Beginning a War

Guy Sajer:

Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves...One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort...One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial...One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired.

If you don't recognize the name of the man who gave that quote, you would be forgiven. He only wrote one book: The Forgotten Soldier, a memoir of his own experience as a German infantryman during World War II. When I studied the World Wars at university, this was the only assigned text (aside from the textbook, because who reads those, honestly?) that I couldn't finish.

Part of my struggle was practical: It's a long book and I wouldn't devote all the time I needed to in order to finish it off. The other part was emotional: Sajer has some incredible stories about the war, but it became more and more bleak the longer I read. Eventually, my heart hurt too much to continue reading.

This is the reason, a couple years ago, I wrote about my birthday and why it's always a difficult time for me. When I teach the World Wars, it gets...heavy.

I imagine that my methods for teaching the classes the way I do are partially manipulative. After all, it's my choice to include the details, share the stories, and arrange the images the way I do. Why do it so thoroughly (for a class of tenth graders)? Why make it visceral? Why try to put the kids into the trenches, show them videos of shell shock, explain the art of death that the World Wars refined?

When I was about their age of fifteen of sixteen, my parents took me to see the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan. It was my first rated-R movie, and certainly the first one my parents paid to get me into, and it was a difficult experience to go through. The violence, of course, was intense. Though I'd played my fair share of violent video games, this was during the PlayStation One era. I think there's a big difference between this...

Source.

...and something like this...

Source.

At the very least, I was deeply affected by my own ignorance. I didn't understand why they were attacking France or had to walk through the French countryside. I thought it was strange but kind of nice that the Germans had put out a bunch of hedgehogs (I didn't know that's what they were called) for the invading army to hide behind.

I took a picture of these hedgehogs while visiting the WWII memorial and military base in Bastogne. They're much smaller than what they looked like in the movies.

I didn't realize that they were meant to prevent landing craft from getting up on the beach, which was why the men had to fight and drown their way forward, bleeding and dying only to get blown up by mines when they arrived. I didn't understand the raunchy conversations of the soldiers, or why they swore so much. The fact that the American soldiers shot surrendering Germans is technically a war crime didn't enter into my comprehension.

After all, I was fifteen.

But walking out of that theater, I remember thinking that most of what I struggled with was petty and insignificant. My parents were right to expose me to that reality, to help give me a deep sense of gratitude for the understanding of "the torments of peace."

I didn't sleep well that night. I was very somber the next day. Since I had gone to see one of the most controversial and buzz-worthy films of the day, my friends asked questions. I remember talking to them about it over lunch, seated at the round tables of my high school cafeteria (a rare place that I only sat at on occasion), the bright summer light washing in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, cheerfully counterpoising my explanations of the violence.

That's what we talked about. The violence. In some ways, that's really the only thing to talk about, when it comes to war. The violence, the depravity, the pain, the fear, the isolation. All of those are but different types of violence, I think. It is, in many ways, why we are equal parts horrified and fascinated by the World Wars.

I begin my annual study of these atrocities starting on Monday. And I worry about how I approach these events with these children, knowing that there is much to be gained by looking into the past--even the horrors of the past--but there is much risked, too. There is an allure in the glamour, the reverence, the lionization, the misreadings, the false analogies, the blindness--indeed, the many follies and lessons that we committed and ought to learn--in the way we learn about war. It can be seductive. It can be intoxicating. It can be misleading. Everything about war is dangerous. You cannot study it without being infected, in some way, by it. Yet the vaccine of knowledge is the only way I know of to prevent it from spreading again.

Nevertheless, because of the age of my students, their tendency to view the world from an incredibly privileged and generally unmolested position, I worry about how I teach this potent, perfidious time period. I may say that my greatest fear is that students will make the mistake that war foists upon its participants and is best summed up by Guy Sajer:

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.