbling in prophecies of all kinds, igniting “fire in the minds of men”23 with various slogans, images24 and bandwagon appeals, a strategy that their heirs still love to adopt these days; scientific interest in 'occult' phenomena was also present.

There was a resurgence of the occult in the late nineteenth century that was associated with thinkers and movements that are modern and modernist in anyone’s canon. The occult was a part of what we broadly call the revolt against rationality and of the crisis of liberalism -...-. Popular culture had no such scruples. New journals expounded a great variety of old and new occult traditions, there were some two hundred clubs in small towns as well as major cities; six hundred mediums worked in Berlin alone, and mail-order businesses sprang up in response to all this activity.Everywhere, but especially in Germany, the occult was allied with science and plagued by fraud, science’s evil doppelganger, from the start (Laqueur 2006:111-114).

22 1989.

23 Commenting on the Hindu tradition and the image of fire, Joseph Campbell explains:”life comes out of death, create death and you create life -...- the world is an ever burning fire: feed that fire” (1989:episode the sacred source).It can apply (in both positive and negative form) to any group of zealots into any kind of pursuit. Often attributed to Dostoevsky, the phrase “fire in the minds of men” is also found in Richard Baxter's Christian Directory (1673):”atheism, which leaveth the heart free and open to all designs and desires of rebellion, doth kindle that fire in the minds of men, which government cannot quench -...- it poisoneth the heart of commonwealths”.

24 Thinking of imagery having made long journeys, the rose (or the western equivalent of the eastern lotus) is a symbol of spiritual alchemy and ensuing realization, from medieval Roman de la Rose to freemasonry.

Case in point, the '1.000 years Reich' was not the offhand invention of

German

crackpots, but a German adaptation of widespread Christian beliefs predicating the return of Christ and an earthly kingdom of his to last 1.000 years before the final judgment. Before that, Plato25 had posited that before going on to rebirth, souls are either rewarded or punished for their lives for a period of 1.000 years, and so on and so forth. Another popular prophecy after WWI announced the rise of a 'German messiah' of unspecified background; this was just another edition of the ever-present longing for a leader that will lead the faithful out of the present predicament, whether it be the dire years after WWI, the heavy taxes that burdened the medieval peasant, etc. In many cases the messiah would represent a return or reincarnation of a traditional hero (king Arthur26, the emperor Redbeard, Charlemagne, Marko King of Serbia...) considered to be meta-historically “asleep” in some sacred place 27 but ready to help his kin in times of high distress: this concept was generously applied to the fallen heroes of WWI as well28. SS leader and brand manager Heinrich Himmler is said to have believed in his 'mission' to vindicate some prophecies of Georg von Lanz about a war to the East; he is also said to believe he was the reincarnation of Saxon King Henry I. When all else fails, messiahs can be purposefully 'manufactured'29 as tools of political intrigue, as the cases of many medieval spurious royalties and mystics shows 30. The motif lives on in our day when this or that unspeakable war criminal, movie or rock star officially declared dead is 'spotted' in some obscure place (or several at the same time); the reverse also unfolds - albeit less frequently- when this or that public personality is 25 In the so-called “myth of Er” -a soldier who had come back to life to explain how the afterlife worked- in the book X of the Republic.

26 According to Joseph Campbell (1989: where there was no path ), archeology documents how Arthur himself was already object of devotion in the Pyrenees region during the first century CE. 27 Lecuppre 2003.

28 “The resource of medieval funerary statuary was mobilized with recumbent figures of soldiers to visualize the ‘sleeping dead’.4 In 1916, the art gallery of Mannheim in Baden organized a well-received exhibition about war graves and war memorials that afterwards toured Germany -...-. Consider Munich’s ‘sleeping warrior’ unveiled in December 1924. In harmony with the inscription, ‘THEY SHALL RISE AGAIN’, the speaker of the Bavarian Veterans’ Association pictured the imminence of national regeneration” Goebel 2004:488-92.

29 Prominent contemporary philosopher Krishnamurti was by all accounts the 'manufactured messiah' of the theosophical society 30 Lecuppre 2006.

rumored to have died, being thus replaced by a substitute.

Other 'occult' leaders -such as Weisthor31 and Eckart32- are found behind the scenes of the rising NSDAP regime. Laqueur writes about Weisthor: he was a certified nut. Already institutionalized once in the 1920s he went mad again and was relieved of his duties although not before he was charged with investigating the proposals of another occultist, Edgar Julius Lang, one of Franz von Pappen’s speechwriters, who though that the SS should found a secret order to work toward a new Teutonic Holy Roman Empire. (2006:116).

The pan-german and occultist scene in many cases also harbored antisemitism of old: Antisemitism is a related case in point : In medieval texts, hatred of Jews was religiously formulated; in the "scientific age it was not discarded but reformulated "scientifically," as a racial [and socioeconomic, too] theory. When such theories were discredited, antiJewish sentiment did not disappear but reverted to its ancient, political form. (Goodman 1993:101).

Kellogg (no date:1) offers what Hagemeister (2008) terms a “countermyth” by exposing “ the crucial influence that extreme right-wing “Russian” émigrés in collaboration with

völkisch (racist) Germans exerted on the development of Nazi ideology ”, or the RussoGerman racist conspiracy. In England and elsewhere, 'occult lodges' were well represented, too, and an 'occult' international network existed; Rudolph Hess's fruitless trip to England was said to be intended as a way to rekindle such 'occult', off-the-record Anglo-German network. For example, the idea of European culture as emanation of “aryan”33 culture of immemorial eastern origin was for a long time subject of posh and mainstream academic and cultural discussion all over the European world, before 31 Karl Maria Willigut, known under various pseudonyms, was a colonel in the Austrian army during WWI. Convinced he possessed mystical powers (which he credited to his mythologized Aryan origin) and involved in all sorts of 'occult' pursuits and investigations, is referred to as prominent member of the SS along with all-powerful leader Himmler. It is also said Willigut was behind the runic inscriptions on the mandatory SS ring.

32 Dietrich Eckart is credited with claiming that Hitler was 'dancing', but to his (Eckart's) tune.

33 The most popular translation of the term include “noble” and “born again”.

distressed scholars after WWII turned the concept into the discredited voodoo doll of pseudo-science only charlatans would take seriously. It is also opportune to emphasize how these people and the ideas they championed did not just spring into existence at some point, especially after WWI, but had a personal history that stretched back decades (in the case of individuals) and centuries (in the case of ideas).

Oliveira Carneiro34 analyzes the relation between 'the fantastic' and the concept of altered states of consciousness/madness/deviance in the late nineteenth century: phrenology, hypnosis, aliénisme (the early designation of psychiatry) etc in turn dealing with and trying to make sense of nightmares, somnambulism and -broadly speaking- madness and sexuality. Understandably, hypnosis “fascinated deeply the scientific and literary elites in France during the years 1880 and 1890” 35. The treatment of

(real or presumed) psychological illness/deviance in women through surgical

intervention on the genital area, and/or using extreme sexual stimulation 36 was accepted medical practice37, well before psychoanalysis emphasized sexuality's omnipresent driving role (as a force to control through social conformism for Freud, or to accept and unleash for Reich38). As a matter of fact, repression of sexuality and autoerotism (condemned under the the biblical but incorrect designation of onanism 39) dated back a long time; chastity belts to prevent autoerotism were commonly sold: even early luminaries such as French scientist Tissot had 'scientifically' condemned ( L'Onanisme, 34 1994.

35 “É sabido que o recurso à hipnose como cura da histeria desencadearia igualmente na França dos anos 80 a 90 um verdadeiro fascínio nas elites literárias e científicas.” Oliveira Carneiro 1994:1 36 British physician Granville patented in 1883 an electromechanical vibrator that would soon become very popular as a device for autoerotism, whether 'medical' or otherwise, which Graville condemned. Already by 1900, a collection of electromechanical vibrators was presented to the Exposition Universelle. By around 1905 these devices were offered wholesale to the public on some popular magazines, making it to the Sears-Roebuck catalogue in 1918.

37 The (in)famous docteur Guerin had 'cured' young girls affected by onanism by burning their clitoris with a hot iron. Influential docteur Zambaco (future commandeur de la légion d'honneur ) had in 1882 published his considerations (and relative 'treatment') regarding female autoerotism in the psychiatric review L'Encephale, 38 At Anna Freud's behest, Jewish-Austrian thinker Reich was cast out of the mainstream psychoanalytic circles, and later commingled his scholarly investigations of Marxist psychoanalysis with eccentric and dubious pursuits related to the accumulation of sexual energy, UFOs, etc that landed him in jail, where he died.

39 Onanism designates coitus interruptus according the the biblical story of Onan.

1760) autoerotism (hence sexuality) as possibly lethal practice, thus medicalizing erstwhile sins. The Victorian era therefore teemed with more or less medicalized, and more or less clandestine obsessions with various forms of sexuality. A French scholar explains: Some general comments on the magnetic scene in mid-19th century France. Between 1821 and 1842, animal magnetism, and especially clairvoyant powers, had provoked a fierce controversy that turned the Academy of medicine into a battlefield. From the study of magnetic lucidity, the pro-magnetic side expected a great progress in the understanding of human nature. But on the anti-magnetic side, the physicians were afraid that such a study might encourage a return to the dark ages of ignorance and superstition, and dismissed all the facts as mere tricks. In 1842, after a vote, the Academy of medicine decided that, from now on, any study on animal magnetism would be systematically rejected. It signed a death warrant on all this field of research. Of course, such an official decision was unable to hinder the magnetic current, which kept on developing in French society. But the physicians who wanted to study somnambulistic states did so at their own risk. Rejected by official science, and by those who should study it, the magnetic powers were appropriated by jurists, writers, theologians, philosophers, left-wing agitators, right-wing nostalgists. This strange state of consciousness, that psychology could not understand in the mid-19th century, and is still unable to decipher, became an exciting subject for those who rejected the current state of human knowledge and French society (emphasis added).

Meheust (2007:2) The

riddle

of

mysterious

cultures,

impending

and

sudden

renewal/doomsday, sacred missions, earlier epochs and lost knowledge under the public eye of 'ancestral tradition' returned in motifs of initiation. Self-proclaimed clairvoyant madame Blavatsky in 1888 published The Secret Doctrine detailing the presumed knowledge gathered during a journey to Tibet, during which mysterious monks had shared the esoteric knowledge about the nature of the universe contained in a sacred book; it is no coincidence that decades later, NSDAP SS Ahnenerbe ( a research group devoted to uncovering the ancestral legacy) would organize trips to several 'occult'

locations, including Tibet, Iceland and so forth40. If early phrenologists and aliénistes had been probing the vortex of the individual psyche in order to understand, detect and eradicate (or control) what to them constituted deviance and illness in the name of what to them constituted the generally accepted criteria of normalcy, so did others with the collective unconscious and the underlying community.

The swastika itself is also worth pausing over briefly. Quite (un)surprisingly, the first swastikas were seen on the planes or uniforms of Freikoerper -that is troops recruited -in the immediate war's aftermath- among defeated German forces to try to rebuff the communist revolution- much as swastikas similar to the later NSDAP ones were the official symbol of WWI British National War Savings Committee. Popular theories voiced by various 'accredited' intellectuals explain the 'swastika turned to the right' in esoteric terms as NSDAP's attempts to summon the forces of evil for help. A cursory analysis of the historical forms of yet another solar symbol 41 reveals that these theories might be driven by more than just scholarly zeal. The swastikas of British

National War Savings Committee are -indeed- turned to the right and so is the swastika on legal tender issued by the Russian Menshevik government, which was socialist and progressivist in orientation. A website (' 18 old-timey...', no date) shows various pictures of youth sport teams before WWII wearing

right-turning swastikas on their

uniforms:”Once upon a time, it was as common a symbol to see on a team uniform as the five-pointed star is now” (Ibid).

Well before Freud popularized the motifs of Oedipus, the Sphinx and related conundrums, several known authors (Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Ada Leverson, Janet Achurch...) had already made wholesale use of the same along lines very different from Freud's42. That fits perfectly within the spirit of the times, as the British had 40 That is the kind of pursuit that is vulgarized in the Indiana Jones kind of movies.

41 According to Joseph Campbell, the swastika “represents the four points of the compass, the cross of the Earth in movement” (1989: episode and we washed our weapons in the sea ), discussing Mesopotamian pottery.

42 Debelius 2000.

(around 1880) taken military control over Egypt, and the human psyche had always been haunted by eerie, zoo- and teratomorphic 43 creatures (among which the dragon, the sphinx, the chimera...), often the custodians of great wisdom/treasures, and often in the position of asking impossible questions to an endangered, shivering, clueless mortal, as it was already the case with the Egyptian book of the dead at the dawn of civilization44.

Witch hunts kept well alive in war or high distress time are those informing that enemies (aliens, spy syndicates, collaborators, members of certain groups or classes...) are surreptitiously conducting sabotage, preparing a riot (coup, invasion...), and/or spreading poisonous agents45. Sensational books -allegedly based on 'leaked secret documents' detailing the enemy's master plan- denounced for example

Hindenburg's March into London (1916). Dabbling in prophecies, and thus paving the way to conspiracy theories and to wild goose chases after the true culprit or originators behind such schemes, could have unexpected (and terrible) results, yet it dated back several centuries with secret societies across the entire political spectrum being chased by their foes, most notably the feuds between the secret societies of the XVIII and XIX century on the opposed ends of the political spectrum. It dated even farther back into 43 Zoomorphism refers to the shaping of some -typically sentient- living being into animal form or terms.

Teratomorphism refers to hybridism, to composite creatures resulting from the fantastic conflation of different animal, physical and metaphysical forms, such as dragons, chimeras and sphinxes. Much older examples are also common, such as the paleolithic sorcier des trois frères (France), a creature with human and animal characteristics (wolf, owl, deer, bison...opinions differ). Such eerie creatures are at times referred to as (shamanic) animal masters, and are not confined to the animistic and/or pagan world: a XIII century Dominican manuscript mentions the peasant cult devoted to thaumaturge saint Guinefort, a dog that saved his master's infant son from a serpent but was killed in error because the master assumed him to be the attacker. The same story recurs in Indian panchatantra (several centuries BCE): in that case the faithful animal is a mongoose, a sort of ancient Rikki Tikki Tavi. On the other hand, St. Christopher martyr is at times portrayed as St Christopher kunokephalos (with the head of a dog). J.Campbell (1989:episode and we washed our weapons in the sea ) discusses the Catal Huyuk Turkish archeological site (about 10.000 BCE) and the presence of 'mother goddess' figures giving birth to bullheaded figures to mean rebirth in a lunar cosmology (the horns of the Moon; the Moon's cyclical rebirth, etc).

44 The very concept of 'books of the dead' revolved in fact around the suggestion of the 'right' answer to the gods' questions at different moments of the otherworldly quest for immortality: for example, one had to answer the questions of a series of gate-keeping teriomorphic serpent-gods in order to proceed; it isn't by chance that the soul that would fail the supreme test was doomed to be fed to Ammit, a demon with the head of a crocodile, the fore quarter of a lion, and the hind quarter of a hippopotamus.

45 Bird 1979:180ss.

immemorial time with the enemy (of the day, of course!) representing the quintessential trickster adapted to whichever actual situation (for example, Germany's false pacifism; the Soviets and their fifth column of domestic agitators; Judaeo-masons and their 'master plans' etc): Trickster is eternally scavenging for food [in modern terms it might be power, money, stock profits....], exhibiting an unbelievable appetite [schizophrenic behaviour] that places him in precarious situations. Trickster has childlike qualities [Germans, Soviets, Judaeo-masons etc as butt of many jokes] , but in other narratives, he is also the father of the people and a potent conductor of spiritual forces in the form of sacred dreams [Germans, Soviets, Judaeo-masons etc as a powerful force to contend with]. He represents the basest instincts, but attacks situations with cunning.

-...- Trickster plays tricks and is the victim of tricks [Germans, Soviets, Judaeo-masons etc victims of their plans when they backfire]. The trickery of such stories extends as well to symbolic play regarding cultural forms, rules, and worldview. -...- selfabsorption, and love of mischief--cruel and vividly silly--make him both unpredictable and potentially dangerous. At the opposite end of the spectrum, his endless foolishness catches him in one disastrous trap after another, making him a laughingstock before all, humans and deities. (Hempel 2004:3-4).

It is the almost animistic minuet of myths and counter-myths, cosmogonies and counter-cosmogonies46 with 'bad' or 'good guys' at the center. It is a fact that the NSDAP regime waged war on freemasonry, and even organized a grandiose exhibit of materials confiscated around lodges in occupied territories; this in spite of the hard time anyone might have trying to draw a clear line between the 'occult' NSDAP background (and the secret societies it included) and freemasonry, rosicrucianism and other brotherhoods based on spiritual (and ensuing social) alchemy 47. Furthermore, well 46 Literally the 'purposeful generation of an entire universe' of... for example, the police state apparatus and relative laws being created by 'the good guys' to make the world safe 'for the good cause' (whatever that is). Of course, the counter-mythology (or 'rational account of a story originally handed down by word of mouth') might relay how 'the bad guys over there' always found new ways to oppress and possibly murder others under offhand pretexts that are just too ridiculous in their perversity to be rationally considered.

47 A rosicrucian manifesto-documentary (Alptekin 2002) still extolled the credo of making the world a better place by making ourselves better people. Of course, the documentary preaches world governments and other 'solutions'

before Freud's disciple Jung popularized the item, a German ethnologist and physician, Adolf Bastian, had already conducted extensive field research on aboriginal societies distilling the concept of collective unconscious and 'psychic unity of mankind' (around 1868)48. The writer/poet/pamphleteer thus rekindled his ties with the ancient seers, half prophets, half madmen, grappling this time not with minotaurs, harpies and so forth, but with the abyss of the human psyche, in both individual and ancestral/collective form.

The “warrant for genocide”, as Norman Cohn describes the Protocols of the

Elders of Zion or the archetypal Judaeo-masonic conspiracy text, was a mixture of plagiarism and hoax assembled around 189549 in order to discredit liberalism, possibly under the care (or in the entourage) of general Rachkovsky of the Czarist secret police (okhrana, Paris bureau) engaged in counter-revolution also by fielding provocateurs and spies50

recruited among radicals. On the other hand, P.A. Taguieff51 blames the

Catholic Church for basically making the Protocols possible, and Dughin suggests the real author might be the occultist Papus 52. Bar-Yosef and Valman inform that “the calling into question of Jewish national loyalties at the time of the Eastern Question crisis and the South African War, as well as the popular and organized hostility to Jewish immigration, were situations that highlighted ‘what was regarded as the essential incompatibility of certain Jewish and British interests’.”53 . Apparently, the

Protocols were engineered from a polemic pamphlet targeting in 1864 the regime of Napoleon III (Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel ) usually attributed

48 49

50 51 52 53

typically associated with the freemasonic worldview, as they identify freemasonry as an emanation of the much older rosicrucianism, in turn tracing its roots back to Egyptian mystery religions. Yet, it is not difficult to see the same alchemical imagery NSDAP, too, embraced.

Examining how the same myths and practices recur in distant and unrelated cultures, with less important local variations.

Regarding date of publication of the Protocols, opinions differ. Bar-Yosef and Valman (2009:11) claim that they were first published in Russian in 1903, while other dates put forth are 1897, 1905, 1921...some authors as well seem to refer to 'versions' other than 'the' Protocols as generally known.

Kronenbitter, no date, no page.

French researcher Taguieff also argues the Protocols appeared in French around 1895.

Dolcetta 1994. Dughin's viewpoint seems to support the contention of a confrontation between 'occult' societies.

2009:10.

to a French author named Maurice Joly. Some sources 54 popular before/during WWII framed the text within the Judaeo-masonic conspiracy relating how Maurice Joly's name might have been Joseph Levy or Moses Joel. Finally, Hagemeister 55 raises doubts about many angles of the received origin of the Protocols56. Yet it went beyond texts now obscure written by now forgotten 'kooks', and included pieces from the likes of industrialist Henry Ford57, and pieces (such as a 1920 article 58) attributed to some Winston Churchill. The torturing embarrassment regarding Churchill's ' true ideas' 59 could be easily solved dealing with another possibly controversial (and unpublished) article: Sir Martin Gilbert, the eminent historian and Churchill biographer, -...- said the article was not written by Churchill at all, but rather his ghost writer, Adam Marshall Diston. He added that Churchill's instructions for the article were different in both tone and content from what Diston eventually wrote, and pointed out that Diston was a supporter of Oswald Mosley, the notorious fascist and antiSemite.

As seen above, conspiracy theories and ensuing denunciations – as pathetic and offhand as they may get- are a part of the art of controversy after all, and everybody seems to 54 Searching for example Google books.

55 2008.

56 “ The historian Boris Nikolaevskii, a coordinator of the Bern trial and an expert on the czarist secret police, admitted in a confidential letter that-...- [he] did not present his findings at the trial, since, as he wrote later, this “would have been a stab in the back of the Russian experts and would have objectively disorganized the campaign against Hitler.”-...-Basically, [Henri] Rollin produces a countermyth, in that the German-Russian anti-Semitic conspiracy he uncovers is almost identical to the Jewish conspiracy. A legend still circulating today is that Rollin’s book is very rare because it was confiscated by the Nazis during the occupation of France and destroyed. The book actually went through at least five editions in 1939, was widely available, and is today easy to find in secondhand bookshops. -...-[Norman] Cohn did no independent research, preferring to compile the findings of others. Most of these stemmed from Nikolaevskii. -...- Nikolaevskii was convinced that the origins of the Protocols had nothing to do with Rachkovskii -...-. The reason deserves to be quoted: “Of course,” wrote Vera Cohn [ Norman's wife ] to Nikolaevskii, du Chayla [other key witness] was indeed a “swindler,” but his description was so “picturesque” (zhivopisno) that “it would be a shame to omit it.” The tale then figures in key passages of Cohn’s book and delivers the “facts,” which even today strongly determine the narrative of the origins of the Protocols.” (Ibid.:923).

57 The International Jew series.

58 “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 February 1920.

59 Smith 2007, no page.

find them useful as damning or absolving evidence: the same guilt ( immoral, irrational, schizophrenic passion for world dominance, for example ) would be laid unto Germany as part of war propaganda.

While some conspiracy theories are nowadays discredited and regularly exorcised by righteous experts 'on the side of angels', the same format lives on denouncing other bogeymen and stigmatizing as 'outcasts' those unwilling to believe in them60, substituting over time medicalized (a sub-category of scientism) bogeymen to traditional ones. In other words, it is the same strategy of declaring foes 'mentally ill', or 'unscientific' (irrational) because -go figure by what set of divine coincidencespsychoanalysis, neurology, string theories, subatomic cosmologies and so on and so forth actually support and/or reinforce this or that worldview or assumption that -again by go figure what set of divine coincidences- people with normative power happen to endorse61. This stratagem may be applied irrespective of the topic or person at hand: contemporary vogues predicate 'racists' and their ilk as 'mentally ill'; eminent Polish philosopher Kolakowski explained the ill effects that erroneous Marxism had on the mind; homosexuality had long been considered a 'mental illness', and now some propose that homophobia fill that gap, and so on and so forth. It may also happen that both 'party liners' and dissidents use the same jargon (quantum theories, for example 62) to buttress conflicting worldviews: Szasz (1970) emphasizes the dehumanization which follows from the "myth of mental illnessIf and which is produced by a pathologizing ideology in the interest of social harmony (Barclay 1990:61).

It is not by chance that science could once be used to unquestioningly 60 'Islamofascism', Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, etc in recent years.

61 It is interesting today to see how posh science (for example quantum physics ) can be invoked as the ultimate justification by proselytizers all across the credibility spectrum.

62 It is not uncommon to see that people believing in esoteric and/or paranormal phenomena -which mainstream science ignores, debunks or ridicules- use quantum or atomic theories' jargon to defend their worldview made of UFO abductions, reptilian masters from planet X, astrotheological items and so forth.

buttress that from which today people recoil in horror; what once constituted the gem of clinical science -for example atavism pioneered by eminent Jewish-Italian scientist Lombroso63 (1835-1909) or eugenics - is today shun as politically tainted, bogus '...ism'.

It is thus safe to conclude how the intellectual atmosphere of the Victorian and Belle

Epoque era was literally saturated by spiritualism, occultism and various conspiracy theories, perhaps as another way of grappling with anxiety : The experiences of the trenches eluded conventional theological explanation and legends concerning the supernatural abounded. In civilian circles bereavement was to become a national experience, mourning a community activity. In this emotional climate, stories of the return of the dead were common. -...-By the twentieth century Spiritualism had retained its eclectic membership, with a bias toward what one prominent medium described as the 'superior working class', while the number of people who identified themselves as Spiritualists grew rapidly nation wide. (Hazelgrove 1999:405-406).

To name just one occurrence of strong spiritualist influence of esoteric undertones, Die Toteninsel [Island of the dead] - Boecklin's 1880 mesmerizing painting with an immense oneiric potential – became a favourite of such diverse figures as Hitler, Lenin, DalÏ, Strindberg, D'Annunzio. For example, the less known Gabriele D'Annunzio was not only a reputed intellectual and a daring 'extreme sportsman' 64, but also the creator of most of the visual and rhetoric apparatus usually identified with Fascism throughout the 1920 campaign he mounted to attack -and successfully occupy for a while (Reggenza del Carnaro) before being evicted by force- the city of Fiume, thus defying the world order established at Versailles.

The sincere, albeit futile, attempts to negotiate (or better: to mend ) a peace by the German65 and Russian Emperors showed that the (presumably stable) European 63 Clinician Lombroso basically thought that -broadly speaking- criminals, antisocials and their ilk could be detected by way of bodily features (for example by way of skull measurements).

64 We may think of his aerial enterprises, or of his participation to legendary -albeit marginal- war episodes such as the beffa di Buccari .

65 It is important to note that the King of England was actually Wilhelm's uncle.

aristocratic order was affected by the polarization66 implicit in one strand of romanticism, made of chauvinism and jingoism on one end, and of pastel-colored, generic Enlightenment principles on the other, namely the (ab)used principle of nationality and self-determination. Even literary media ultimately failed the acid test of the war67, with known genres as pastoral, sentimental, memoir and poetry morphing into something else to include and absorb a unheard of dimension of human experience ( and related lexicon ) that would ultimately never leave. It is here enough to think of harsh taxation “pending war time only “ enacted in several countries, and of a certain habit to comply with 'headache gray' uniformity and pervasive State control, which form letters best epitomized. For alleged security reasons, soldiers were allowed to write home only such form-letters as printed wholesale by the government and including only phrases reinforcing the 'big picture' favourable to those governments 68 .

While such tactics are typically associated with the 'coinciding opposites of terror', namely the NSDAP and the Bolshevik regimes, WWI was the occasion for the U.S federal and State government(s) to create and/or patronize “patriotic league(s)” with the aim of not only inspiriting the masses, but to field informants (provocateurs?) with the purpose of monitoring dissent and to report dissidents to the justice system if need be, with a corollary of vigilante action and political mischief. It is highly telling how scholarly attention -typically alert to liberticidal practices- devoted to U.S “patriotic league(s)” is very scant if we consider the importance of the event. Few works overall exist on this particular subject, and when they happen to be critical of such 'patriots', they are summarily dismissed as biased since the author “fails to explain how their behavior was understandable in their time and circumstance”69. In Belgium70 , postWWI repression of (real or presumed) traitors, profiteers and collaborators went as far 66 Paul Fussell devotes a sub-chapter ( 1975-1:90 ss ) to the “polarization of Siegfried Sassoon” and to the polarization of myths and enmities (ibid, chapter 3, p.75 ss ).

67 Cfr Fussell (1975-1), chapter 7, p.231 ss.

68 Fussell 1975-1:231ss.

69 Luebke (no date) is here writing a review of Watchdog of Loyalty, a book by Carl Chrislock. The book happens to be critical of and supplying damning evidence against 'patriotic' league(s) in Minnesota during WWI. 70 Van Ypersele 2006.

as suspecting people on the sole basis of their being of (real or presumed) German stock or origin, with once again the corollary of vigilante action. While 'patriotic league(s)' proliferated in many countries in times of war, distress and social unrest, it is a fact that many historians most often indulge in commodious exercises that alternate duplicitous righteous indignation against those who trespass moral absolutes (the 'bad guys'), and a vast array of scornful special pleading strategies (the 'good guys'), as Polish statesman Sikorski71 documents examining one such case.

As a mere example, the 1917 U.S Espionage Act was amended in 1918 to include all-encompassing provisions punishing with up to 20 years prison terms whomever might be construed as working against the U.S government in any way, shape or form, or sympathizing with said government's enemies in any way, shape or form; it is not without irony that president Wilson had sought re-election promising to keep the country out of war, and whose appeals in favor of sacred civil liberties were famous. The Act has not been repealed to this day, and was very recently invoked as a wedge to gain leverage for censorship in the dubious recent 'internet information leaks' case. While the Act's provisions and tone might certainly raise nowadays a few eyebrows, its tone and provisions are uncannily similar to '...ism-censorship' laws adopted in many countries and generally considered the pinnacle of moral thinking in action and of the purest state of law. It is not by sheer chance that in 1921 JewishAmerican theorist Lippmann wrote Public Opinion; in 1930 Lasswell published

Psychopathology and Politics; in 1928 Bernays wrote Propaganda extolling “This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. -...- regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers. So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so tenacious are they when regimented � 72 , well before the rise of totalitarianism. After all, politics might just be a 'shrewd and pathetic stage act' to 71 1996.

72 Bernays 1921, no page.

condition the simpleton, as Machiavelli had already suggested to his amoral principe73 in 1513:”And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite. ” 74 . Of course, the increasing role and consequent demands of (and license accorded to) a dirigiste nanny, welfare and consequently police state that was presented as a temporary and insignificant concession in the name of 'the good cause' never regressed to pre-war levels, and only served as springboard for more demands in the name of more or less real (and often fabricated) emergencies.

The moderns have been reluctant to recognize that the ultimate irrelevance of rugged individualism and the ultimate debilitation of commodious individualism were the concomitants of the very character of the modern project. Its methodical universalism left no room for substantial individual vigor. Its aggressive realism so subdued and tamed reality that it no longer invigorated and ennobled individuals.(Borgmann 1992:79) Mass production and automation were were to be technological fixes for social injustice, -...- [for example ] safer cars for careless driving (Borgmann 1992:124).

Later, the “trench mentality” of the restless mass of veterans would contribute decisively to the rise of totalitarian regimes; for most veterans the war would never truly end, with individual obsessions coalescing under the colors of German (later NSDAP ) revenge, and Italian discontent (soon voiced by Fascism ) over the vittoria

mutilata and mani nette75.

73 The possibly identified messiah in Machiavelli's work was Cesare Borgia, cardinal, duke of Valentinois and son of Pope Alessandro VI. Cesare Borgia's generally short and modest career as a military man and ruler included the creation of a short-lived domain in central Italy (Romagne) that swiftly collapsed after Alessandro VI's death. His rapid ascent, however, fueled hopes for a strong leader who could pacify the chaotic Italian mosaic.

74 Machiavelli, 1513, no page.

75 Western powers had made huge formal promises in terms of territorial acquisition to secure Italy's intervention.

Mussolini's nationalist newspaper had received under cover funds from the French. In the end, Italian delegates would leave Versailles “empty handed” (mani nette); not only were such acquisitions much less than agreed, but

If the idea of revenge championed by Germany after the war seems to the contemporary reader an abomination leading inescapably to horror, or a fig leaf for more mundane imperialism, the mythology shrouding the concept of revanche (against the 1870 defeat at the hands of Prussia) had been at the core of French politics for decades before WWI, and 'accredited' historians cannot typically put it in a light good enough (as a righteous or legitimate reaction against 'German militarism', for example).

When the Ottoman Empire (allied with Germany and Austria) collapsed, victors occupied its territories; soon thereafter, an insurrectionist government under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, a war veteran Ottoman officer, rose denouncing the Sultan's (inept, corrupt...) government and its acceptance of the vexatious peace conditions that shattered Turkey's sovereignty. Military confrontation thereafter ensued between the Kemal government and representative contingents of the occupying forces, until Turkey was freed from foreign occupation. While uncannily similar to German 'roll back' policies of the 1930s in the disavowal of the legitimate government having signed the peace treaties, and in the denunciation of the injurious conditions thereby imposed upon the people, generally generous reviews are reserved to the Turkish reaction (understandable, gallant, masculine...), when the situation is discussed in some length and not simply set aside or exiled to footnotes: the folklore of the event changes drastically. The same response sympathetic to possible Turkish sensitivities

persists

regarding

the

tragic

Armenian

question

and

ensuing

responsibilities. The strategy that might see in other circumstances the incautious proponent as making excuses for a murderous regime (and thereby being guilty – by at least a moral if not a legal standpoint- of the same horrendous crimes by way of guilt by association ) becomes championing freedom of speech in academia, as 'accredited' historians fence in the shades of gray of interpretation in order to avoid offending the Turkish nation with hasty verdicts, jousting with sources or facts that just might lend

Italian cities such as Fiume were annexed by Yugoslavia, opening an harsh debate over an incomplete and unjust victory ( vittoria mutilata).

themselves to multiple interpretations76. In fact, the “offence to the Turkish nation” (art.301) is punishable under Turkish criminal law, a sort of '...ism-censorship law' working counterclockwise, whose (ab)use to discipline deviationists has not diminished the fervor of the forgiving, sympathetic political alchemists who generously extend Europe's new frontier to Asian Anatolia. Wholesale recourse to the 'offence' motif had already been made by 'disinterested' authors 'on the side of angels': The objective fact is that Austria told Servia to permit Servian officers to be suspended by the authority of Austrian officers; and told Servia to submit to this within forty-eight hours. In other words, the Sovereign of Servia was practically told to take off not only the laurels of two great campaigns, but his own lawful and national crown, and to do it in a time in which no respectable citizen is expected to discharge an hotel bill (Chesteron 1914:no page).

Eugenics proponent -and plagiarist77-, H.G. Wells also wrote in 1917 posing as an “extreme pacifist “ who “did not want to write anything “under instruction”” 78: The German cultivation of opinion began long before the war; it is still the most systematic and, because of the psychological ineptitude of the Germans, it is probably the clumsiest. -...Neither the English, the Russians, the Italians, nor the French, to name only the bigger European allies, are concerned in setting up a legend, as the Germans are concerned in setting up a legend of themselves to impose upon mankind. They are reality dealers in this war, and the Germans are effigy mongers. -...- And then over and above the great outrage of the war come these incessant mean-spirited atrocities. A great and simple wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war itself, had it been fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would have made no such deep and enduring breach as these silly, futile assassinations have down between the Austro-Germans and the rest of the civilised world.

76 As a mere example, see Stanley 2006.

77 While the case for Wells' plagiarism is well supported, many forgiving authors simply suggest it all might have been “sheer coincidence” (Hughes 1966:85). Even eugenics is typically politely excised from Wells' dossier -as a token of appreciation for his 'patriotism' or germanophobia, perhaps-, or neutralized to mean absolutely nothing of interest except for the malevolent critic 'with an axe to grind'.

78 Wells 1917:No page.

One great misdeed is a thing understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the consciousness of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a national sin but a national insanity; that we dare not leave the German the power to attack other nations any more for ever.... (no page), emphasis added.

Readers may remark that the sulfuric prose suggests the 'complete neutralization for ever' of 'aggressive groups whose national trait is insanity, the habit of setting legends about themselves, and appetites for world dominance': the pamphleteers of the future totalitarian regimes could consider themselves well-schooled. Of course, the comparison might seem to some quite unwarranted; although both parties wrote the same kind of inspiriting mixture of half-truths and shameless lies, the influence of the animistic almighty force of evil and greed that invites slaughter rests -always- with the enemy, and the enemy only. 'The bad guys' -whoever they happen to be at any particular moment in time- serve the purpose of making the 'virtues' of the 'good guys' possible by way of their immorality and bad deeds; J.Hughes 79 repeatedly states that in Greek-Athenian mythology, the neighboring city-State of Thebes was home to everything ungodly. As Quintilian very well put it: the same words may be received as signs of folly, freedom or pride on the sole basis of who is uttering them.

For some reasons, late German imperialism never lent itself too well to the romantic elation that celebrated France and the local string of revolutions being regularly 'exported' with all possible consequences. It occurred that well before the radicalization of the 1930s, Germany (and German culture) had been the object of character assassination and ritual defamation as a measure of war (a schizophrenic culture imbued with an ethos of hate and supremacist ideals that justify greedy imperialism, for example), which collided with the erstwhile praise directed to the nation, its glories and -indeed- Kaiser Wilhelm: Kingsley, as professor of modern history at Cambridge, used his 79 1996.

post to espouse the cause of Anglo-Saxon protestantism in a rhetoric of universal mission in keeping up 'Teutonic traditions' worldwide -...-. Bishop William Stubbs, professor of modern history at Oxford from 1866 to 1884 who had the greatest confidence in all English institutions with Teutonic origins and reached back to the medieval period for teaching material -...-. It was not until the end of the Victorian period that this essentially Protestant-Teutonic connection was challenged (Pridmore, no date, no page).

No matter how similar the German notion of 'master race' ( herrenfolk) might be to 'the white man's burden' of the British tradition, or to the governmentfunded promotion of the French empire enticing the youth of the French Republic with the opportunity to “become masters” ( seigneurs, which in German is -in fact-

herren ) on the empire's soil80, German ideas always end on the 'unethical' side of the divide, excluded from the romantic and mystical preludes reserved to other systems of power.

As discussed, another ominous consequence of WWI was going to be the massive deployment of hatred81, hoaxes82, propaganda, technology, garrison state and censorship, in a perverted climate of crusade and clash between faddish principles embodied in the failed attempt to process kaiser Wilhelm in sensational terms similar to “crimes against humankind” so ( selectively ) popular after the second world war. Such wartime hoaxes have been 'debunked' in a series of books in the years following WWI: 80 Still in 1994 (Decaux 1994), a documentary celebrating the French Empire (likened in the last minutes of footage to Rome in its cultural mission) could be produced with the cooperation of governmental bodies. The narrator Decaux tells the public of the epidemic success (34 millions visitors in 6 months) of the 1931 official exposition coloniale to the detriment of a rival exhibit denouncing colonialism ( la vérité sur les colonies , 5.000 visitors in 7 months). The elated narration (with the appropriate soundtrack) emphasizes humanitarian and cultural deeds, such as hospitals and schools. In the voice of a documentary reproduced in the footage (around min 20), “quelle vie merveilleuse pour un Français de 20 à 25 ans -...- la joie d'estre un chef et de servir la France en menant la vie seigneuriale”[ what a wonderful life for a Frenchman 20 to 25 years old, who can serve his country by being a leader living the life of a lord] ; Decaux interjects that French youth was told how it only depended on them to be seigneurs (lords), by serving in the army. The reader can imagine the outcome of a hypothetical similar production meant to glorify Germany's 'cultural mission'...

81 The British royal house of Hanover changed officially name into Windsor and dropped its German titles.

82 “Atrocities” attributed typically to Germans started to spread like wildfire.

among others, Falsehood in Wartime83 , Atrocity Propaganda84

and so forth. The

'crucified' hero-savior -to name just one- was such a hot commodity that resurfaced as one of the most famous wartime propaganda hoaxes of World-War-I: Like so many other stories, this one underwent considerable changes and variations. The crucified person was at one time a girl, at another an American, but most often a Canadian. "Last week a large number of Canadian soldiers, wounded in the fighting round Ypres, arrived at the base hospital at Versculles. They all told a story of how one of their officers had been crucified by the Germans. He had been pinned to a wall by bayonets thrust through his hands and feet, another bayonet had then been driven through his throat, and, finally, he was riddled with bullets. The wounded Canadians said that the Dublin Fusiliers had seen this done with their own eyes, and they had heard the Officers of the Dublin Fusiliers talking about it." ("The Times," May 10, 1915. Paris Correspondent.) -...-. The story went the round of the Press here and in Canada, and was used by Members of Parliament on the platform. Its authenticity, however, was eventually denied by General March at Washington. It cropped up again in 1919, when a letter was published by the Nation (April 12th) from Private E. Loader, 2nd Royal West Kent Regiment, who declared he had seen the crucified Canadian. The 'Nation' was informed in a subsequent letter from Captain E. N. Bennett that there was no such private on the rolls of the Royal West Kents, and that the 2nd Battalion was in India during the whole war. (Ponsonby 1928:chapter XIII, emphasis added.).

Not only did the Belgian baby whose hands had been cut off by the Germans travel through the towns and villages of Great Britain, but it went through Western Europe and America, even into the Far West. No one paused to ask how long a baby would live were its hands cut off unless expert surgical aid were at hand to tie up the arteries (the answer being a very few minutes). Everyone wanted to believe the story, and many went so far as to say they had seen the baby. The lie was as universally accepted as the passage of the Russian troops through Britain. -...- Pictures of the baby without hands were very popular on the Continent, both in France and in Italy. Le Rive Rouge had a picture on September 18, 83 Ponsonby 1980.

84 Read 1976.

1915, and on July 26, 1916, made it still more lurid by depicting German soldiers eating the hands. Le Journal gave, on April 30, 1915, a photograph of a statue of a child without hands, but the most savage of all, which contained in it no elements of caricature, was issued by the Allies for propaganda purposes and published in Critica, in Buenos Ayres (reproduced in the Sphere, January 30, 1925). The heading of the picture was, "The Bible before All," and under it was written: "Suffer little children to come unto Me." The Kaiser is depicted standing behind a huge block with an axe, his hands darkly stained with blood. Round the block are piles of hands. He is beckoning to a woman to bring a number of children, who are clinging to her, some having had their hands cut off already. Babies not only had their hands cut off, but they were impaled on bayonets, and in one case nailed to a door. But everyone will remember the handless Belgian baby. It was loudly spoken of in buses and other public places, had been seen in a hospital, was now in the next parish, etc., and it was paraded, not as an isolated instance of an atrocity, but as a typical instance of a common practice. In Parliament there was the usual evasion, which suggested the story was true, although the only evidence given was "seen by witnesses." (Ponsonby 1928: chapter VIII, emphasis added.).

Appropriately, Galer85 writes about the “myths of the western front”, which include not only supernatural86 or bizarre events but mainly deeply held attitudes and collective memories87

regarding the war. Some WWI scares were

85 2004.

86 “Two of the earliest and best-known legends have known originators. The Angels of Mons, reputed to have appeared in the sky during the British retreat from Mons in August, 191-4 , and to have safeguarded the withdrawal. developed from a short story which mentioned no angels at all. On September 29, 191-4, Arthur Machen published in the Evening News an openly fictional, romantic story, "The Bowmen," in which the ghosts of the English bowmen dead at Agincourt came to the assistance of their hard-pressed countrymen by discharging arrows which killed Germans without leaving visible wounds.” (Fussell 1975-2, no page ) 87 “Myths of war arise initially because of the need to assign meaning to the individual experience and suffering of the past, and each of the myths of the Western Front has a particular social role in helping to make sense not only of the past but also of the present. The role of ‘‘loss, anger and futility’’ is to permit the expression of anger at the suffering that so many endured, and to grieve for those who were lost. The need for these expressions of feeling, although it may have weakened with the passing of time, remains strong. ‘‘Renewal through struggle’’, no less ‘‘authentic’’ than ‘‘loss, anger and futility’’, is a myth that asserts the worth of military and patriotic values, allowing those who fought on the Western Front to believe that, if they were on the winning side, they faithfully completed a worthwhile task while, if they were the losers, they did their best in fighting for what they believed, and for the survival of their nation. Their ‘‘truth’’ in the historical sense is only one aspect of their validity, since ‘‘Myths are stories told to answer some human need, so we should not feel overly surprised if they respond more faithfully to such needs than to the demands of abstract logic, of science, or even of morality. “ (Galer 2004:184)

destined to be long lived and -for a long time- to be incorporated in the liturgy of commonly received credo, such as the “corpse factory” one, whereby Germans were said to recycle the enemy corpses milled on a grand scale to produce soap or other common items88 , a variation of the 'contamination' or 'defamiliarization' taboo that insinuates suspicion about what is otherwise believed to be familiar and commonplace89. Finally, the struggle between the “loss, anger and futility” and the “renewal through struggle” paradigm may offer insight into the rejection of war poems; certainly many war poems were not conducive to lyrical elation:”For they'll know you've fought for your country/ And no one will worry a bit. “ 90.

Ultimately

higher

principles

eccentric

visionary

president

Wilson

championed91 would come second to the appetites of France and England (and to the benefit of the U.S treasury, too ), thus paving the way to another war of which the first represented a smaller scale model, even in the overuse and abuse of new, cruel and lethal weapons and tactics (for example air raids, tanks, suicidal mass frontal attacks, brutal discipline, mass gassing ). To name just one issue, the severe reaction against and prohibition of fraternization with the enemy (for example on Christmas ) was going to show things were really out of control. In fact, many statesmen and intellectuals (among others Chamberlain and Mussolini) denounced the inconsistencies and double standards that spoiled the Versailles treaties and their concrete application, thus setting the stage for wars to come.

The Great War basically started as another war of average magnitude between an extended family of monarchs over ill-defined interests, albeit capitalizing 88 Neander&Marlin 2010.

89 There is a bottomless corpus of urban legends detailing cases of food contamination (such as the 'Halloween treat' and the 'Chinese restaurant' or 'fast food joint' scene), whereby the mindless public is fed say dog or cat meat instead of rabbit or veal; whereby Halloween treats contain poison or razor blades; whereby severed human fingers are found in fast-food burgers. An example dealing with 'defamiliarization' is the one detailing how the 'exotic pet' vacationers brought elatedly home is in reality a sewer rat, possibly sick with rabies.

90 S.Sassoon, 'Does It Matter?' In JTAP 1996, lines 14-15.

91 For example in his fourteen points declaration.

on decades of increasing unease, and ended with four of the five monarchs waylaid of their power by maximalist revolutions92 and the fourth changing his house's name to accommodate the afflatus of jingoism: it transcended the need to displace an enemy house and resulted in siege being laid to the deepest foundations of European society.

Heartfelt or merely situational, the status of 'just causes' and motifs championed in public is worth debating in general terms: WWII officially started to secure Poland's integrity and under the principles of controlling ambition and such practices as uprooting entire populations, thus favoring the respect of existing borders: a cursory look at the post-war geopolitical situation suffices to understand that those anodyne, humanitarian, disinterested principles probably served as transmission belt for something different. WWI (WWII antecedent) makes no exception: readers may be at a loss to understand WWI casus belli as significantly different from the casus belli at the core of a series of regional wars such as the Franco-Prussian war, the war between Russia and Japan, the Austro-Prussian war or the Italo-Austrian war, not to mention colonial wars (among which the war between Spain and the USA, or the Italo-Ottoman war), which failed to ignite a planetary catastrophe. It is not without interest to consider how -well before European totalitarianism- the potion consisting of varying degrees of nationalism, socialism, revanchism and a host of other spiritual and material doctrines had already been transforming China in the aftermath of the 1911 revolution that had disposed of the imperial regime.

The folklore -or what people generally believe happened versus what really happened- of the casus belli is worth mentioning, rather than the historical facts. A commando of young Serbian nationalists murders the heir to the Austro-hungarian throne, and Austrian retaliations spiral upward to serialized mobilization and ensuing declarations of war. The royal victim wasn't a maximalist, but apparently a reformer 92 In Russia took place the Bolshevik revolution; in Germany a revolution (later repressed by the Weimar Republic ) inspired by Bolshevism took the maximalist form in Bavaria of “République des Conseils” ( soviet in Russian means “council” ), with an equally transient counterpart in Hungary under Bela Kun. The Austrian Empire -on the other end of the spectrum- succumbed to the humanistic “principle of nationality” president Wilson advocated, while the Ottoman Empire was simply divided among the victors.

eager to solve the conundrum of the multinational Empire transforming it into “the United States of Greater Austria” (Isac, no date), an idea examined

since the

convulsions of 1848. The Austrian version claims that Austria not only wanted to punish that savage act, but also to 'clean' a known nest of imperialist terrorism such as Serbia. It was known that maximalist nationalist groups -among which the (in)famous

Black Hand in the army– were being sponsored/trained in and operated from Serbia 93 .

Austria intended his mission to be that of once again pacify the unruly Balkans (after the 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina), with whichever possible geopolitical advantages gained in the process being purely accessory. Furthermore, the diaries of French ambassador to the Tzar94 confirm that at the Russian court many were already sampling anticipated flavors of victory over a defeated Germany when it was still high time to save the peace.

While the folklore relative to the just, armed pacification of countries serving as haven to bomb-dropping terrorists ought to be familiar to today's readers, the received eulogized version makes little to no mention of Serbian nationalism and/or sublimates (Serbia championing fellow oppressed southern Slavs, for example) or minimizes interconnectedness, type the culprits and their motives in diminutive, possibly romantic form (young, sickly95, euphoric, patriotic and/or desperate, reacting against imperialist oppression for example) and emphasizes the situation whereby a power-hungry major international power (Austria) -possibly in decline- had used the possible misdeed of the possibly wrong but terribly romantic few as a pretext to 'rape' an entire, defenseless, idle minor country such as Serbia. 'Patriotic' English writer Chesterton96 gives an incredibly straightforward explanation: The prince who practically ruled Austria was shot by certain 93 Shackelford, no data, no page.

94 Maurice Paléologue 1925.

95 The murderer Gavrilo Princip died in prison of tuberculosis in 1918; he had turned 20 years old at the time of the trial.

96 1914: no page.

persons whom the Austrian Government believed to be conspirators from Servia. -...- First of all, there is a curious, cloudy sort of argument, much affected by the professional rhetoricians of Prussia, who are sent out to instruct and correct the minds of Americans or Scandinavians. It consists of going into convulsions of incredulity and scorn at the mention of Russia's responsibility of Servia, or England's responsibility of Belgium; and suggesting that, treaty or no treaty, frontier or no frontier, Russia would be out to slay Teutons or England to steal Colonies. Emphasis added.

Readers may probably notice the rudimentary technique made of half-truths and cheap journalistic appeals...

The 'possibly wrong but terribly romantic' (diminutive) portrayal is worth examining as it in fact paves the way to “pseudo-sanctity”

97

, or the carefully crafted

image (dating back to time immemorial) of tribulations and penance reserved to heroes who had been right all along, and whose martyrdom justifies the ideal they stood for, namely Serbian imperialism and the image of “Yugoslavia the mother of all South Slavs”, uncannily similar to pan-German ideals NSDAP embraced and that do not benefit from such leniency. As an example, DeVoss writes: But Franz Ferdinand’s death was more enviable than the life that faced Gavrilo Princip. He was taken to Theresienstadt, an old Bohemian fortress north of Prague that had been converted into a military prison and later would serve as a Jewish concentration camp during World War II. Chained with shackles weighing 22 pounds, the 145-pound prisoner was kept in solitary confinement in an unheated cell. Tuberculosis consumed him, and on April 28, 1918, Princip died weighing 88 pounds. Fearing his bones might become relics, Princip’s Austrian jailers took the body in secret to an unmarked grave, but a Czech soldier assigned to the burial detail made a map, and in 1920 Princip and the other “Heroes of Vidovdan” were disinterred and brought to Sarajevo, where they were buried together beneath a chapel “built to commemorate for eternity our Serb Heroes” at St. Mark’s Cemetery. -...- Shortly before his departure to Theresienstadt, 97 Lecuppre 2006.

Princip was told that the war he had started, to free all South Slavs, was, in fact, consuming them. Although Belgrade had fallen to Austrian troops, he remained positive. “Serbia may be invaded but not conquered,” he told one of his German guards. “Serbia will one day create Yugoslavia, mother of all South Slavs.” (2000:5-6), emphasis added.

Is this the man whose act set the world in motion for 30 years of war and consequent pillage, brutality and mass-murder, if we consider WWII a sequel to WWI? Serbian imperialism continued to receive generally condescending press well throughout the convulsions that led to the dissolution of that miniature version of Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia. The Serbian government (that inherited the Yugoslavian U.N seat as a token of appreciation and continuity) was still seen as championing the post-modern version of liberal statehood based on mere territorial right, and emancipated from the barbarous shackles of ethno-cultural allegiance the rebellion of Croatia and Slovenia epitomized. Shortly thereafter, following the esoteric ways of high political alchemy, the same government (the famous Milosevic controversy) rose to the position of international public enemy, perpetrating genocidal misdeeds in the name of commodious State doctrines that were only a fig leaf for imperialism and hatred, whose henchmen deserved to be internationally prosecuted for their nameless crimes.

Another possible example of pliable mythologies comes from the question of the “7800 crates of gold”98 of the bank of Spain that the radical left-wing government transferred to the USSR (through France) during the Civil War. Again, the diminutive, romantic register is employed, and what would have been labeled as immoral pillage at the hands of the enemy, which no indignation could ever castigate enough, becomes “safekeeping”. The exact quantity of gold is gallantly omitted not to drive a wedge into the eulogized 'bigger picture' of the 'good cause', instead of being committed on brass 98 “Since 1936 Russia has been sitting on more than half a billion dollars worth of Spanish gold. When the civil war was only three months old, pro-Communist Finance Minister Juan Negrin secretly ordered 7,800 crates of gold out of the Bank of Spain, had it trucked to Cartagena and then shipped to Russia in charge of four bank officials, for "safekeeping." “(Spain 1957, no page).

plates to posterity as a ritual memorialization item. Alternatively, key figures in the operation may be described as clueless, sickly or acting under a varying array of overwhelming threats coming from all the provinces of the political spectrum.

Furthermore, ideological interconnectedness (the left-wing French government and the Soviet government taking part in the operation) shall be politely downplayed or sublimated, while at the same time castigating the enemy's connections (Franco as Mussolini's and Hitler's crony, and caudillismo as the Spanish arm of the international Fascist menace).

Again, if readers think that the 'diminutive, possibly wrong but terribly romantic' approach is just a matter of style with no practical consequences, they should ponder the outcome of such an approach being reserved to other equally controversial historical characters (personalities whose ideology is ritually exorcised, for example), or cases of pillage (by regimes whose acts are routinely exorcised, for example) to see that could instantly constitute an actionable criminal offense in several jurisdictions. At the end of the war, Germany would be required to accept responsibility for starting the war (article 231 of the Versailles Treaty). The beginning of the war as an eminently Serbian provocation, Serbian imperialism, and the role Austria played disappear to the advantage of a sweeping critique of German militarism and other ill attitudes.

MINIONS, VICTIMS AND MINION-VICTIMS Does it matter?—losing your legs?...

For people will always be kind, And you need not show that you mind When the others come in after hunting To gobble their muffins and eggs.99 Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go100 It is difficult not to recollect the images of the 1931 movie All Quiet on the

Western Front101: jingoist German teacher brainwashes (or finagles ) mindless high school students into joining the army. As the teacher's inspiriting speech progresses, students' minds wander sampling anticipated pleasures of different sorts: making one's father proud (while mother cries ); attracting pretty girls, etc. At the end of the tunnel “They will not be the same; for they'll have fought/In a just cause: “ 102 : death, disembodiment, mutilation (“Legless, sewn short at elbow/”, 103), madness leading to suicide or to an asylum. It is also easy to catch the drift between idle prowess of fox hunters104 having a hearty breakfast, and the disenfranchised veteran who -albeit having proven his manhood and strength at a higher level – is left behind. Sassoon's advice is to “sneak home”, in secret (desertion?), to share the mindless, sheltered world of the home front, with its reassuring (and filtered) war bulletins and its “just wars”, for people at home won't know and “words cannot express” 105 (this is many poets' view ) what war is really like, to the point of “hating” the home front at times (for example Sassoon ) as much, albeit for different reasons, as the battle front. Between the two, the 99 S. Sassoon, 'Does it Matter' in JTAP 1996, lines 1-5.

100S.Sassoon, 'Suicide in the Trenches' in JTAP 1996, lines 11-12.

101Milestone, Lewis (director), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020629/ 102Sassoon's They in JTAP 1996, lines 2-3.

103W.Owen Disabled in JTAP 1996, line 3.

104Sassoon spent his earlier life in such idleness.

105“What I term "combat gnosticism," the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not under gone an identical experience. ” (Campbell 1999:203).

battle front will keep coming back, and many WWI writers will basically keep “going back”106 again and again to the otherworldly vistas of WWI, very similar at times to pictures of alien lands such as Mars.

Owen and Sassoon, two homosexual107 ( or “pseudo-homosexual” according to some authors ) soldier-poets108, borrow their motives of discontent and fashion them the way they do in a precise ratio and reaction to the day's mentality. Both homoerotic suggestions exalting, pitying or describing the plight of “boys” or “lads”, and the unbridled hatred towards the misconceptions fostered at home are deeply rooted in long-term mentalities of medieval origin populated by pastoral images, knights intoxicated by supreme ideals, best of friends, royalties and their “minions” 109:”'No period was used so promiscuously and unhistorically in the nineteenth century as the Middle Ages' ”110 . The very concept of minion, friend and so forth (even in their biblical, lyrical or gallant interpretation) found a place within the boundaries of homoeroticism.

According to Graves111 , homo-eroticism and homosexuality were

106Peter Brooks (1994, passim), emphasizes the importance of “going back” in psychoanalytic practice to make sense of faulty narratives; yet this step might actually come close to self-destruction. They would keep going back f irst to the battle front during the war; later with their minds and in their writings, but at times even in person visiting old war sites.

107“Graves tells us that there Sassoon first met Wilfred Owen, " an idealistic homosexual with a religious background." At least that is what he wanted to tell us in the American edition -...- The phrase was omitted from the British edition at the request of Harold Owen, and it was subsequently canceled in the American edition. “ (Fussell 1975-2, no page ).

108It is highly interesting how the issue is dealt with. Graves -who knew both well- edited a mention of Owen's homosexuality, as well as a mention of “recovering” from his own in his writings, and censored a homoerotic writing of his. Encyclopaedia Britannica (2007) entries make no mention of that, either. Paul Fussell mentions it, but later seems to take it back endorsing Graves' term of “quasi-homosexual” denoting chaste and unconsummated emotional elation. Other authors- for example Sadownik (2007)- considers the issue a milestone in “gay hermeneutics”. Fussell as well puts the issue in perspective through Victorian cults of homoeroticism in welldefined circles, evoking images not so distant from M.H. Abrams' idea (1953:133-134) of sublime “ we authors recognize the sublime not by an act of analytic or comparative judgement, but by our transport. -...- reference of poetry to supreme moments of unstustainable feeling and imaginative impetus made it common for romantic theorists to focus upon the short and incandescent passage as the manifestation of poetry at its highest”.

109“ Even intimate relationships in medieval society are rather paraded than kept secret. Not only love, but friendship too, has its finely made up forms. Two friends dress in the same way, share the same room,or the same bed, and call one another by the name of 'minion'. It is good form for the prince to have his minion -...- this form of sentimental friendship“ ( Huizinga 1972:52).

110 Pridmore, no date, no page.

111 Cited in Fussell 1975-2, no page.

omnipresent: “For every one born homo-sexual there are at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals made by the public school system. And nine of these ten are as honorably chaste and sentimental as I was “. According to Lane112 , homosexuality plays a major role in The Four Feathers under the pseudonym of public disgrace113; Fussell is even more explicit: Given this association between war and sex, and given the deprivation and loneliness and alienation characteristic of the soldier's experience-s-given, that is, his need for affection in a largely womanless world-we will not be surprised to find both the actuality and the recall of front-line experience replete with what lye can call the homoerotic. I use that term to imply a sublimated (i.e., "chaste") form of temporary homosexuality. Of the active, unsublimated kind there was very little at the front. (1975-2, no page ) British black&white footage114 records veterans who reminisce about women's spiteful attitude they had to endure while -for example- going to the movies in civilian clothes and being thus mistaken for draft-dodgers or the like.

The Victorian/Belle Epoque era harbored a vast and diverse homoerotic and/or homosexual culture: periodicals, advocacy groups115 and -most important- an ethos

112 1995:51.

113“How does this analogy between homosexuality and public disgrace influence The Four Feathers? I suggest that it elaborates an insidious mechanism of gender control by conflating Feversham's default on masculine identification with a powerful stigma and taboo. ” (Lane 1995:51) 114 BBC 1964.

115“A less respectable but no less influential prewar tradition of homoeroticism was that of the so-called Uranians, a body of enthusiastic pedo-phils who since the late eighties had sent forth from Oxford and London a stream of pamphlets, poems, drawings, paintings, and photographic " art studies" arguing the attractions-and usually the impeccable morality-of boy-love. Among the Uranians can be numbered such writers, schoolmasters, scholars, divines, and Roman Catholic converts “ (Fussell 1975:no page )

borrowing pastoral and Arcadian motifs as backdrop116 for homoerotic scenes. In 1883117, J.A. Symonds published a book bearing the explosive and enigmatic title: A

Problem in Greek Ethics: paiderastia. Robert Nichols118 describes thus the unholy and ever-present alliance between war119 and (latent, sentimental) homo-eroticism: I remember very well the face of a kind, keen major -...- He smiled at each of us in turn, but his eyes were sad. "How old are you?" he asked an applicant -...-. "Nineteen, sir." "You seem in a great hurry to be killed, my boy." The applicant, disconcerted, stammered, "I only want to do my bit, sir: ' "Very well, so you shall. so you shall; -...-” But .. . as the major laid his head to my bare chest-I was nextI experienced a curious sensation: his eye-lashes were wet Das120 introduces further adjectives to qualify or understand the homoerotic tendencies, such as silliness (opposed to deviance) and “tactile tenderness” or “strong romantic link”: “The war hero, and wartime bonding, informed by manly sentiments and noble ends, were honorably exempt from such base charges and yet -...- not without a trace of anxiety”121 . Das as well announces the 'revolution' that was taking place: In the trenches of World War I, the norms of tactile contact between men changed profoundly. Mutilation and mortality, loneliness and boredom, the strain of constant bombardment, the breakdown of language, and the sense of alienation from home led to a new level of intimacy and intensity under which the carefully 116“Virgil' s Second Eclogue, in which Corydon, who has fallen in love with the boy Alexis, complains of his boyish disdain of love. Every young officer from a public school had read this poem: it recommended itself especially by virtue of usually being skipped by teachers making assignments in Virgil. Acquaintance with it was a great help in promoting sentimental friendships between older and younger boys at school and in training up what Graves calls "pseudo-homosexuals “ -...-. One of the pre-existing motifs available for " translation" and "purification" by Great War writers was provided by the tradition in Victorian homosexuality and homoeroticism that soldiers are especially attractive. What makes them so is their youth, their athleticism, their relative cleanliness, their uniforms, and their heroic readiness, like Adonis or St. Sebastian, for " sacrifice." (Fussell 1975-2:no page ) 117 Some contend the book was written in 1873.

118 Cited in Fussell 1975-2, no page.

119“[war] can, indeed has, been seen as the ultimate rite of passage: a definitive coming to manhood for the industrial age, in which boys become men by confronting mechanical horror and discovering their essential masculinity, perhaps even their essential humanity, in a realm from which feminine presence is banished ” (Campbell 1999:204).

120 2002.

121 Das 2002:52.

constructed mores of civilian society broke down. (2002:52) Through homoeroticism, the topic of decay and of the death dance that has already been mentioned finds new meanings: Such intimacy must also be understood to exist as a triumph over death; it must be seen as a celebration of life, of young men huddled against long winter nights, rotting corpses, and falling shells.

Physical contact was a transmission of the wonderful assurance of being alive, and more sex-specific eroticism, though concomitant, was subsidiary. (Das 2002:55) Paranoia and legal repression in all matters related to (homo)sexuality was in fact common currency throughout the Victorian age and co-existed with various alternative sub-cultures.

CHANGE Change might be the title of this essay: radical, uncompromising, merciless, unexpected, abrupt change. you'll not find A chap who's served that hasn't found some change./ And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!' 122

The vast majority of poems tell of this “change”, as in Sassoon's poem 'They' and Owen's 'Disabled'. At times telltale signs of a vastly dehumanizing experience of dissociation are presented to us first, as in Owen's 'Mental Cases' (“Who are these?

Why sit they here in the twilight? “, line 1 ) and Sassoon's 'Does it matter' (“Does it matter?—losing your legs?.../”, line 1 ), at times with painfully sarcastic, feigned optimism ( “ No doubt they'll soon get well/”, line 1 in Sassoon's 'Survivors'). The shock and strain typically overshadow the rhetorical device; figures of speech chosen to get the point across (for example “twilight” as personal, emotional twilight, necessarily ending in darkness, and furthermore shame to be kept safe from public exposure 123 ) matter less, in comparison with the abrupt feeling of dissociation and pain. Why does the poem 'Survivors' (line 10, “Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad/ “ ) suggest strong opposition between the home and the battle front 124? How -in some sense- have these “children” been driven “mad” over their human bankruptcy (“broke”)? Are they “children” just because they are very young, or is that a subtle homo-erotic allusion? Why would W.B Yeats summarily demean and exclude (some) 122 'They' by S.Sassoon, lines 11-12 in JTAP 1996, no page , emphasis in text.

123 An excellent rendering of this concept in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny got his gun movie: during WWI an American soldier lies limbless, deaf, mute, blind and horribly scarred in a hospital, and authorities make a priority of none actually seeing him; his only gateway to the external world is tapping his head on the pillow to send Morse alphabet signals. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067277/ and http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Casualtiesnote.html 124 Paul Fussell (1975), passim, analyzes the dichotomy in depth.

war poets from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse he edited in 1936?

We shall look at the big picture first. WWI started as another XIX century war: in the beginning there were five Empires waging war: the British Empire alongside the French125 on one side, the German, Austrian and Ottoman Empires on the other. It seemed just another Victorian war, because (as a mere example ) the mother of WWI German kaiser Wilhelm II was Vicky, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England, who (and this is highly indicative ) had previously employed her and her husband Frederick126 (then only heir to the throne ) to deputy extensively on her behalf. Vicky's children also included Sophia (Queen consort of Greece), while Edward VII of England (Vicky's brother ) was married to Alexandra, daughter of the King of Denmark, sister of the King of Greece and of Dagmar, betrothed to Russia's heir to the throne and future empress. While it can be easily evinced from this summary sketch that tensions existed127, a network of more or less solid interlocking directorates128 still seemed to exist between the major feuding royal houses. A general feeling of peace and interconnectedness dominated; people and merchandise could travel across borders with little to no formalities. It might be argued that the worst people could fear might have been another war like the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, which had triggered the collapse of the French Empire and had blazed a trail in modern warfare (for example Prussian advanced railway logistics, mass mobilization and improved weaponry ), but had been nowhere as destructive, dehumanizing and ultimately stacking the deck of political cards available as WWI would prove to be. It is enough to mention that by 125 France had been a Republic since the fall of the Second Empire in 1870; it retained, however, a deeply rooted “imperial mentality” and its Empire had expanded -by a territorial standpoint- faster than any other. It is equally telling that France came close to Bourbon legitimist restoration, averted because the presumed heir to the throne refused to compromise over mostly theoretical, but politically supercharged, “matters of principle”.

126 Throat cancer ended the reign of this liberal monarch in only 90 days. Erstwhile, his estranged son Wilhelm had been raised in the shadow of Bismarck to hate liberal principles Frederick and Vicky championed while considering to model the young German Empire on the English counterpart.

127 For example war between Prussia and Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein in 1866 that saw the loss of roughly 2/5 of Danish territory in favor of Prussia; or between Prussia and Austria (the Austro-prussian war ).

128“ Interlocking directorates -- defined as the linkages among corporations created by individuals who sit on two or more corporate boards -- have been a source of research attention since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century “, (Domhoff, no date ).

1919 the Ottoman and Austrian Empires would cease their juridical and geopolitical existence, while the German and Russian (1917) Empires would cease their juridical existence in a geopolitical catastrophe similar to the one the French Revolution had once wrought, yet (this time) without any hope of Restoration.

In an era when women used to wear uncomfortable garments 129 as a token of conformity to received desirability and gender roles, another way to look at change that disquieted many people is to examine the situation that prompted remarks such as “this civilization no longer has sexes” by intellectuals such as Drieu de la Rochelle: Drieu signalled not only his concern that the boundaries between ’male’ and ’female’ had been blurred during the war, but also that the gender boundary was the most fundamental or significant. -...gender was used as a primary referent to signify the cultural crisis in bourgeois society after the war. -...-Like Drieu, Caston Rageot, a post-war journalist and novelist, saw civilization as tottering on the brink of disaster because of the war‘s so-called destruction of traditional gender relations. (Roberts 1992:49-52).

Furthermore Levine130 informs readers that :”The need for a separate female force to deal with the specific problems faced by women and children in the community was a long-held ambition of both feminist and social purity campaigners “. Levine also details the unholy and problematic alliance between traditional jingoist, 'sexist' regimes 131 and the militant fringes of feminism and suffragism:”It was "agitation over the suffrage question" that most disquieted Commissioner Edward R. Henry when, at the outbreak of war in 1914, deputations of women approached both him and the home secretary about the opportunities for policewomen under wartime conditions.” 132 . The 'Trojan horse' strategy is thus summarized: “ Women's entrance into police work came at a time when both militant and constitutional feminisms were publicly laying aside their 129 Such as the corset analyzed by Summers 2001.

130 1994:34.

131 Feminist literature offers several tantalizing concepts: phallocracy, patriarchy...

132 Levine 1994:39.

political claims on the state in deference to the cause of national unity. “ 133, while Higonnet134 considers it more casual and spontaneous and tells the story of a few eminent women-soldiers: Barred from the full rights of citizenship -...- in most of the warring states, women by 1914 nonetheless had begun to enter the public sphere. -...- [some] had become involved in the peace movement.

Others rallied around the politics of women’s bodies, especially around legislation governing child birth and prostitution. The growth of international organizations devoted to suffrage, socialism, and peace fostered networks of journals and newspapers that united women across national lines.

Worth mentioning is also women's massive 'conscription' to serve in the industry and in other roles135 to feed the gigantic appetites of war and the traumatic effects war exerted on the -broadly speaking- labour force that in many cases seemed to consider military service just as another job to do, as Wise 136 suggests analyzing the situation in Australia.

The 'gender relations conflict' could also compound with preoccupations relating to racial and/or religious matters137. It is enough to mention the uproar the deployment of French colonial soldiers of color to police occupied Germany caused.

This

anxiety was also present in the USA138 in an atmosphere minutemen139

133 Levine 1994:39.

134 2003:49.

135 “Patriotic women were mobilized, both economically and ideologically, by governments whose propaganda machinery worked to guarantee financial, political, and moral support for the war effort. Some women writers, such as Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Matilde Serao, and Gertrud Bäumer, contributed to that propaganda. The “sacred” unity of the home front with the battlefront was a commonplace invoked across Europe.”( Higonnet 2003:52).

136 2007.

137 It was common to denounce German Christianity as a driving force behind Germany's immoral appetites of world dominance, as if the religion then mainstream in Germany (whether Catholic or Protestant) differed significantly from the religious practice then mainstream on the other side.

138 Bird (1979:229ss) examines a series of scares relating to WWII and calling attention to possible or impending race riots (that had indeed happened during WWI), and/or to motifs such as what would people of color do upon the departure of White men to war.

139 Four minute men were patriotic volunteers who recited propaganda appeals in-between reel changes at movie theaters.

supercharged with elated propaganda denouncing 'German racism', and instilling the holy thirst for absolute democracy the USA wanted to champion, which might have raised a few questions for the African minority in a segregated society. Racial tensions thus culminated in riots140, mutinies of African soldiers (of whom, several would be later executed or sentenced to long prison terms) and reciprocal accusation of discrimination leading to martyrdom (on the side of the African-American press) and of anti-national activism at Germany's behest 141 (on the side of the 'White' press); readers may notice how Germany always served as scapegoat or bogeyman, while Austria (the true protagonist) and the Ottoman Empire faded into insignificance. It can thus be safely evinced that the recourse metropolitan powers made to aboriginal colonial soldiers (India, Africa...) sparked a first wave of post-colonial (racial?) consciousness destined to be long lived. In 1920 went to press a book (which the author claimed to have penned right before the war in 1914) by T.L. Stoddard with the ominous title:

The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy . Soldiers imbued with (or subjected to ) traditional values, ethics and rhetoric were undergoing a life-changing 142 experience in the trenches, but would be utterly disappointed in the way society had changed; this particular kind of disapproval (besides mundane concerns and disenfranchisement ) was another transmission belt behind the rise of radical movements, right- or left-wing.

140 Johnson 1999; “The most serious riot involving Negro soldiers which occurred in the United States during the first World War took place in Houston, Texas, on the night of Thursday, August 23, 1917. At that time over a hundred Negro United States Army regulars seized rifles and ammunition by force, and marched upon the city.

This outbreak followed a period of rising racial tension climaxed by an altercation between white police officers and Negro "military police." The following morning it was announced that there were thirteen known dead, of whom only one was a Negro, and nineteen wounded, including five Negro soldiers, as a result of the riot. ” (Schuler 1944:300). It is highly interesting how Schuler's 1944 account mentions matters of women and alcohol as present in the preparation of the incident, without minimizing racial friction and the objective conditions of African soldiers. The typical eulogized, post WWII version only relates how it all started with African soldiers reacting gallantly to the arrest of a Black woman by White policemen, incident also related in Schuler's paper.

141 A corollary to the 1917 “Zimmerman telegram” incident (whereby Germany had offered Mexico an alliance presumably to counter the impending U.S intervention) was the denunciation of Germans recruiting and training -on Mexican soil - disgruntled Blacks.

142Some authors, however, claim that “The war transformed Owen with almost molecular thoroughness; it seems to have left Sassoon's most fundamental dimensions unpenetrated. “(Mallon 1983: 81-99).

Once again self-proclaimed traditional (jingoist) (male) ruling classes were working their own ethos out of business 143 under the pretense of fighting 'noble' causes and summoning demons for help, which they would no longer be able to control and whose appearance called for yet more demons to drive the first away. The surrogate Victor Frankenstein of social alchemy and propaganda fueled, patronized and funded what it would later identify with the ultimate nemesis: Arab nationalism to annoy the Turks (allied of Germany and Austria ); Zionism in Palestine (again to annoy the Turks); Communism to disrupt Russia's war effort 144; Japanese imperialism in the far East (to attack and occupy German settlements and colonies); politicization of the masses of soldiers of color (India, Africa...) drafted en masse; Feminism (Suffragism, etc ) to gain very vocal advocates of yet another holy cause, along with a host of other “...isms” and related baggage the ruling elites fancied would easily co-exist and be easily reabsorbed. It all became apparent to some after WWII, when the social alchemy apparatus defending the 'best of all causes' had been running unhampered for some 30 years. A controversial book145

denounced virulently a supposed radical left-wing

conspiracy to take over America through the rogue use of -broadly put- 'brain-washing' methods (including psychoanalytic methods). The book denounces certain practices -such as electric shocks- that uncannily resemble later denunciations of the highly unethical (and State-funded) Mkultra/Cameron146 experiments that took (at the U.S government's behest) the Victorian fixation with hypnosis and altered states of consciousness to unethical new depths. The book also explicitly establishes a parallel between the 'justified' recourse to 'brain-washing' to re-educate people in defeated 143 “Post-war recovery, according to one contributor to a 1919 survey on the war and feminism in Je Sais Tout, would be measured in terms of the restoration of a traditional feminine role” (Roberts 1992:52).

144 The Germans repatriated Lenin. Oddly enough, decades later Khomeini would find sanctuary in France, going back later to Iran in order to lead a revolution. Islamic radicals would at some point represent 'fellow freedom fighters' against a Soviet invasion, and 'public enemies' at another.

145 Stickley 1959.

146 Patients underwent heavy electrical shocks and unorthodox therapies, and were administered massive doses of psychotropic cocktails in the alleged attempt to 'reprogram' them to bypass neuroses etc. The government was interested in the possibility of creating 'psychobombs', perfect killers on demand for rogue intelligence purposes, as it was rumored the Soviets were very ahead in the field. The program was a complete failure, along with other similar ones devoted to ESP, psychokinesis etc (in perfect Victorian fashion once again).

enemy countries, and the growing fear such 'scientific methods' may be used as a rogue weapon of mass control in the hands of unscrupulous politicians: the 'patriotic' cohort of wartime spin-doctors, psych-warfare experts, politicking minorities, 'militant' filmmakers, jingoist clinicians etc appeared in a new light throughout the 'scares' of the 1950-60s.

It is thus appropriate to debate whether the rise of certain social and political movements owes more to 'invisible hands' (progress, chance, the eternally present blood thirst of some and opportunism of others...) in their progressive, ineluctable historical actualization, or to the experiments and decisions -soon gotten out of hand- of the surrogate alchemist of social engineering and propaganda. It is generally known that secret societies and -in general- ethos that fueled the rise of National-socialism had been common currency for decades if not eons (antisemitism comes to mind), and so did messianism, millenialism and various esoteric beliefs that gained mainstream status and superb momentum only in the war's aftermath.

THE GENERAL ATMOSPHERE Yeats dismissed war poems/poets in unflattering terms: I think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right;-...-. I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; -...-; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. -...-. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same (Yeats no date :no page 147 ) The new societal order battling the old might be one way to frame Yeats' viewpoint.

Critics come to several conclusions regarding Yeats' role or choice: His peculiarly unsavoury political views -...- There were clearly other more sinister forms of repression to which I was oblivious.

-...-Choice was, to a large extent, the privilege of a chivalric code with its built-in heroic idealism. A code in which Yeats was grounded and to which he clung, especially since it connected with the heroic past. He disliked democracy, he disliked notions of human equality -...-. Yeats himself never really explored the complex problem of courage. He was interested primarily in the aesthetic issue of striking a courageous attitude. (Zwicky 2006:no 147 The whole passage (Yeats 1915) reads as follows:� I think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth besilent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter's night. I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all anthologies, but I have substituted Herbert Read's 'End of the War' written long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy-- for all skill is joyful-- but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his "Empedocles on Etna" from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same“.

page ).

Furthermore, some describe Yeats as a committed, severe perfectionist of eccentric tastes148 and explain his rejection of war poems in terms of “the design has some philosophical justification -...- [it is ] not the result of momentary caprice” 149; others

150

seem to sympathize with him: Yeats, who thought we make rhetoric, or propaganda, out of our quarrel with society, and poetry out of our quarrel with ourselves, had correctly identified that Owen was a "rhetorician." -...-Robert Graves never forgave Yeats for his rejection of Owen and was not included himself in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse but is often close to Yeats in feeling -...-[and] Owen's compassion has been attacked from another angle by Jon Silkin151 .

And offer this further insight: “Yeats's inclusion of Sassoon in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse was an aristocratic preference. Sassoon often catches a warrior-caste contempt for death and hell. -...- Sassoon has the confidence of a class with money, status, influence and the power to make changes. “ 152 . Furthermore, Banerjee153 writes about war poetry as “fads”154 and describes it as a sexist domain155.

148 Brater 1975.

149 Brater 1975:670.

150 Lomas 1985:377-379.

151“A small but recognizable part of Owen's adult practice as a poet tends to tie in with the rather grandiose and portentous response officially given in England to compassion.... to elevate compassion into a religiose sentiment, thus making innocuous any enquiry as to the state of the victim and the cause of his suffering.... It is at once politically expedient and morally less taxing as a mode “ (Silkin in Lomas 1985:379).

152 Lomas 1985:381.

153 2006.

154“As this essay argues, a close analysis of the fad for poetry during the First World War provides a better understanding of the socio-cultural reality of the war generation than a study based on isolated critical deliberation on a few select male poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. -...Catherine Reilly’s crucial work English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography (1978) lists 2225 published poets, testifying to the immense popularity of poetry during the time of the war. -...-The majority of these poems did not come from the established poets, but from the common masses who, riding on their newfound poeticafflatus, invigorated the infectious poetic fad in vogue. -...-The gradual emergence of the Imagist and the Georgian movements too acted as a stimulus to the poetic fad -...-.However, there was a gradual but a radical shift in the focus of the poetic fad from the die-hard patriotism and romanticism associated with the war, to the tragic and brutal reality of the trenches and modern warfare. This realistic verse found a steady market too, as publishers rushed in with slim volumes of compilations ” (Banerjee 2006:1-5).

155“Nearly seven decades after the war, the tradition of Great War poetry was largely believed to be an exclusively

The reason of this pervasive distaste for (some) war poetry shall be sought in the deepest abode of the collective moral compass -pointing to what is 'socially' good and recommended and its contrary- instilled in the youth since childhood 156, purposefully set ablaze during war times. The limited scope of this study does not allow to analyze multiple works, thus The Four Feathers (1901) will serve perfectly as an 'acid test' to understand the genesis of the distaste for any poetry not serving as transmission belt to foster what authorities deemed the right attitude. First, however, a succinct analysis of the main strands of the 'patriotic' atmosphere is in order to understand against what Owen and Sassoon rose indignantly; the analysis will also allow to understand where Yeats' criticism comes from. Lessenich157 correctly concludes “ The First World War or Great War was the first military conflict in history that evoked the widest possible spectrum of literary responses“. Curiously, Majkut158

remarks “World

War I is found to be a dividing line between pre-war socialist eutopias and post-war anti-socialist dystopias -...- [proclaiming the] rejection of the communal idealism of the pre-war novels. All are found to be dark expressions of post-war individualism”.

Some authors write about “incorporative mode” of propaganda novels whose:”viewpoint implies readers with no personal experience at the Front. -...- More specifically, its content accurately reflects a number of the myths, stereotypes and

male prerogative. Most standard anthologies published earlier, contained no poems written by women poets at all” (Banerjee 2006:5).

156“ British war comics from the 1940s onwards often directly transferred ideas and stories depicted in the serials.

The ethos of early twentieth century writers such as G A Henty, and children’s authors during the war such as the self-titled Lt-Col F S Brereton, were carried over into these comics, which continued to expound the well established ‘public school’ or pre-war honour systems. Although the War Books Controversy of the late 1920s put pay to these sentiments in mainstream and adult writing, the extremism of these concepts in children’s fiction was still tolerated. Authors used these notions as strong grounding elements for their readers, introducing them to a series of ideas that were deliberately posited in an exaggerated capacity. This idealism provided elements of heroism that appealed both to children and their parents, who wished to engender strong understandings of morality in the younger generation. Most importantly however, there also seems to be an underlying implication that as children reached adulthood, they would be encouraged to put aside such childish ethos, undergoing a process of disenchantment that correlated directly to the loss of innocence experienced by the generation of 1914-18.“ (MacCallum Stewart 2003:no page ) 157 1999:no page.

158 1986:i-ii.

dichotomies”159 . It is actually difficult to understand where exactly does 'patriotic' or even jingoist activism become sheer 'hate literature' (in today's trendy terms). With the exception of very few intellectuals who engaged openly in systematic and vitriolic propaganda, the uninitiated contemporary reader may as well think of a row of now forgotten authors writing heroic novels or inspiriting brave soldiers to “see they be worthy”160 of their country's dire effort to assert her superior moral, cultural or human standards following the reassuring image of the writer as self-controlled and disinterested: most often it wasn't the case. Generally speaking of wartime propaganda, these examples may prove the point: “ Germany should be so effectively destroyed that we should not have to fight her again for a hundred years -...- This can probably only be done by sterilization -...- [which is] little more painful than vaccination “ 161: this example regarding the Second World War does not come from third rate authors but from Ernest Hemingway. The same source in 1942 informed readers (ibidem) that “Said New Yorker Critic Clifton Fadiman, in one of the year's most mixed metaphors: "It seduces us to rest on the oars of our moral superiority." Fadiman himself believed that "the only way to make a German understand is to kill him. . . ."”. Readers may be tempted to explain away these examples as products of bygone ages, yet -just a few years ago162 - offhand opinion leaders could argue extensively over the Internet in favor of “nuking the frogs”, “ass-grabbing Russia” and other trailer park and ale house surrogates of top-shelf propaganda; it is enough to ponder that similar public exhortations in different circumstances might lead one in front of the courts in many 159 Crago 1979:274.

160 Gingrich, no date.

161“ Said Hemingway, in his preface to the impressive collected stories Men at War ($3): "Germany should be so effectively destroyed that we should not have to fight her again for a hundred years, or ... forever. This can probably only be done by sterilization [of] all members of Nazi party organizations." The virile, well-equipped novelist admitted that his suggestion should not be advocated now, as it would provoke "increased resistance" by the would-be victims. But, he pointed out, with an air of self-possession: Sterilization is "little more painful than vaccination." “ (The year in books: 1942).

162When Russia, France, China and other countries strongly objected to the American intervention in Iraq, which was alternatively designed as peace-keeping, counter-violence, freedom export or invasion. The fact that American citizens could advocate to subject the biggest contributor to U.S independence to a nuclear attack says all.

jurisdictions under some '...ism censorship' law, statute or provision, not to the gilded podium of the indignant patriot.

According to Bar-Yosef163, the motif of the crusade was a staple of WWI rhetoric and acquired special meaning in Palestine; the motif of the crusade co-existed with the officially demanded caution to avoid religious overtones that might disquiet the many Muslim subjects of the United Kingdom. The above matters insofar soldiers -by virtue of their position- were constantly bombarded with propaganda. In fact, the winning ace up General Diaz's164 sleeve was not only a radical change of strategy, but the massive and efficacious recourse to propaganda. Propaganda officers would mingle with the faceless crowd of soldiers, select a few of them and enlist them to relay propaganda during small talks in the trenches; propaganda (which had to be simple and to the point ) would at that point circulate as 'spontaneous' rumors and generally held opinions to inspirit soldiers and to gain their confidence: Reeves 165 discusses at length the entirely new 'industry' of British film propaganda during WWI. The fact that propaganda served as mere tool for policy makers and rulers - irrespective of any 'good' cause championed publicly to inspirit the masses - may be explained examining the political convulsions Italy went through before entering the war in 1915; the proEnglish and pro-French side eventually triumphed. The French secretly funded 166 the aggressively vocal newspaper of evicted Socialist maximalist Benito Mussolini, now converted to nationalism; it is not without irony then that Fascism was made possible by unofficial French (or otherwise) subsidies, and not by often invoked animistic forces such as Goya's el suenho de la raz贸n [que] produce monstruos (Reason's sleep [that] generates monsters). Against all odds, the weaker pro-German side, too, had its own rhetoric and prospective bonanza to advertise: to colonial concessions the English had 163 2001.

164 The Italian Army's head from November 1917.

165 1986.

166Mussolini's first (but kept secret from the public) wife, Ida Irene Dalser, had apparently denounced Benito's 'deals' in her tentative to settle a personal grudge over the status of their relationship. Her denunciations led nowhere and she died interned in a psychiatric institution in 1937.

promised (and would never deliver ), the 'German party' opposed claims to Nice, Corsica, Savoy and Tunisia that France had unfairly secured 167. The gentlemanly ethos of keeping one's word had also been put forward, since an alliance bound Italy to Germany and Austria; moreover, Austria had spontaneously offered concessions to appease Italy's grudge over irredenta; the pacifist and neutralist parties (not exactly superposed) had their rhetoric as well. Italy ultimately sided with the highest bidder, not without bitter disappointment when the outcome revealed the tremendous effort had served the English, the French or the U.S treasury much better than it had alleged Italian interests. As well, the forethought of never recovering the huge investments tied to the fate of England and France played a decisive role in the American intervention, disquieting entrepreneurs who -in turn- 'had a decisive say' in funding the very flexible and vocal class of professional carpet-baggers. As the Italian case shows, the rhetoric of engaged or hired propagandists was rather anodyne, being easily tailored (for example: war as regeneration; patriotic duty; possible gains etc ) to fit most scenarios. Of course, the above conclusion might appear simplistic, ethically infantile or jaded to some, yet in 1961 “The Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare printed a report of 186 pages on 31 July I96I, "National Defense Education Act Amendment of I96I," which named folklore (pages 20, 138) as a field to be excluded from Title IV graduate fellowships under the Act.” 168, prompting eminent Jewish-American folklorist Dorson to plead with a politician “The recent critics of folklore studies are through ignorance playing directly into the hands of the Communists. Folklore is one of the most powerful propaganda weapons -...- The democracies of course do not use folklore as propaganda, but for knowledge and insight. ”169 . Later, U.S Republican New York Senator Keating (at the height of the Cuban crisis and ensuing scare) in 1963 (no page) could again denounce the (mis)use of traditional folk motifs to seamlessly serve the appetites (and fit the commodious agenda) of the formerly gallant WWII ally, the now 167The significant presence of Italian immigrants in Tunisia only made matters worse when France took over.

168 Dorson 1962:160.

169 Ibid:161,163.

accursed Soviet regime and its domestic fifth column of radical left-wingers:”Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that if people went around singing this [Yankee Doodle] today, we would be in a pretty fix with our shipping ban against Castro.”.

It is interesting enough how propaganda could handle the same set of slogans or subjects in order to mean just about anything, without any apparent contradiction. Such attitudes as “Right or wrong, it is my country” could be both taught as the 'responsible' attitude towards the 'right' cause and blamed on the enemy as sign of blind, uncompromising fanaticism that invariably leads to the amoral turning of a blind eye to misdeeds later possibly labeled atrocities. By the same token, objections to propaganda could alternatively be labeled as the pinnacle of moral maturity (when exposing the 'enemy'), or as morally infantile anti-nationalism (if not treason pure and simple). Double dealers could either be without honor nor conscience (if serving the enemy), or could be having just found their honor and conscience (if serving 'the good guys'); “democracy” could be championed as well in the company of France, Czarist Russia or the USSR, without disconcert. Black and white British footage is famous (BBC 1964), in which a British veteran relates an exchange he had with German soldiers during WWI. Both parties were burying their dead in close proximity, when the British were puzzled to discover the Germans were carving “for fatherland and freedom” on the cross of one of their fallen countrymen, because the British thought they had a copyright on the item of the fight for freedom: the care and repair of public myth 170.

More specific than generic war propaganda and worth mentioning is “romantic militarism”171 : “It was the invention of romantic writers who -...-wrote 170 McNeill 1982-83.

171“"Romantic militarism" refers to a widespread European intellectual phenomenon that made its appearance at the time of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the European reaction. It was the invention of romantic writers who were not always passionate about politics or inclined to real aggression but who wrote about war as the way to enforce justice and as the occasion for self-expression. Romantic militarism can be distinguished from ordinary militarism which assumes the social importance of exclusively military virtues and privileges.1 It also differs from the more common prosaic love of war with its attachment to the exhilaration of combat, the comforts

about war as the way to enforce justice and as the occasion for self-expression. -...Romantic militarism is neither a political philosophy nor a sentimental experience, but an imaginative invention and a psychological stance. “

172

. The bit about wars as ways to

enforce justice was as old as the Crusades 173, and had found shrewd application not only in the aftermath of the French Revolution, but during the Versailles conferences as well: astute advisers to already eccentric visionary President Wilson -such as JewishAmerican propaganda genius (and Freud's nephew) Edward Bernays 174- had made a point of emphasizing U.S war intervention as exquisitely humanitarian/disinterested (“making the world safe for democracy”) 175.

We can compound this suggestion with

the following: The ideal of chivalry tallies with the spirit of a primitive age, susceptible of gross delusion and little accessible to the corrections of experience. Sooner or later intellectual progress demands a revision of this ideal. It does not disappear, however, it only sheds its too fantastic tendencies -...- [and] will be henceforth only a of esprit de corps, and homoeroticism. Romantic militarism is neither a political philosophy nor a sentimental experience, but an imaginative invention and a psychological stance. “ (Rosenblum 1982:249) 172 Rosenblum 1982:249.

173 However similar, the concept of pax romana emphasized rather inoffensive cultural aspects -much as the earlier Persians had done- and the simple concept of “pacified zone” ( paying taxes to Rome in order to enjoy peace and civilization ); the ancient world lacked the 'loving zeal' typical of epochs ruled by monotheistic religions.

174 Bernays' genius was behind the Communist scare -orchestrated on behalf of fruit multinationals- that led to covert operations preparing for the golpe in Guatemala in the early 1950s, employing a wide array of tactics including ritual defamation, rigged press conferences, (probably) remotely controlled demonstrations of hostility relayed through in-home news agencies in turn exaggerating a faddish atmosphere of impending doom against which 'the good guys' had a moral duty to rise: wartime tactics never stopped paying dividends. Much earlier, Bernays had masterminded a campaign on behalf of tobacco multinationals to make smoking appealing to women; for example during public events paid female testimonials were caught on film smoking. Rhetoric was also developed through paid newspaper columns to establish a link between the women's emancipation movement and smoking: the smoking “new woman” was also compared to the Statue of Liberty ('torches of freedom'). Bernays as well first massively utilized financial support lent to 'scientists' to publish 'studies' that extolled the virtues -or minimized the dangers- of products his clients had to sell. Bernays credited himself with inventing “public relations” to give propaganda a more respectable name, and -in Bernays' own words- to apply the war propaganda methods of persuasion and control to peace time priorities: from a culture based on 'need' to a culture based on 'desire' . Persuading the “stupid” (= Bernays' own word) masses that they needed a constant inflow of consumer goods (as phallic projections, perhaps), or that taking up smoking was in their best emotional interest would be no different from persuading them that they needed a war with another country to make an ethical statement.

Cfr.BBC 2002, episode happiness machines.

175 Wall (no date), establishes a parallel between duplicitous governance under president Wilson and under president Bush, jr.

model of social life. -...-. The modern gentleman is still ideally linked with the medieval conception of chivalry (Huizinga 1972:124-125)176.

Mens sana in fabula sana: mental health is a coherent life story, neurosis is a faulty narrative. -...- the narrative chain, with each event connected to the next by reasoned causal links, marks the victory of reason over chaos, of society over the aberrancy of crime, and restitutes a world in which aetiological histories offer the best solution to the apparently unexplainable. (Brooks 1994:49-53).

For Giroud, the first half of the First World War was also still characterised by 'chivalry' as the ultimate code of honour and it was only as the war became increasingly de-romanticised from 1916 that the images changed. (Pridmore, no page, no date). in order to understand that the ages old, eulogized and mythologized figure of the 'gentleman' was being eroded rather swiftly after WWI, as Collins 177 documents. What was left of the medieval virtues of the knight, filtered through the prism of the 'gentleman', was gradually slipping not only out of fashion, but also out of the focus of enforced moral and social norms, with WWI representing a major turning point. As Collins178 suggests, the very idea of gentlemanliness (a quality Englishmen loved to make their own) gradually started to serve as scapegoat when protestation erupted denouncing what was wrong in society 179. WWI had only hastened the coming to the conclusion that “the Emperor was naked”: Owen and Sassoon had their way to turn heads towards the “naked Emperor”. 'Gentlemanliness', however, and related expectations exerted their full power into the Belle Epoque180: men deemed unworthy 176 “ The ideal of chivalry tallies with the spirit of a primitive age, susceptible of gross delusion and little accessible to the corrections of experience. Sooner or later intellectual progress demands a revision of this ideal. It does not disappear, however, it only sheds its too fantastic tendencies -...- [and] will be henceforth only a model of social life. The knight is transformed into the cavalier, who, though still keeping up a very severe code of honour and of glory, will no longer claim to be a defender of the faith or a protector of the oppressed. The modern gentleman is still ideally linked with the medieval conception of chivalry “ (Huizinga 1972:124-125) 177 2002.

178 2002.

179 Although only a slogan, Italian Fascism's me ne frego [I don't give a damn] targeted received social norms and values.

180 Here is how Owen describes it (Disabled, lines 32-36 ): “He thought of jewelled hilts/

or failing to conform would more or less instantly lose their masculinity:”Still, the links between military cowardice and homosexual scandal are important to consider because

The Four Feathers compares pacifism with socially unacceptable desires.”

181

. Even C.G.

Jung - who had confessed that a man had sexually attacked him as a boy- believed -according to Freud- that Nietzsche had contracted syphilis in a homosexual brothel, and that two of Jung's friends who followed Nietzsche were homosexuals, of whom one committed suicide, and the other lived on a quite peculiar life 182. Victims would also become stateless and unwanted, as the analysis of The Four Feathers shall demonstrate.

It is not all clean-cut, however, and probably Owen and Sassoon's poetry rubbed the heralds and newsmen of the established order the wrong way because it pointed to a visible, terrible aporia: disabled veterans (Cohen 2001) the war had 'milled' on a grand scale endured very hard times when they came back, not only because of the lack of adequate infrastructures or the devastating economic crisis that followed WWI, but especially on a personal and 'ideological' standpoint that isn't difficult to imagine given the row of uprisings and revolutions of communist 183 undertone and the disruption of the societal fabric. As a mere example, once repatriated en masse, Italian prisoners of war found themselves in 'camps' that offered conditions comparable to those endured in foreign camps. Often rejected and neglected by the very people they had championed in war; often left behind by opportunist governments and Marxist agitators; often disappointed in the “new society” they had found ( for example in matter of gender relations), it is no mystery that newly born and soon strong Fascist

For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes; / And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;/ Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits./ And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers. /” 181 Lane 1995:46.

182 Bishop 1999:238, note 6.

183 While the radical left was unable to organize political experiments elsewhere that could match the extent of the Russian, Hungarian or Bavarian revolutions, it was very active everywhere. In Italy, 1919-20 was named biennio rosso (the red two-years) as a result of strikes, agitations and overall maximalist left-wing unrest. While the attention always focuses on the birth of Fascist militias, left-wing attempts at mounting the same (for example, the people's squad, arditi del popolo) are politely ignored, mythologized or downplayed.

movements184 (appearing in several European countries: Italy, Spain, Germany, Romania, Belgium...) capitalized on the distress the country had caused veterans. That generally co-existed with the compulsion to commemorate (Runia 2007) both the war and its meaning; in Italy it was mandated that burial grounds had their viale delle

rimembranze to commemorate soldiers fallen during WWI: even small villages had one.

The next strand of propaganda worth mentioning can be brought under the umbrella of “rhetorics of sacrifice”, at times interspersed with pastoral or sacred motifs (for example the imitatio Christi185); soldiers could even dream of being warriors of another golden age repleted with pseudo-Homeric and/or religious myth (Ware 2003).

In turn, the 'pastoral' and 'bucolic' element cannot be mentioned without mentioning landscape (Hemmings 2007): Words or maps are used to represent landscapes or territories.

When the territories shift from the physical realm to the realm of subjectivity, to include the mind, topography develops a literary resonance that is particularly rich in poets concerned with landscape or, more broadly, with Nature: Blunden and Sassoon, and before them Wordsworth.

The polarized atmosphere of crusade of good against evil, for or against without question, has already been discussed: “Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt/” (W.Owen, 'Disabled'186 ), but nothing can be properly explained without the pervasive ethics of heroism and sacrifice. According to both war poets and critics (Gingrich, no date ) the cleavage between soldiers and the home front widened, until soldiers felt strangers at home confronting what has been termed “newspaper language”, that is the civilian perception (“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye “ 187) of what was really 184 Fascist movements recurred to a series of different motifs: for example traditional Catholic nationalism (Léon Degrelle in Belgium); Christian mysticism and chivalry ( Corneliu Codreanu in Romamia ); latent Communist/Socialist undertones ( a large fringe of NSDAP in Germany and among Croix Flechées in Hungary ).

185“Wilfred Owen draws the same equation between his soldiers and the Christ who approaches His Crucifixion. In a letter to Osbert Sitwell written in early July, 1918” (Fussell 1975-2, no page ) 186 in JTAP 1996, line 30.

187 S.Sassoon, ''Suicide in the Trenches' in JTAP 1996, line 9.

going on being clouded to a higher degree by State propaganda and the artificial climate it created, emphasizing positive aspects and minimizing or suppressing negative or horrible ones.

VICTIMS, TRAITORS AND WATCHMEN Some writers188 talk about “hermeneutics of war“, others (like Paul Fussell) make clear WWI wrought unanticipated and unheard of changes and plight (as opposed to WWII ). Some authors 189

make a point of emphasizing Owen's “true” case of

neurasthenia (shell-shock), as opposed to Sassoon's fabricated one (Graves had “rigged” Sassoon's medical commission

to help him dodge court martial over his anti-war

protest ); other authors190 want to stress the imposition of roles and demeanor (for example gallantry, masculinity ). It can be argued that war poets react against a bundle of expectations pressuring them unnaturally towards madness, “fear of fears” (“And no fears Of Fear came yet.” W.Owen, 'Disabled'191), mutilation and death.

If we go back to the pseudo-Hippocrates, spurious correspondence credited to the famed ancient physician summoned to treat the “madness” of the equally famous philosopher Democritus192, madness is a mask under which to impart moral teachings based on a critical perspective193. Lecuppre194 mentions the role of the fool at the medieval king's court to “put power in perspective “ reminding the King that he's a man after all, and that he shall refrain from becoming a tyrant 195; the great license accorded to the fool at court disappears as the modern, absolute State takes over, Lecuppre (ibid.) adds. The 'mad' veterans, therefore, may have an important message for us all and -again going back to the pseudo-Hippocrates- their message might be a plea to defend 188 Slawek 1985-6:309-331.

189 Hildebidle 1983:101-121.

190 Hildebidle 1983:101-121.

191 in JTAP 1996, lines 31-32.

192 “But Democritus plays a special role by programming displacements of myths and his distinctive, immemorially repeated, myth of the mythmaker and the myth hearer as frightened and ignorant primitives” (Goodman 1993:49, note 7).

193“Demócrito não estava desprovido de senso, mas desprezava todas as coisas, e, assim, dava-nos uma lição de bomsenso e, através de nós, a todos os homens -...-. De fato, o binômio formado por loucura e normalidade parecia ter cedido a outro, constituído por sabedoria, ou hiper-filosofia, e senso comum.” (Fortuna Cairus 2003:78-80).

194 Le Fou du Roi 2006:1.

195 “Alter ego du roi, il lui rappelle en permanence ce qu'il est (un homme) et ce qu'il ne doit pas devenir (un tyran).

Tous les traités de gouvernance du Moyen-Âge (les « Miroirs des Princes ») insistent sur ce rôle : par son extravagance, le fou met le pouvoir en perspective”

“the man in disharmony with our terrible companion: normalcy” 196

197

, in the veteran's

case the Victorian ethos; of course, the fool's plea is not to be accepted -as it used to be in the Middle Ages- by the heralds of the established order such as Yeats. As well,

katabatic stories (or accounts of trips to the nether world(s) ) had been a staple of mythology (or the rational account of a story originally handed down by word of mouth ) all along, as part of the 'hero's journey' motif. In a not so subtle way, all great heroes -often (semi)gods and their ilk- and saviors had their own katabasis: Aeneas, Hercules,

Jesus of Nazareth, Krishna, Odysseus, Orpheus 198,

Osiris, Persephone,

Pythagoras, Zoroaster and so many others 199. Many cults -whether actual or ancientincorporate(d) a katabasis ritual based on allegorical-metaphorical200 ordeal/death and/or resurrection, with ecstasy, kalos thanatos (heroic death), rapture, mahasuka etc (hence a form of altered state of consciousness) being most often part of the picture.

Such was the case of the 'mystical tomb' of the German Eksternsteine: a hollow rock in which the postulants lied in meditation to trigger their awakening, second birth etc.

The 'sacred' megalithic complex near Teutoburg was (incorrectly) rumored to consist of asteroids201 fallen in a primeval age; the NSDAP regime included the Eksternsteine in its neo-pagan, pan-German mythology based on the ancestral heritage. applies to WWI soldiers: either we consider them the volunteering

The same young crop

196 Fortuna Cairus 2003:80.

197“ Pensemos, à guisa de epílogo, no século XV de Michel Foucault. Voltemos à França intolerante com as idiossincrasias, perseguindo-as e encerrando-as em manicômios. As cartas hipocráticas, publicadas em grego na Itália, logo chegariam à França. A medicina, então assaz hipocrática, seria levada a reconhecer um texto que defende o indivíduo da coletividade. Não se tratava, porém, de um simples indivíduo, pôde-se argumentar.

Demócrito não era um abderense qualquer, é certo, mas foi por isso, e somente por isso, que houve empenho em ouvir, não o sophós, nem a loucura alegórica de Erasmo, mas simplesmente o homem em desarmonia com a nossa terrível companheira, a normalidade.” Fortuna Cairus 2003:80 198 Orpheus crucified (Orpheos Bakkikos) used to be a famous worship item. Some date the same mythic image of the crucified hero unjustly slain to Caesar's funerals -whence the ensuing cult- and existing roman cults.

199 The basic variant is: the hero goes to the nether world because he has 'what it takes' ( for example needs to fulfill a mission), and the descent and consequent ascent 'prove' he is all that people believe about him (for example a savior ); or the hero goes to the nether world for some less glamorous reason (such as Odysseus needing hints to find his way home), but is back to possibly show other men the 'lesson' he has learnt, thus showing he had 'what it takes' to begin with.

200 A rhetorical device used to comprehend a mystery that would otherwise elude men.

201 The worship of celestial bodies made tangible -such as asteroid fragments and so forth- recurs in ancient mythologies.

destined to the mission (or the “renewal through struggle” paradigm); or we consider them as commoners who happened to have been drafted because someone said so (or the “loss, anger and futility” paradigm). In any case, the hero who makes it back from the nether world of the battle fields has a valuable lesson for us all: that is what supposedly happened to historical Saint Francis of Assisi and so many others after all; and the ones who did not make it are heroes as well who died for us, so we shall “see we are worthy” awaiting their possible “second coming”.

The 'all-encompassing' war experience, with its frantic polarization through which men and their visual, bodily and emotional experience “become one” makes sure that no restoration will ever be possible. It seems that the home front blames this impossibility upon the soldier, whose plight is -to a larger extent- self-inflicted: The blame for being "unduly" consumed by their war experiences falls on the soldiers themselves; the unrealistic militarist-masculine ideals remain beyond question. -...-. Likewise, the "popular press argued that neurasthenic men were malingerers who had been born with debased bodies". Moreover, the medical community did not publicly refute those misconceptions; to the contrary, doctors published statistical studies that suggested a "predisposition of emotivity" amongst the neurotic soldiers. (Harris 1998:no page )202 The idea that war poetry amounted to a sort of therapy is very popular among critics203), both interpreted as a “coping strategy”204), “attempts to write [one's 202 “ The blame for being "unduly" consumed by their war experiences falls on the soldiers themselves; the unrealistic militarist-masculine ideals remain beyond question. Bourke observes that social commentators often cast the terms "malingering" and "neurasthenic" as interchangeable concepts (119). Likewise, the "popular press argued that neurasthenic men were malingerers who had been born with debased bodies" (119). Moreover, the medical community did not publicly refute those misconceptions; to the contrary, doctors published statistical studies that suggested a "predisposition of emotivity" amongst the neurotic soldiers (Bourke 119). As Samuel Hynes suggests, "clearly the definition of true madness, or of shell-shock, or whatever it was to be called, depended on the definer's attitude towards the war" “ (Harris 1998:no page ).

203“ Owen is bypassing the censor and divulging therapeutically, clinically “ (Lomas 1985:386).

204 “ Claustrophobic trenches and heavy artillery fire -...- engendered severe feelings of helplessness, as soldiers were unable either to flee or actively defend themselves -...- these conditions left combatants cognitively overwhelmed and vulnerable. -...- Even allowing for diagnostic inaccuracies and contemporary ignorance of mental disease, most men clearly overcame battle stress extremely successfully. How did men cope? This article will argue that at the root of soldiers’ resilience lay a number of perceptual filters and psychological strategies which presented them with a

way] out of a nervous breakdown by speedingly composing a sonnet” 205 and as a broader clinical strategy206 to make men fit for combat again by addressing their fears, often in a form of self-medication: The obvious physical threat which these writers constantly faced was counterpointed by the no less feared spectre of neurasthenia -...-. Graves was on the verge of thus succumbing, whilst Sassoon probably suffered a total nervous breakdown -...-.The dominant motif which emerges from a study of the autobiographies of Blunden, Graves and Sassoon is the desperate search for psychological defences against such a condition” (Monick, no date , no page ) The “diary as a strategy”207 is a literary device to narrate stories “narrating a crisis, to the subjective states and contents – often fragmentary and incoherent of the psychology of the actor/narrator”208.

Well before Freud, Lacan (and his 'purloined letter' seminar) and others, anagnorisis (recognition, one of the key elements -along with catharsis, purgation- of the Greek tragedy209) had always come with a price and had to be earnt; the 'solution' is repeatedly 'purloined' like Poe's fictional letter210. Recognition -as in Poe's Purloined

Letter- is never all-encompassing but makes room for dark, 'open' or otherwise unexplored aspects. At some point, thought, the 'truth' will suddenly strike like a distorted, overly-optimistic but beneficial view of their surroundings and personal chances of survival. “ (Watson 2006:248).

205 Martin 2007:35.

206 Martin 2007.

207 Oliveira Carneiro 1994:5.

208 “ [A] escolha do registo diarístico -...- é particularmente bem adequada à crise, aos estados e conteúdos subjectivos - muitas vezes fragmentários e incoerentes do psiquismo do actor-narrador.”.

209 Joseph Campbell's interpretation based on Hindu symbolism (1989: episode from psychology to spirituality ) links recognition (the start of true spiritual life) to the heart chakra, and purgation “rather not purging it out so much as sublimating it [animality] -...- so that the transcending can be experienced” is associated with the higher throat chakra.

210 Lacan in 1972 examined Poe's Purloined Letter (1844). The story narrates the exploit of a detective that locates and recovers a mysterious letter, which in turn had been stolen from a Queen and was used by an unscrupulous minister to blackmail her under the threat the letter posed to her reputation and honor (presumably it was about an adulterous affair ).

thunderbolt, affecting the victim (Sassoon, Owen or other veterans) in a way similar to Pater's “sublime”211. More precisely, Ahl212 comments on that narrative strategy “”formidable speaking”, deinotes, is a major style of oratory in antiquity -...- [and] it relies on the listener to supply details omitted altogether by the speaker -...-. The reader or listener must supply some information, do some work himself”.

It has been showed how soldiers suffering from neurasthenia were very often misjudged as malingerers, shirkers or cowards, yet some 213

argue that the

confusion and unpreparedness in the medical field was significant, for example shown in the divide between the 'school' denouncing strictly physical or anatomical causes and a burgeoning approach taking psychology and mental health into increasing consideration:”All had shifting connotations in pre-war British medical discourse, and incorporated aetiological ambiguity”214and only “ After 1917, the bulk of the British medical literature focused on the emotional and psychological origins of the war neuroses. The limits of a ‘psychological swing’ should be borne in mind, however“215.

The picture wouldn't change much by WWII:”49 percent of all [U.S] soldiers evacuated from combat were sent back because they suffered from mental problems -...-. [U.S] Psychoanalysts used techniques developed by Freud -...- [and] became convinced the breakdowns were not the direct result of fighting -...- [but] of the man's own violent feelings and desires”216: the malingerer of the patriotic imagery was replaced by the analysand of the medicalized Freudian imagery, whose plight is largely self-inflicted.

The topic of comparing shell-shocked or otherwise ill soldiers with malingerers, cowards and traitors brings back the subject of Italian war prisoners

211 “We authors recognize the sublime not by an act of analytic or comparative judgment, but by our transport.”

(Pater 1873: 133-134).

212 1984:175-6.

213 Loughran 2009.

214 Loughran 2009:5-6.

215 Loughran 2009:9.

216 BBC 2002, episode the engineering of consent .

starving to death in captivity during WWI because the liberale217 Italian government did not want to provide for them in order to discourage the forethought of preferring detention to battle; as the famous slogan before the last battles of WWI went: “ O tutti eroi, o tutti accoppati “ [either we all becomes heroes, or we all get slain]. It is impossible to ascertain how many Italian prisoners of war died in captivity: some 218 estimate a number of 100.000, which would be surprising considering that the bulk of Italian prisoners was captured/surrendered in the aftermath of the Caporetto disaster (October 1917); it is also curious how 'accredited' historians 219 seem to find the subject unworthy of scrutiny and that the same sources (archives, etc ) -which support other claims with a barrage of minute evidence leading to unanimous conclusions- have nothing in store about this particular occurrence.

The atmosphere, especially under general Cadorna, was that of merciless discipline; merciless discipline that -to name just one- was one of the reasons behind the epidemic success of the Communist revolution in Russia, after the Western Powers had 'convinced' the provisional (Menshevik ) government to once again wage war. It is also argued by many that Petain's 'stick and carrot' tactics of fewer summary executions on one hand, favors (for example furloughs) and expedient measures (such as the rearrangement of undisciplined units) on the other helped him counter the potentially disastrous outbreak of mutinies and protest in the French army. The contemporary reader may struggle to understand the extent of such mercilessness, yet circolare n.

3525 del 28 settembre 1915 is an unambiguous example. Thereby, then head of the 217 It is typically referred to as liberale (liberal) the Constitutional government based upon the Statutes of King Carlo Alberto of Sardinia (1848), different from other strictly democratic-popular constitutions, and of course from totalitarian constitutions. Typically, Stato liberale is believed to last from 1848 to the inception of Fascism either in 1922 or rather in 1925-26, when a series of laws ( leggi Fascistissime ) were enacted to create and support a true Fascist regime. Formally the Statutes ceased only with the constitutional change of regime into a Republic.

218 Pavan 2001.

219There are typically at least a few books/sources on just about any historical occurrence -or (counter)interpretation of the same-, which includes the story of Italian prisoners 'abandoned' in captivity. A completely different matter is the likelihood of such sources appearing in university syllabi or being discussed at length and in agreement by experts during prime time televised debates destined to the public at large: that is why the present writer uses the adjective “accredited”.

Italian army Cadorna intimidates his soldiers forewarning them that he who tries to surrender or to retreat will be dispatched by his officers; by police units organized to patrol the territory; by other soldiers “prima che si infami� [in order to avert dishonor ]; it is also important to emphasize this discipline was enforced by chivalrous Victorian officers serving liberal, parliamentary governments 220. Soldiers, then, faced incredible pressure coming from all angles: the socially acceptable; the patriotic and the strictly military enforcement, all conspired to exasperate them.

220 In spite of claims to the contrary, even Germany and Austria were two advanced parliamentary regimes.

THE FOUR FEATHERS As Eby221 explains, The Four Feathers author A.E.W Mason - an “ exmarine, former secret service officer in Morocco”- entered the picture when “The government -...- [mobilized] English writers into a special propaganda section, designed originally to counter German propaganda in the United States which might persuade Congress to cut off munitions sales to Britain.” (ibidem); among others J.M. Barrie, A. Bennett, R. Bridges, G.K. Chesterton, A.C. Doyle, J. Galsworthy, T. Hardy, H.G. Wells, H. Newbolt, E.V. Lucas, J. Masefield All promised to aid the cause by writing or lecturing, but while they waited to be mustered into service the government decided that publishers and newsmen made better propagandists and placed the litterateurs on indefinite hold.-...- Undaunted, Barrie and A. E. W. Mason -...- sailed at once to America to initiate their own private propaganda campaign, but they were headed off and silenced by the British Embassy in Washington, which feared that their appearance would spark a counterdemonstration by GermanAmericans.“ (Eby 1988:244).

Lane222, however, raises doubts about the writer's persona: Mason did not marry, nor did he have any notable or durable relationships with women; he devoted his attention almost exclusively to men, whether in travel abroad or in London's gentlemen's clubs. Mason sustained two important and passionate relationships with men.

Some critics address the novel in these terms: “ Most recently, the sixth 223 remake of A. E. W Mason's 1905 colonial epic, The Four Feathers, has played to full movie houses. Even postcolonial Bollywood can't let go of the Empire “ 224; Trotter225 221 1988:244.

222 1995:49.

223 Cfr www.imdb.com there appear to be versions filmed in 1915, 1921, 1929, 1939, 1977 and 2002.

224 Lassner 2004:2.

225 1993:53.

adds: “The Four Feathers is the nearest popular equivalent to the divided narratives of Gissing, Forster and Lawrence. “; Daly226 comments:” The Four Feathers, is in some ways the quintessential imperial romance” and continues 227 :”The screen success of The

Four Feathers is worth pausing over. -...- Mason's novel has nevertheless also spawned a series of desert spectaculars”.

It is thus important to understand how Mason was not 'just another successful writer' peddling what critics term “martial illusions” 228, but an engaged “secret agent”; in a period when “The guerilla, the commando, the Special Operations forces, the secret agents, spies and saboteurs who operate “behind enemy lines” … these become the characteristic soldier heroes of twentieth-century adventure. “ 229.

Others as well had (or would) put burgeoning mass-marketing to use to in order to envelop ordinary events of patriotic interest into myth 230: the journalist Lowell Thomas, who turned the far more contradictory materials of T. E. Lawrence's [of Arabia] career into an adventure narrative. In an era of modern mass publicity, Thomas's use of familiar romance paradigms helped to make Lawrence into a star, and in turn this process fuelled the market for romances like The Four Feathers. (Daly 2000:154).

The Four Feathers231 is a novel detailing the fall from grace and later glorious redemption of a British officer: he tenders his resignation just before a military expedition and he is thus disgraced and labeled a coward, receiving four white feathers 226 2000:14 227 2000:153.

228 Harari 2005.

229 Dawson cited in Daly 2000:154-155.

230 “The success of such desert adventures owes more than a little to what at first may seem like an extra-fictional factor, that is the cult of Lawrence of Arabia. But the popular conception of Lawrence has to be grasped as itself largely a romance, one created by the journalist Lowell Thomas, who turned the far more contradictory materials of T. E. Lawrence's career into an adventure narrative. In an era of modern mass publicity, Thomas's use of familiar romance paradigms helped to make Lawrence into a star, and in turn this process fuelled the market for romances like The Four Feathers. As a result of this fictional/publicity cross-fertilization the themes of disguise (even to the point of 'going native') and of guerilla warfare are more prominent in subsequent adventure romances. “ (Daly 2000:154).

231Cfr www.imdb.com there appear to be versions filmed in 1915, 1921, 1929, 1939, 1977 and 2002.

from both his friends and his fiancée as a sign of utter disrespect. Puzzled, he then manages to visit the war theater and to become a hero giving back the white feathers to his former friends, and (after 6 years of colonial escapades, prison and battle) he manages to marry his (former) sweetheart. Trotter 232 explains: “ In The Four Feathers (1902), A. E. W. Mason juxtaposed a story of enablement with a story of disablement.

-...-. The novel is as definite and incontestable about loss as it is about gain, refusing to allow enablement to supersede or conceal disablement“. It may

prove extremely

fruitful to put forward observations regarding The Four Feathers and to compare them with bits from Owen and Sassoon's poems to understand the cleavage in British society between 'real' war and 'fictional' war. Above all, allowance shall be made for the rather inconsistent premises: if Harry Feversham (the hero and son of a British general) was imbued with the traditional ethos, couldn't he simply foresee the consequences of his resignation, rooted in childhood traumas caused by hearing histories 233 of cowardice234?

Why did he resign if he cared so much? Anyways, let's see what happens to him and what his reactions are after the fateful decision. Lane establishes a connection: General Feversham's anecdote about cowardice and stigma resonates with contemporaneous accounts of homosexual scandal that Mason is likely to have read. Historically close to the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray four years earlier, in 1891 Mason's account of his "coward" 232 1993:152-153.

233“There were three hundred yards of bullet-swept flat ground, and a message to be carried across them. Had Wilmington toppled off his horse on the way, why, there were the whispers silenced for ever. Had he ridden through alive he earned distinction besides. But he didn't dare; he refused! Imagine it if you can! He sat shaking on his horse and declined. You should have seen the general. His face turned the colour of that Burgundy. 'No doubt you have a previous engagement,' he said, in the politest voice you ever heard—just that, not a word of abuse. A previous engagement on the battlefield! For the life of me, I could hardly help laughing. But it was a tragic business for Wilmington. He was broken, of course, and slunk back to London. Every house was closed to him; he dropped out of his circle like a lead bullet you let slip out of your hand into the sea. The very women in Piccadilly spat if he spoke to them; and he blew his brains out in a back bedroom off the Haymarket. Curious that, eh? He hadn't the pluck to face the bullets when his name was at stake, yet he could blow his own brains out afterwards." ” (Mason 1901, no page ) 234“And Lieutenant Sutch thumped his fist despairingly upon the table. "If only I had spoken at Broad Place. Harry, why didn't you let me speak? I might have saved you many unnecessary years of torture. Good heavens! what a childhood you must have spent with that fear all alone with you. It makes me shiver to think of it. I might even have saved you from this last catastrophe. For I understood. I understood."” (Mason 1901, no page )

being shunned, spat at, and pushed toward suicide generates an intriguing subtext in The Four Feathers. (Lane 1995:48).

(Psychological ) emasculation, disenfranchisement, feeling an alien at home suddenly befell Harry235:”Disgracing my name and those dead men in the hall [ portraits of his gallant ancestors ] I think I would have risked. I could not risk disgracing her [his fiancée Ethne].”; furthermore, his choice is equated with “disability” in the opinion of a sympathetic friend236 and with loss of masculinity 237. Furthermore, his state of pariah is continuously dissected238:”A coward, and you go quietly down to Surrey and confront your father with that story to tell to him!”

239

. A pariah and now virtually homeless 240

and uprooted, Harry suddenly concocts his plan to regain manhood and citizenship 241; it 235 Mason 1901, no page.

236“ "Did you ever read 'Hamlet'?" he asked.

"Of course," said Harry, in reply.

"Ah, but did you consider it? The same disability is clear in that character. The thing which he foresaw, which he thought over, which he imagined in the act and in the consequence—that he shrank from, upbraiding himself even as you have done. Yet when the moment of action comes, sharp and immediate, does he fail? No, he excels, and just by reason of that foresight. I have seen men in the Crimea, tortured by their imaginations before the fight —once the fight had begun you must search amongst the Oriental fanatics for their match. 'Am I a coward?' Do you remember the lines?” (Mason 1901:no page ) 237“"You cannot stay in London, hiding by day, slinking about by night," he said with a shiver. "That's too like—" and he checked himself. Feversham, however, completed the sentence.

"That's too like Wilmington," said he, quietly, recalling the story which his father had told so many years ago, and which he had never forgotten, even for a single day. "But Wilmington's end will not be mine. Of that I can assure you. I shall not stay in London."” (Mason 1901:no page ) 238“Again remorse for that occasion, recognised and not used, seized upon Lieutenant Sutch.

"Why didn't I speak that night?" he said impotently. "A coward, and you go quietly down to Surrey and confront your father with that story to tell to him! You do not even write! You stand up and tell it to him face to face!

Harry, I reckon myself as good as another when it comes to bravery, but for the life of me I could not have done that."

"It was not—pleasant," said Feversham, simply; and this was the only description of the interview between father and son which was vouchsafed to any one. But Lieutenant Sutch knew the father and knew the son. He could guess at all which that one adjective implied. Harry Feversham told the results of his journey into Surrey.” (Mason 1901:no page ) 239 Mason 1901:no page.

240“"My father continues my allowance. I shall need it, every penny of it—otherwise I should have taken nothing.

But I am not to go home again. I did not mean to go home for a long while in any case, if at all."” (Mason 1901, no page ) 241“"What if I could compel Trench, Castleton, and Willoughby to take back from me, each in his turn, the feather he sent? I do not say that it is likely. I do not say even that it is possible. But there is a chance that it may be possible, and I must wait upon that chance. There will be few men leading active lives as these three do who will not at some moment stand in great peril and great need. To be in readiness for that moment is from now my career.” (Mason 1901:no page )

is equally bizarre how Harry's fiancée Ethne242 almost instantly turns against him with all her self: ” I told him to take up those three feathers 243 because they were his, and I wished to show him that I agreed with the accusations of which they were the symbols. That seems cruel? But I did more. I snapped a fourth white feather from my fan and gave him that to carry away too. It is only fair that you should know. I wanted to make an end for ever and ever, not only of my acquaintanceship with him, but of every kindly thought he might keep of me, of every kindly thought I might keep of him. I wanted to be sure myself, and I wanted him to be sure, that we should always be strangers now and—and afterwards” (Mason 1901, no page).

Readers may now skip the bulk of the novel with its colonial escapades, exotic scenarios and the usual repertory of “renewal through struggle”: Harry is back after 6 years and has regained his manhood and pride. Now Harry has subjected himself to an ordeal much harsher than if he had just been a mere soldier:”this pressure also registers as the cost of straying from "normalcy" and the energy he expends in attempting to regain it”244 , a coded speak warning to all those readers contemplating to avoid “doing their bit”, and going back to the remote dawn of Western civilization: Spartan women bade farewell to their men with these words” Either with this, or on this”, meaning that men should always keep their heavy shield (typically abandoned in retreat) with them, or be repatriated lying on it after death. Of course, every epoch exerts the same pressure and blackmail making sure the same fate befalls transgressors, although based 242“She was at that time a girl of twenty-one, tall, strong, and supple of limb, and with a squareness of shoulder proportionate to her height. She had none of that exaggerated slope which our grandmothers esteemed, yet she lacked no grace of womanhood on that account, and in her walk she was light-footed as a deer. Her hair was dark brown, and she wore it coiled upon the nape of her neck; a bright colour burned in her cheeks, and her eyes, of a very clear grey, met the eyes of those to whom she talked with a most engaging frankness. And in character she was the counterpart of her looks. She was honest; she had a certain simplicity, the straightforward simplicity of strength which comprises much gentleness and excludes violence. ” (Mason 1901:no page ) 243“Harry Feversham took the feathers as she bade him, without a word of remonstrance, and indeed with a sort of dignity which even at that moment surprised her. All the time, too, he had kept his eyes steadily upon hers, he had answered her questions simply, there had been nothing abject in his manner; so that Ethne already began to regret this last thing which she had done. However, it was done. Feversham had taken the four feathers.” (Mason 1901:no page ) 244 Lane 1995:51.

on a different set of bogeymen, 'founding events and values', whereby victims and tormentors, law-makers and outcasts, the vile and the sublime, the mainstream and the taboo often exchange places from period to period in an opportunistic minuet.

It is interesting to examine on which terms Ethne 245 accepts to love Harry again, and to marry him246: ”There was a great barrier between us then separating us forever.

We should never have met again here or afterwards. I am quite sure of that. But you have broken the barrier down by all your pain and bravery during these last years. I am no less sure of that. I am absolutely confident about it, and I believe you are too. So that although we shall not see one another here and as long as we live, the afterwards is quite sure for us both. And we can wait for that.

You can. You have waited with so much strength all these years since we parted. And I can too, for I get strength from your victory." -...-.I am glad that you escaped from Omdurman without the help of Lieutenant Sutch or Colonel Durrance. I wanted so much that everything should be done by you alone without anybody's help or interference," she said ” (Mason 1901:no page ).

When Harry comes back, Ethne is engaged to Colonel Durrance, one of Harry's (former) friends who once had considered him a coward, but no longer did. Since she has promised Harry that “there will be no parting” 247, she has to deal with Durrance, who

had

contracted

another

“disability”

(blindness)

during

the

war:

the

'medicalization' (whether metaphorical or otherwise) motif reappears. Durrance, however, knows best: 245Social norms are so internalized that Harry thinks only the best of Ethne's behaviour:”That she took the sorrow bravely and without complaint, doing the straight and simple thing as her loyal nature bade her, did not diminish Harry Feversham's remorse. On the contrary it taught him yet more clearly that she least of all deserved unhappiness. The harm was irreparable. Other women might have forgotten, but not she. For Ethne was of those who neither lightly feel nor lightly forget, and if they love cannot love with half a heart. She would be alone now, he knew, in spite of her marriage, alone up to the very end and at the actual moment of death. ” (Mason 1901, no page ) 246“"Well, it's just the truth. The most I hoped for—and I did hope for that every hour of every day—was that, if I did come home, you would take back your feather, and that we might—not renew our friendship here, but see something of one another afterwards."

"Yes," said Ethne. "Then there will be no parting."” (Mason 1901:no page ) 247 Ibid.

“"I went because neither you nor I could have kept up the game of pretences we were playing. -...- Some day or other we should have failed, each one in turn. I dared not fail, nor dared you. -...- You on your side dared not let me, who had said 'Marriage between a blind man and a woman is only possible when there is more than friendship on both sides,' know that upon one side there was only friendship, and we were so near to failing. So I went away -...-.

"The oculist at Wiesbaden?" she asked. "He gave you a hope?"

Durrance stood meditating whether he should lie or speak the truth. "No," he said at length. "There is no hope. -...-. Perhaps one of these days I shall go on a journey 248, one of the long journeys amongst the strange people in the East.""”

In these few lines readers find all the strands of 'patriotic' rhetoric that have been mentioned: rhetoric of sacrifice, romantic militarism, “renewal through struggle”, “seeing one be worthy”.

We have come to a full circle now to understand the opposition between the home and the battle front, and the desperate feeling of disenfranchisement lurking underneath war poems' often rushed, hallucinating, unpolished writing. We also understand better how war poets were compelled -at least in many ways- to use the images they used, which in many cases remind us of nightmares, or “acid trips”.

Men ought to be gallant and brave, but also fit and whole; there is little place for disabled heroes; rhetoric is in sharp contradiction with the reality of war and the cold statistics of tens of thousands of disabled and amputees; much as The Four

Feathers documents, so do war poets:”Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes/ Passed from him to the strong men that were whole./How cold and late it is! Why don't they come/And put him into bed? Why don't they come?/ “

249

. Since the Italian

High Command had officially blamed the Caporetto disaster on the sudden, mysterious and cowardly disbandment of the entire army, most were quick to wish the “vigliacchi 248 Much as the limbless veteran soldier in Owen's poem Disabled longs for darkness, for venturing into the realm of sleep, so Durrance shall atone for his disability through a journey that will be the mock copy of his earlier heroic escapades.

249 W.Owen 'Disabled', lines 43-46 in JTAP 1996.

di Caporetto” [Caporetto cowards] were all dead, which would come true for many in prison camps, anyways; Sassoon writes about a soldier in these terms: 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.” ('Suicide in the Trenches', lines 5-8) Not knowing better, it would be easy to mistake “Tim” (who died smiling) for some gallant hero of medieval inspiration; yet we know that “Tim” died suicidal of Self-Inflicted-Wound (Owen's poem 'S.I.W'),

along

with

Sassoon's “friend”,

immediately forgotten. As in psychoanalytic transference, consciousness is a gradual and vexed process: the veteran in 'Disabled' struggles at first to realize what is happening to him, mixing recollections of superficial wounds playing football, which brought him so much glory (“carried shoulder-high” ), with a situation in which “half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race/ “; an equally seemingly superficial wound (“And leap of purple spurted from his thigh./” ) leaves him wishing for “they”, “darkness” to come, for the “twilight” to morph into obscurity (preferably of death): “Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal./ Only a solemn man who brought him fruits/ Thanked him; and then enquired about his soul./”250. It is not difficult to recognize Sassoon's Bishop ( from 'They' ), thus understanding the hate and diffidence towards the home front, for only authorities seem to care for the veterans ( medals, hospitals, pensions etc ), and very residually so (“And take whatever pity they may dole.” 251.

Yet (as in the Four Feathers case ) what had fueled the delusion of the “boys” was not the cold official rhetoric or the ill-defined interest of a duplicitous clique of consanguineous monarchs, but the idea of mesmerizing pretty girls 252 (or “boys”, it does not really matter ) and of resuming successes from the football court at an increased level of amplitude. Now women prefer “strong men who are whole” to the 250 W.Owen, 'Disabled', lines 37-39.

251 W.Owen, 'Disabled', line 42.

252“Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts/” (W. Owen, Disabled, line 27).

brave veteran, and since war hardly leaves soldiers unaffected, the present writer surmises those “strong, whole men” might very likely be ( at least to a telling extent ) those draft-dodgers, emasculated cowards, weaklings or malingerers whom the official rhetoric and lay men's mentality exposed to ridicule and shame 253: shame becomes the veteran's lot, and roles get reversed when 'someone else' gets all the women's attention.

Finally, the paradox expounded in Four Feathers comes full circle, and we can now understand why Sassoon asks the rhetorical question “Does it matter?”; he's asking what matters most: “doing one's bit” or saving one's integrity?

As Paul Fussell explains, WWI narratives are most often “faulty” at a level similar to official propaganda and its fabricated (or grossly massaged ) stories about “atrocities” blamed exclusively upon the enemy under the care of government-friendly presses254 staffed with imaginative ghost writers, and about an ultimate principle at stake. Recent evidence255

suggests that the British purposefully lured third-party

civilian ships in water patrolled by German submarines in order to trigger incidents, and that the famous U.S civilian ship Lusitania256 German submarines sunk in 1915 253 Hardy (1914:no page) devotes his On the Death Bed (Satires of Circumstance) to this theme:” 'I'll tell -- being past all praying for -Then promptly die.... He was out at the war, And got some scent of the intimacy That was under way between her and me; And he stole back home, and appeared like a ghost One night, at the very time almost That I reached her house. Well, I shot him dead, And secretly buried him. Nothing was said.

'The news of the battle came next day; He was scheduled missing. I hurried away, Got out there, visited the field, And sent home word that a search revealed He was one of the slain; though, lying alone And stript, his body had not been known.”

254 The December 1917 issue of Popular Mechanics (1917:912) announces”The Germans always have been distinguished for uncivilized acts -...-” the author proceeds not without sarcasm “ This volume [printed by the French] lists all possible German atrocities -...- then -...- recommends the reprisal that should be made”.

255 Greenhill 2008, no page.

256 “There are other perplexing facts about the Lusitania as well. For some reason a new captain, William Thomas

-thus triggering a wave of germanophobia and moral outrage that some credit as major event leading to the U.S intervention- did in fact carry war materials to be supplied to Germany's warring enemies. The fact that German submarines observed less and less frequently the code of honor at sea (for example sinking ships without warnings) is well known; less known is the fact the British used ships that looked like civilian merchant ships, but that were secretly equipped to open massive fire against German submarines having surfaced to give the chivalrous warning, much as the mob attacking on English soil stores with German names is rarely mentioned, and -if such is the casedone away with as 'understandable mood of the times'.

The “openness” of a layer of war poetry or literature seems to conflict with the underlying assumption that “words cannot express” what war is really like, so that openness might be interpreted in some cases as mere 'trick of the trade', a craftsman's ruse to create an (non genuine) effect. Or is it not rather the other way round?

What stands in opposition to storytelling, what is in the process of replacing it entirely, is of course the novel -...-. for the novelist is necessarily isolated, invisible, a hidden god [in the works of Walter Benjamin] who does not have the capacity to enter into colloquy with his fellow man, and thus cannot communicate that wisdom that is good counsel. (Brooks 1994:81-82)257 Turner, was placed in charge for the return trip from New York. Turner flagrantly violated all the formal sailing orders given him in New York. Contrary to these instructions, he sought out rather than avoided the highly dangerous zone in which the vessel was actually sunk. Again, contrary to orders, he neither increased his speed nor followed a zigzag course when in the general zone of danger. Did captain Turner receive a subsequent set of instructions by wireless altering his original orders? Why was Turner met by Churchill upon his arrival at the pier after his rescue and taken directly to King George V and knighted? Was there a British governmental design to invite a submarine attack?” Connors 1966, no page. In 1966 this conjecture might still have been discarded as coming from a moral outcast making excuses for German crimes, or some journalistic appeal of this kind.

257 “ What stands in opposition to storytelling, what is in the process of replacing it entirely, is of course the novel -...-. for the novelist is necessarily isolated, invisible, a hidden god [in the works of Walter Benjamin] who does not have the capacity to enter into colloquy with his fellow man, and thus cannot communicate that wisdom that is good counsel. Even more threatening to the survival of storytelling than the novel, according to Benjamin, is “information,” the typical modern form of communication, the domain of the newspaper which, in providing explanations for everything, impoverishes our experience of narrative -...- for Benjamin, then, storytelling belongs to the world of the living world, the world of a communication that is authentic because it concerns the transmission and the sharing of experience, and that can thus become wisdom, the counsel of man to his fellow men. This wisdom, however, is less a factor of the “message” of the tale than of its integration in the storytelling

That is another windmill Owen and Sassoon try to battle, for their interest is not commercial at all (compared to war-related works such as those of Graves ), but overwhelmingly psychological : in vain they try to warn others about “what words cannot express”; storytelling is then another divide war poets wants to cross, and their narrative is faulty at times precisely because of what “words cannot express”.

situation“ (Brooks 1994:81-82)

CONCLUSION It is impossible to understand the world of WWI, and the feeling of abrupt change, pain, desolation that dominated that world if we cannot understand the stability (and consequent feeling of security ) that came abruptly to an end. The Victorian era had indeed witnessed some foretelling and ominous events, such as the novel deployment of logistics and weaponry in a row of regional wars. In spite of that, long-term foundations of European civilization and ethos were largely unaffected, and Europe was still ruled by an extended family of consanguineous monarchs. The Victorian/Belle Epoque positivistic ethos of slow yet steady progress seemed the right way to interpret evolution and mankind's ultimate fate. Masculinity (even in its homoerotic interpretation ) ruled a psychological world haunted by gallantry and “doing one's bit” no matter what the cost might be, in an era of colonial expansion, “white man's burden” and so forth. Secret and/or patriotic societies existed, often headed by self-proclaimed seers that elatedly chanted a revival of spiritualist, occult and ancestral beliefs and imagery. Phrenologists and very popular early psychiatrists (aliénistes) -whose exploits fascinated the great public- probed the depths of the human psyche trying -in often bizarre ways- to make sense of altered states of consciousness, madness, deviance and sexuality. A darker side existed to all that, though, by virtue of which conspiracy (and anti-conspiracy) theories, maximalism, jingoism and chauvinism were dethroning mild, humanistic, progressive values. Thus, by 1919 the German and Russian empires ceased their juridical existence succumbing to maximalist revolutions of Communist inspiration, while the Austrian and Ottoman empires ceased their geopolitical existence as well, succumbing (on the other end of the spectrum) to humanistic “principles of nationality”; even the winning English house of Hanover changed its name to Windsor to accommodate jingoism. All that fueled by a composite mixture of 'patriotic' motifs (epitomized by the most successful novel The Four

Feathers ): “romantic militarism”, “martial illusions”, vigilante 'patriotic leagues' and their web of informants co-existing with an equally diverse homoerotic (sub)culture

both omnipresent and dreaded.

In this chaos war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon try to “deconstruct” their world in a narrative all the more faulty the farther they venture to come to terms with “what words cannot express”, an experience made of allencompassing psychological and bodily experiences that doomed an overwhelming number of soldiers to madness, mutilation and death. Their deconstruction and harsh critic attempt to show that “the Emperor is naked”, that the home front can be as merciless as the battle front; that “martial illusions” and propaganda lie. On one end of the spectrum images of young men enlisting in haste to “do their bit” -thus anticipating the pleasures of glory, gallantry or luck in love-; on the other end shine images of insane, suicidal men in the mud of the trenches, whom everyone immediately forgets or no longer speaks about. The cripple veteran is also an haunting figure, whom women “shun like a queer disease” preferring strong, whole men to him; the images of mentally handicapped veterans “sitting in the limelight” match images of young people foolish enough to hope that war would just be another venue to repeat the facile sport or foxhunting victories. We see another war looming, brewing from the discontent of restless masses of veterans and from the unjust peace of Versailles; another war which will take the developments broached with the Franco-prussian war to the ultimate level of mass weaponry, mass mobilization, mass hysteria, massacres and devious propaganda tested during WWI.

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