Gary Dale Mawyer
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History Wasn’t Very Long Ago

2/25/2014

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The centennial of the beginning of World War I is fast approaching. My interest in the Great War began around the age of 9 or 10 with a book, Arthur Guy Empey’s Over the Top.

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In 1915, Empey went to London and enlisted in the British Army. Soon enough he found himself plastered with shot and shell, not to say mud, blood, lice, rats and poison gas, in settings of utmost ruin and decay. He was wounded at the Somme and shipped back to the U.K., where his identity as an American from Utah caught up with him. He was repatriated and promptly produced his best seller Over the Top in 1917.

I got my copy in a box lot of miscellaneous books from a farm auction. Auction box lots provided most of my reading until I was about 13 or 14 or so. My father Dover often picked up random boxes of books for 25 or 50 cents in 1960 money at such auctions, where he clerked and I sold soda pop. Any box was certain to include 2 or 3 books that would interest me in some way. Many of those books would not interest me at all now, but there was the odd classic, and sometimes the very odd classic, like Over the Top.
 
Over the Top is a bloodthirsty and horror-raddled story with episodes that might have nonplussed Edgar Allen Poe — a phenomenal tale of unbridled violence and terror mixed with equal parts sadism and schadenfreude. This is an adventurer’s first-person account rendered with plain, unselfconscious simplicity. Empey’s comical bayoneting incidents and accounts of casual dismemberment, not to mention his apparent enthusiasm for trying to shoot people through the head, suggest a solipsist with a strongly inhibited sense of empathy. 

As a 10-year-old reader, Over the Top amazed me. I remember wondering if this story could even be true. Of course I knew about World War II; 10-year-olds of my generation already knew a lot about World War II. We played soldiers with our war toys incessantly. I even had a treasured stash of patches, insignia and badges from Normandy and a whole fruit salad of European campaign ribbons, items I rescued from the trash when my grandparents’ next-door-neighbor threw them away. Every kid on the block had a reasonably good supply of ammo belts, clip pouches, canteens, mess kits and other field gear left over from World War II. We had lots of context for World War II, including incessant war movies, but no context for the Great War. Adults never spoke of it. It wasn’t a famous event.
 
At first Over the Top might as well have been science fiction to me. That changed quickly. I had to know. A few trips to the library later, I could be sure it was all literally true. Empey may not have had the imagination to invent any of it. Lack of empathy, acute self-obsession, default of imagination; perhaps the author of Over the Top was a very good candidate sociopath, in the end. But that is an adult thought.

Over the Top seemed to me a strange echo of a very distant and forgotten time. In fact, it had only been 43 years. Arthur Guy Empey was still alive when I stumbled over his book. By comparison, it would be like a kid in 2014 reading about the fall of Saigon. That’s the thing about history. It’s always closer than you think, like the skeleton hand on your shoulder in the fun house.


Karen reminded me that we did not have much library access in those years. That’s true. We had a once-a-week school library period lasting one hour, but circa-1960 school libraries in Charlottesville seemed
deficient even then and would horrify us now. The University of Virginia had one of the best research libraries in North America but as school children we had no access to it. The public library, located at that time in the handsome McIntire building that is now the home of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, was unusually good for a town this size, but its children’s section on the lower level was very humble. Some badgering was required for an adult card at age 10,  and to use the city library I had to walk two miles each way. The bus cost a dime and my weekly allowance was a nickel. I enjoyed the walk.

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Soon, though, I got a job mowing lawns. Dover was perfectly happy for me to take the lawn mower around and charge the neighbors fifty cents to mow a yard. I was soon rich enough to join the Science Fiction Book Club. To me, this meant that not only was I quite rich for my age but also a member of the literary world. The first book I received was H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. This is that same copy. 



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This illustration of the Martian fighting machine is from
 the 1906 edition.  




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And this inkwell is trench art from Verdun, made from a German artillery fuse. Coincidence? Who can say?

War of the Worlds was first published in 1897. Its premise is that the Martian invasion brightly divided history into a before and an after, the postwar civilization being altogether different in kind from a more innocent pre-war civilization, innocence perhaps being defined as naiveté mixed with self-obsession, weak
imaginative powers, and lack of empathy -- qualities the old monarchical empires of Europe required in order to function in the world they had so thoroughly colonized. Of course no humans expressed these qualities better than the hapless Martians, with the possible exception of the Czar, the Emperor Franz Josef, and poor old Kaiser Bill. Or Empey. Or maybe war lovers in general. Hmmm.

At age 10, reading the War of the Worlds gave me the context for the Great War -- a world was ending. The Battle of France was no irrational outburst from an unintelligible stream of events matching MarkTwain’s definition of history as “One damned thing after another.” The Great War was structural, to the point it could be predicted, and was predicted -- just not by enough people, or by the right people, to be avoided.


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On the whole, my favorite objects from the Great War are probably the buttons. They come in many forms. These humble objects, used to fasten coats and shirts, seem so personal and yet also so generalized, and so fixed to time and place in their purport. They were easily scavenged as souvenirs, especially in the aftermath of great offensives. In particular, British and American souvenir collectors would scavenge a belt and wire lots of interesting buttons to it, producing some effective spontaneous collections. This weathered fragment of a German belt features some regimental German buttons but you find all kinds on these belts. Sometimes when the collector got home he might string his own insignia on the belt too, a fine democratic touch.

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Even today, collectors like to revisit the old fields and see what they can scratch up. This is the sort of thing that scratches up. These events are just as real now as they were when they originally happened. As a die-hard solipsist myself, that perpetually amazes me.


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Snow

2/14/2014

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The news here is snow. Snow is Central Virginia’s equivalent of volcanic eruptions. Not nearly as awkward though. This storm started Wednesday evening at 5 PM and ended Thursday night about 9 PM. What we think of as the surface of the earth is for the moment about a foot and a half higher than usual, which actually changes the perspective of the ground dramatically. This and the shift in color make snow dramatic; and snow also seems subjectively more immersive than, say, rain or sleet.

 In a big snow, the sky itself seems to be snow, and snow has texture. A storm like this one managed to run a gamut of textures, from hard-frozen silvery dust at its beginning to flat iridescent plates,  like little fragments of mica or muscovite, to conventional flakes and clumps of flakes. For a good while the snow was falling at the rate of a couple of inches an hour, the point at which whole landscape features disappear behind falling snow.

Various temperature bands in this storm all had their own snow signatures, or granular ice signatures. As of this afternoon, the snow has become a melting snow,  since it is above freezing today, and that is something we have not seen much of in recent weeks.

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In sunlight, snow forces a lot of impressionistic contrasts out of the shadows. Conversely, under clouded conditions snow tends to erase shadows. Snow has a lot to do with light.  Many favorite Japanese woodcuts are snow scenes. I’m not sure why this should be, but as has been observed, classical Japanese woodblocks are characteristically shadowless, as if the scenes and people are wholly Platonic or on some idealized plane, or as if the artists and by extension the viewers are so wholly identified with light itself that, like the face of the sun, we never see a shadow. It’s the least Western thing about the classic Japanese woodblocks.
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Modern shin hanga of course shows a lot of shadow experimentation, but it would be too abrupt to associate this with western influence. The lack of shadow in Harunobu, Utamaro, or Eishi has to be considered against the prevalence of shadow in the places where these prints were displayed. As Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki observed, in his short elegant study In Praise of Shadows, Japanese classic architecture and landscaping is about the creation and manipulation of shadows, space defined by its shadows. I think the answer, in the old woodblocks, is the artist’s message, maybe an unconscious one, that our eyes are the light. Aat least in a paradoxical way, shadows are irrelevant. One is reminded of Goethe’s peculiar theory of physics in which sight is an active, not a passive property; a kind of radar from the eyes, as if the light were in us and the eye was essential to evoke the external sense of light. There really is something Berkeleyesque and Protestant about this. But, like foam on the wave, I appear to digress. Enough to say, when old-fashioned Japanese woodblocks turn to snow scenes, they ironically become entirely naturalistic.


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Maybe it’s the elemental nature of snow that appeals so strongly. It’s crystal. It refracts and reflects. A world under snow has been strangely mineralized and thus somehow rendered transcendent and original. A week or two ago, after a couple of inch dusting in single-degree weather, walking to work behind the university practice fields in the early sunlight at about 8 degrees F, the surface of the ground was spectacularly gemlike, by which I mean prismatic, sparkling in diamond colors. Any breath of air sent this finely particulate snow drifting from the tree limbs in clouds of sparkling rainbow dust. It was worth getting up and walking across hard-frozen fields to see.
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110 Years Ago This Week

2/5/2014

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People study wars for all sorts of reasons. And some people intentionally avoid the topic, as articulated musically in the gospel song “Down by the Riverside,” with its famous verse, “Ain’t gonna study war no more.” I find the idea of not studying war terrifying; it would be like deciding to stop studying famine, pestilence and death. Thought and study are our only protection from the famous Four Horsemen. Of course study can only do so much, a point made eloquent by a friend of one of my sons, who bought four pet hamsters and named them War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. To be the owner of the Four Hamsters of the Apocalypse is no ordinary ambition, but surely it confers a certain solemnity or gravitas obtainable no other way.

This year is the centennial of the Great War, which in later years was demoted to World War One. The Great War did not occur in a vacuum. Scholars today suggest the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was a sort of World War Zero setting in motion the currents that led to World War One. One wonders if historians centuries from now will see all the wars of the 20th century as a single Great War, the way we now understand the Hundred Years War or the Eighty Years War.

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This week is the 110th anniversary of the beginning of World War Zero, the first industrialized war, a war of mass conscripts, the first steam-powered armor-plated war. It’s little studied in the West. This probably won’t look familiar:

February 6, 1904: Russian forces cross the Yalu River into Korea.

February 7: Japanese cavalry cuts telegraph lines to the Russian naval base at Port Arthur (Lushun) on the Liaodong Peninsula.

February 8: A Japanese naval task force enters the harbor at Chemulpo (Inchon), Korea, disembarking infantry to seize Seoul.

February 9: In a surprise night attack, Japanese torpedo boats attack Russian battleships. at anchor in the Port Arthur naval base. Japanese cruisers at Chemulpo sink two Russian warships there.


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The disasters of the Russian army and navy left Imperial Germany in control of the Baltic Sea and unafraid of war with Russia. The Russian Empire’s economic, political and military failure in the east led to bread riots, naval mutinies and worker rebellions while Japanese agents funded revolutionary movements in Russia and spread rumors of secret Japanese naval bases in Sweden and Denmark. After a Russian fleet sank English fishing boats in the English Channel in the belief that they were Japanese, Britain briefly considered joining the war.


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Ships were seized in the Mediterranean. Madagascar drew the gaze of the world as a naval point d’appui, and a fleet of yachts and other pleasure craft set out from Singapore with picnic baskets to watch the doomed Russian Baltic Fleet steam by in a column miles long en route to the largest naval battle in history to date—even though the decisive battle of Mukden, one of the largest land battles in history with well over half a million troops engaged, had already been lost by Russia, and the dream of a huge Russian colony in China with it. Popular disappointment and ferment over the war lent momentum to what would become the Russian Revolution.

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President Teddy Roosevelt brokered the peace in New Hampshire, at the Treaty of Portsmouth (September 1905). The peace inspired disappointment and social ferment in Japan and even set off riots. After two wars (the first being the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895), the United States, Russia and Great Britain ceded control of Korea to Japan in exchange for Japanese recognition of US and British interests in the Pacific. But Manchuria, conquered for the second time by Japan, was taken away again and returned to China. To many Japanese this felt like the tragic betrayal of a costly national sacrifice. The sense of tragic betrayal felt by the Korean and Chinese people can only be imagined or estimated.

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In 1904-05, Japanese troops in Korea, China and Manchuria revisited the graves of Japanese soldiers killed in the First Sino-Japanese War ten years before. In 1918, 70,000 Japanese troops invaded Siberia by way of Vladivostok and Manchuria. A generation later, Japanese soldiers would invade Manchuria again, and find the graves of three previous wars.


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Finally Manchukuo, a Japanese colony a half million square miles in size, came into existence in 1931. Few in the west seem to remember this entity ever existed. Manchukuo’s final collapse in 1945 added additional hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Japanese and Russian casualties to the end of World War Two.


The past demands attention. It’s famously said that the past is a foreign country. That is true, but it’s the unknown country we live in. Somehow the immediate issues of 1914 seem largely closed. No one anticipates another invasion of Belgium. On the other hand, the issues of 1904 seem alive still -- Not just two Koreas, but multiple theories of Korea; disputes over rocky islets and natural resources; borders in dispute, identities in dispute. History’s ghosts sleep very lightly. See for instance this article in The Japan Times: 
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/02/03/reference/yasukuni-its-open-to-interpretation/#.UvJ67_u4TAo

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    Author

    Gary Dale Mawyer has been writing for over four decades, and to date has published four novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark,  Exemptions, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., as well as a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. Gary's writings draw on a wealth of history, lore and lived experience. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Gary is a Central Virginia native with over 40 years of publishing and editing experience. His interests include American and Virginia history, military history, geology, hiking, travel, landscaping and gardening.  He is the father of four grown children and has four grandchildren. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County. 

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