The Professor and Other Writings (5 page)

Panic-stricken civilians making their way down were staggered—or so one reads again and again—by the sight of “firefighters loaded with gear, trudging their way up the stairs. Everyone stepped aside to let them pass, watching them in awe.” Onward, Christian soldiers.

Cynics will no doubt want to debunk the heroic image of World War I walking: they will call attention to the fact that men who balked at the whistle—the signal for the start of the assault—faced being shot on the spot by their commanding officers. True enough. It's also true that other frightened soldiers simply faded from the scene, only to be caught and punished later. (The Ypres museum has a sad little pamphlet for sale commemorating the 306 British troops officially tried and “shot at dawn” for cowardice or desertion.) Kipling—Kipling!—has the following wrenching couplet in his
Epitaphs
(1919):

Yet, relatively speaking, very few men seem to have failed thus in their duty. Those who did so were usually blatantly shell-shocked or otherwise unfit. However amazing in retrospect, the vast majority of ordinary soldiers accepted the martial tasks assigned them, even when such tasks were plainly suicidal. The most moving British novel to come out of the war, Frederic Manning's
Her Privates We
(1930),
may be taken as a fitful, yet forceful, demonstration of this fact. The hero, a laconic private soldier named Bourne, commits himself to a nighttime trench raid, though he knows it is doomed to fail. When asked by his foolish commanding officer if he has any objection to going, Bourne feels “something in him dilate enormously, and then contract to nothing again,” but says only that he is “quite ready” to go. He goes; he dies; and the book ends.

If you're a woman—and a woman haunted by feelings of cowardice—it's hard to know where to stand with all of this. You regret the appalling, absurd waste of life. You excoriate the madness of the system. You rail against war. You see the savage toll the cult of heroism takes—has always taken—on men and boys. But painful, too—at times exorbitantly so, once you become sensitized to it—the near-total exclusion of your own sex from such primal dramas of unflinching physical courage. You feel at a moral deficit. You wonder, perhaps dubiously, if you would be capable of such nobility under the circumstances: of moving forward calmly. You fear the worst. For Brittain was right: women have seldom been asked to exert their valor in this direct, theatrical, entirely wasteful, and (yet) sublime fashion. Certainly I never have.

From early childhood I have searched with little success for a woman who might show me, in some comparable and quite literal way, how to walk towards death. Few have offered themselves as models. A psychoanalyst I know says this is because women are preeminently concerned with “life.” Children and the raising of children. They have no interest in walking towards death. Given half a chance, they walk away from death. It's “pure and simple biology,” the shrink says. But whence my own odd questing? Some retardation of normal development? Some sad hormonal jousting with the male of the species? Some dissatisfaction with simply staying put and waiting for things to happen? Last week I went to see the film version of
Lord of the Rings
—not having thought much about Tolk
ien since I was twelve. The trilogy's a death-trip of course—a long weary trudge through mud, mines, ravaged woods, and orc-infested caves. As I pondered the dire, cacophonous, corpse-laden wastelands through which Frodo and his friends are forced to travel—now digitalized and Dolby-ized and fiercely estranging (like video games and cyberterrorism)—I found myself wondering whether Tolkien had been a soldier on the Western Front. Couldn't remember. Got home and looked him up: he fought on the Somme with the Lancashire Fusiliers.

True, a woman on her way to public execution in some degree resembles a soldier going over the top. As a child, I uncovered a few such women, and studied them as best I could. But a certain intimacy, kinship—even friendliness—was almost always lacking. They never felt like comrades. There was Joan of Arc, but I found her celebrated visions freakish and her personality aloof. I was not raised a Catholic, so stories of female saints and martyrs made little or no impression. I was too young for the terrible dramas of the Holocaust and Resistance. There was the aforementioned Edith Cavell—her fate, I find, is luridly described in a children's
Pageant of History
book I still have on my shelves—but it would take a while before I understood her actions in context. (Calling me, not long ago, from the grotty pay phone near the latter's memorial at the foot of Charing Cross Road, Blakey had to endure me squeaking away, at eight thousand miles' distance,
But of course she was a spy! The Germans had every right to shoot her! She knew it!
etc.) Only now do I begin to find the high starched collar, iron-gray hair, and sweeping black cape oddly alluring. No, sir, I do not require a blindfold.

The French Revolution, to be sure, offers instances of almost picturesque feminine gallantry—though it's hardly fashionable to say so. Madame Roland was famously poised on the scaffold: she let Lamarche, a feeble old man being executed with her, go first so he would not have the sight of her own headless corpse before him as
he approached the guillotine. Marie Antoinette, former
cocotte
, was even more so. Hounded, half-starved, white-haired, and decrepit at the age of thirty-four (from chronic menstrual flux and the gross abuse of her jailers), the no-good
Autrichienne
became quite staggeringly noble in her final moments. David's harrowing sketch of her, set down from life as she rolled by in the death cart on her way to execution, is the unexpected emblem of a stupendous and electrifying heroism.

The French Revolution is also the setting for the only major work of art—the only one that I can think of at least—devoted profoundly and entirely to the topic of feminine courage: Francis Poulenc's 1957 opera
Dialogues of the Carmelites
. Based on a play by Bernanos and a novel by Gertrud von Le Fort,
Die letzte am Schafott
(“The Last to the Scaffold”), the opera turns on the struggle of Sister Blanche de l'Agonie du Christ, a novice in the Carmelite order at Compiègne, to master the dread that assails her when the sisters of the convent are arrested during the Terror. The plot has its origin in fact: Marie de l'Incarnation, a Carmelite nun who survived the Revolution, tells a similar story in her memoirs. (And how odd, the WWI freak notes, that it should all have taken place at Compiègne: British GHQ during the retreat from Mons and site of the signing of the Armistice in 1918.)
*
When the other sisters take a vow of martyrdom, Blanche runs away and hides for several weeks at her father's house. Mortified by her own cowardice, however, she secretly follows her fellow nuns when they are taken to Paris for execution. In the opera's final moments, as the condemned women march to the guillotine singing the Salve Regina—a voice falling out with each ferocious slice on the
cymbals—Blanche suddenly materializes from the crowd and joins in the procession. Hers is the only voice left, soaring up in triumph, when the last blade stroke comes down and the curtain drops.

But Blanche is a bit of a pill, too—a sexless high soprano and one of those blonde, seraphic goody-goodies one could never stand at school. Charlotte Brontë would have loathed her. And for every Blanche, it seems, there are always women like the unhappy Lange Vaubernier, better known as Madame du Barry, the one-time mistress of Louis XV. On her way to execution, according to Lamartine's
Histoire des Girondins
(1847), the aging harlot flung back her veil “in order that her countenance might move the people” and “did not cease to invoke pity, in the most humiliating terms.” The poet, spokesman of the People, is extravagantly contemptuous:

Poor old Lange.
See yah. Wouldn't wanna be yah.

At a certain point one just gives up and decides to go with the men. They're so much closer to home, after all. Unless one is insane
or a sex fanatic, it's impossible to identify much with Joan of Arc or Marie Antoinette; whereas one's estimable Uncle Newton, soft mustache and all, seems just a few decades and a Chunnel trip away. I sometimes feel I could call him up on the phone. He lives in the same world as I do, the familiar vale of sorrows, fuck-ups, and relentless, chain-reaction human disasters. (How acutely one feels the 9/11 violence to be, like so much else in our time, simply one of the hundreds of geopolitical aftershocks of the First World War. Palestine, after all, began its long, sad modern history in 1917, when Allenby's Army drove off the Turks at Gaza and occupied Jerusalem.)
*
And compelling indeed is the knowledge that I myself can now walk exactly where he walked. The worst signs of battle have long disappeared from the Western Front but the war tourism industry battens still on the morbid hankering of visitors to stroll freely about those very places (Loos, Menin, Hooge, Stuff Trench, Polygon Wood, Vimy, Festubert, Beaumont Hamel, Gheluvelt, Neuve-Chapelle) where walking (of any sort) was once so foul and frightening. One can now wander unimpeded over spots formerly blasted by gun and shell fire; where lifting one's head above the parapet, even by an inch, meant getting it blown off. One feels floaty and tall and invulnerable, like a ghost. You imagine getting hit all over—positively laced with bullets—but it doesn't hurt at all.

And then, too, there's the
mana
effect: the hope that by treading just so, on the very spot, some ancient family backbone will be magically imparted. (After I came back from my trip, I found it oddly difficult to brush the Somme mud off my hiking shoes.) Traveling through Picardy and Flanders, it's hard to forget that the soil itself is full of once-sentient matter, now dissolved but still in situ. We are
inclined to make fun of Rupert Brooke–style animism these days, perhaps because his creepy brand of dirt-magic is still so weirdly potent:

Yet it's only a short step from Brooke's patriotic composting to fantasies of an even more atavistic sort. Almost as soon as the first Great War cemeteries were opened to the public, sentimental grave visitors sought to absorb the magical rigor of the dead. In
The Unending Vigil
(1967), his history of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Philip Longworth relates a saccharine tale of a French child at Versailles—a “heroic little thing…doomed by a disease of the spine”—who insisted on tending the graves of her
“chers soldats anglais”
until her sickness defeated her. The punning import of the story is so obvious as to be risible: how else to ward off “spinelessness” in the face of mortality? I've got her number, and she, undoubtedly, has mine.

So I want my great-uncle to make me brave; is that what it boils down to? To place his hand in the small of my back and give me that first shove up onto the fire-step? To start me off on my wind-up-toy-like way into No Man's Land? That's an answer for the moment, I suppose, but no more than that. It would be nice to be sturdier and less addled, not such a twit on wheels. It would be gratifying to impress everyone with my handsome, jut-jawed selflessness. (“I now perceive one immense omission in my Psychology,” William James once wrote; “the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.”) Somewhere, it seems, there must be a lost baby
picture of me—at my father's perhaps?—in which I look just like Mel Gibson in
Gallipoli. Huzzah, matey!

At the same time, I see how kooky and notional it all is. How can I be sure, for example, that my great-uncle even died bravely? His service record seems to have disappeared; according to the Public Record Office Web site, it looks to have been one of the hundreds of thousands of such records destroyed during the Blitz. Perhaps he was a puny little time-serving fellow who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. My mother's vague recollection of him being shot by “his own guns” is worrying: perhaps he was sitting in a dugout drinking a cup of tea, or nibbling on a piece of chocolate (the family vice), and simply got blown up by accident. Perhaps he was picked off by an errant bullet while using the company latrine. Perhaps he started jabbering in terror one day and his sergeant-major just had to brain him in homicidal exasperation. Such things were all part of the “normal wastage” of the war. I have a great deal invested, I realize, in the image of him not being wasted. I prefer to view him stalking forward coolly, his fellow Poplar and Stepney Rifles at his side, across the muddy, blood-drenched plains of the Ancre.