say. he ended his presidency in horrible circumstances. they are not the best memoirs in the world. >> he died relatively young.did. did he have a sense of his own mortality? >> yes, he did. he spoke about civil rights physically, he looks very different had long hair and almost looks like a hippie or do think he had a sense of his mortality from the time he decided not to run. i think that was the end of him and some ways to this was a man who was political to the core. he spent his whole life in washington, his whole life trying to achieve legislation. that is how he measured his greatness be it from the moment he told america i will not run in 9068, i think that in some ways was the beginning of the

end. he did not have much more to live for. >> can you compare him to his predecessors or anybody else in the white house? >> yes, i think he was more effective than john f. kennedy and he was a fundamentally legislative president, a person who loved and revered congress. when he governed, that was one of the greatest skills he brought to the table, his relationship and his sense of the institution. kennedy did not have that. . think that was a big flaw fast forward to today, i think a lot of the presidents we have had in recent years, they are much more disconnected from washington and from congress. some serve, like president obama, for a short amount of time, but they do not invest themselves on capitol hill. i think that is one of the most distinctive features of who he was as a politician. >> when does the book come out? >> january 20 15 with penguin. >> thank you very much for being

with us. >> thanks for having me. >> you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every .eekend, on c-span3 to join the conversation, like c-spanhistory.at >> next, a look at how world war i soldiers interpreted their war experiences. he uses works by three writers, including ernest hemingway, to illustrate different ways soldiers coped with the transition to civilian life after they enter words physical and mental trauma during the war. this class is about an hour and 20 minutes. >> all right, we will go ahead and get started. today, we are covering, as you can see, this disillusionment of the first world war, postwar disillusionment. and how we as historians should maybe approach the topic. i'm going to begin this class

with something i never thought i would do to begin a class. we're going to begin it with a canonical column. -- poem. it is regarded as probably "the poem out of the first world war, and it has been reprinted in anthologies over and over again to show us something of the experience of the great war and its memory. you will undoubtedly recognize it because you read it for today's class -- bent double, like old beggars under sacks knock-kneed, coughing like hags we cursed through sludge till on the haunting flares we turned our backs and towards our distant rest began to trudge men marched asleep many had lost their boots but limped on, blood-shod all went lame, all blind drunk with fatigue

deaf even to the hoots of tired, outstripped five-nines that dropped behind fittingly, we have a talk mine -- pockmarked shell torn landscape. gas, gas -- quick, boys, an ecstasy of fumbling fitting the clumsy helmets just in time but someone still was yelling out and stumbling and flound'ring like a man in fire or lime dim, through the misty panes and thick green light as under a green sea, i saw him drowning in all my dreams, before my helpless sight he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning if in some smothering dreams you , too, could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in and watch the white eyes writhing in his face his hanging face, like a devil's

sick of sin if you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues my friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. these are of course the words of wilfred owen, written as it was ongoing. wilfred himself was a junior officer in the british army in the first world war. they are often reprinted words and they tell us something about the brutality of four on the -- of war and the experience of war on the western front. they also show was something polemical. a bit of an argument here,

especially in the last part where he talks about men dying for nations. for national causes. the stakes of this one man's death from gas becomes very high indeed in his eyes. this gives us a sense of what nations ask men to do in war. to complicate this, i want to give you a quote from another war writer, a patriotic novelist who, like wilfred owen, was on the western front. his name is ian hague. he was reflecting in the 1930's about war books. he writes -- for the last 10 years we have , been submerged by a flood of so-called war books that depicts the men who fought as brutes and

beasts, dissillusioned, drunken, and godless. some of these books are just conceivedull dirt, for that. to wilfredeferring owen as dole dirt, but sensationalized war novels. he says we do not need to worry about these sensationalized accounts, but others are undoubtedly sincere. they are genuine. their object is obvious and understandable, to paint war in such horrible colors that no one will ever fight again. you can certainly see that in owen's column and you can see it poem, and you can see it in so much of the literature. so far, in this class, we have approached the topic of war and its impact on individuals, but also war's reputation, and what

also were's representations, what i will simply call war's story. how war story works in culture and how historians approach that story with and cultural frameworks. using the case studies that we two have spent time with all semester long -- the civil war, of course fought around us in the fields of gettysburg, and more recently, our discussion about combat experience in the first world war, we have been able to recognize certain similarities within the cultural narrative that are created by people who fight, but come home, they survive conflicts and remember them afterwards. some central questions we have exampled are, what motivates people to fight in wars? what sustains soldiers on campaign or at the front? how do soldiers cope with the experience of war? how did they change as a result of what they witness? and for this afternoon's class,

how do they show change? how do they write about it? how are memories created and articulated on paper? our case study this afternoon is the first world war in british and american memory, and we are considering the impact on individuals and the much larger question of the memory of the war within british and american literature. for this afternoon, you have read some examples about how the war affected individual soldiers and how they treated it as a creative trope. the results of this creative enterprise, their poems, their memoirs, their short stories -- these were created out of the aftermath of violence, violence on the western front. their work demonstrates for a

us something of the war's memory, but we should use caution in using the term memory. as we have talked about kind of ad nauseum in the class, individual memories are not the same thing as a collective consciousness. although individual writers are held up as being the voice of a generation or the experience of the war or the one book you need to know to know something about -- to read to know something about this or that conflict, these works exist within particular context. they were written for particular audiences. a good caution is a reminder of the way we have examined the british war poets. war poetry has had a significant impact on the way the british view the first world war. many of them view it as a futile tragedy, a wilfred owenization

of the first world war. which has led britain to view the extremely complicated issues of the first world war's impact through the lens of doomed youth. doomed youth, lost generation, whatever grim moniker we want to use. this is another one of those problematic lenses that i believe we should remove from our world one glasses. -- our world war i glasses. we need a new prescription for the war's memory. if we are going to be more aggressive -- we should cut out the cataract of disillusionment and with clear eyes view the war generation. our case study this afternoon, war literature released in the 1920's, has to do with the value of literature to show us the emotional impact of war. we should have no doubt as to this value. but we should still, as

historians, exercise good old-fashioned skepticism as to whether literature is an effective way of interpreting complicated historical experiences. we are trying to get at the heart of the notion of disillusionment. i will use it interchangeably with disenchantment, as war writers of this period did. it is a cultural trope. it is one real enough, but why did it become the dominant voice to emerge from the experiences of the trenches. at the heart of our discussion this afternoon, you should all emerge questioning the way novels, memoirs, poems, films, made-for-tv miniseries, etc. , impact the way we view history. class, yourk in this know that history is often times framed by the way social groups choose to remember certain events.

and we see this in the way that we remember conflict. the civil war is oftentimes interpreted as a redemptive national tragedy. and there are problems with us doing so. the first world war is seen as bloody shambles, the lost generation, a precursor to the false start, leading to the second world war, which is seen by the americans as noble victory. the greatest generation. something that cements the rise of american power before vietnam. vietnam, seen as a political mistake. despair, disillusionment, shame coming from that war. the oliver stone interpretation of vietnam. each of these conflicts are of course complex. the way we remember them, we sometimes become victims of our

own narrative reductiveness as we attempt to understand their vastness, their meaning, to understand our own identities. to understand who we are, sometimes we cut corners with the historical past. we see conflict through lenses designed for our own convenience. there is something very likable in us doing this. very much so. it is comforting. but if you know anything about history, it's not comfortable. it is messy. i was talking to one of you during office hours last week. about how messy history is and how frustrating it is. and it may me very happy. not so much the student, i think. history is messy. but as historians, that is our role, to get to the heart of things, to push back against easy generalizations. to question their foundations and strive to complicate what we think we know of the past. this is what we do when we enter cleo's garden. so, let us leave cleo's garden and going to the murkier

trenches. the first world war, as you know, was a global conflict. it was waged by empires. it was fought in many different theaters. in anglo-american memory it is remembered primarily by its principal theater, the western front. the combat experience in the western front was brutal. soldiers adapted to their experiences with surprising resilience. most who served in the trenches, most who served in the west, returned home afterwards. of course, many bore physical and mental scars of their war service. when the war ended in 1918, it was widely thought by the allies to be a victory over the central powers. in the decades that followed, the great war's hard-fought legacy was internationally remembered in thousands of ways. it was remembered in stone. it was remembered in bronze. it was remembered in what is the

subject of this class on paper by those who lived through it. just as war monuments are meant to convey certain messages to the public and they all have similar kind of language about sacrifice, about national virtue, about causes, tributes to comrades, etc., war books have a memorial purpose. they convey the sentiments to the public at large. they are a forum for doing so. memory in the hands of the storyvelists and short ets, is aboutpo personal experience. but memoirs are also written to say something greater than the collection of war anecdotes, greater than war stories. the first first world war generated hundreds of american and british war books. many written by veterans, struggling to find a way to tell

their story. in the late 1920's, some of the best-known of these books were written and published. "all quiet on the western front," "goodbye to all that," "memoirs of an infantry officer," "a farewell to arms." but today we are questioning the , way three authors interpreted the war. more specifically, how veterans interpreted their own homecoming. the first is robert graves, whose "goodbye to all that" we have been discussing and struggling through this week. second is ernest hemingway, which says something interesting about american war service and an american soldier coming home. the third, much less well-known known, regrettably, an essay, the epilogue to a war book written in 1929.

through these three accounts, we hope to get through something, some kind of impression of what the war memory looks like in the late 1920's to americans and britons who lived through it. first, i would like to start with robert graves. graves, i think is the closest to us, so we should probably start with him. i have put up a quote here from a critic, cyril falls. falls was a british historian who avidly reviewed war books in the 1920's for the times literary supplement. i rather liked him because he compiled his war book reviews into a rather slim book called "war books," in which he gives a paragraph reviewing all of them

-- the war book's that come out after the first world war. and he reviewed robert graves as "goodbye to all that" came out in 1929. he reviewed it as such. his work has been justly claim to be excellent. they are. in fact, among the few books of this nature that are of real historical value. his attitude, however, leaves a disagreeable impression. one might gather that thousands of men instead of a few hundred were executed, and it suicides -- that suicides were as common as blackberries. he is, in short, another example of an intellectual, whose intelligence with regard to the war penetrates a much shorter distance than that of the plain man. a rather caustic review of robert graves. when we left off with robert graves, we we had him still in the trenches.

last week, we examined graves serving in the western front. he is at the battle -- he witnesses what he regards as the amazing screwup of the british army within the trenches, and then he does another battle where he is gravely wounded. more than gravely wounded. he dies in that battle, or at least that is how it is reported back to the family. graves has two right at the time -- has to write the "times" and but thankst that, for writing something nice about me. so, graves is wounded in the trenches. he comes back and is recuperating back in england. he starts to think more on his military service. last week we talked about the type of soldier robert graves is. how would you summarize robert graves as a soldier, do you think? how would you characterize him?

laura? >> he did not fall into a a regular group, and he is kind of an outsider. from his earlier life. >> right. he seems a bit of an outsider. in the charterhouse, on the western front he seems to be an outsider. he does not fit in with his regiment. you get that in the subtext of what he is saying. robert graves is an intellectual outsider. he is not a great team player. you see a little bit of that. he is a little bit of an outsider. how does he view his war experiences? how are they changing during the war? what do you think? kevin, what do you think? >> he views it as a kind of transformative experience where he is an outsider at the

beginning of his life. he continues to be so during the war, but he also learns to get along with people a little better. he is able to buy into the regimental history. he takes a lot of pride in the group of men he is serving with, even if he is not necessarily the most liked figure. to him, it gives him a new experience that he is able to put to use. >> graves appears to be a surprisingly, slightly reluctant, good soldier. he deeply loves his regiment. the comes across. he admires many of the men he served with. he is able to recognize heroic qualities in a lot of the action he sees that the western front. at the same time, graves is very conscious of lampooning what he thinks his military idiocy, and he talks a lot about, you know, kind of the british army, the british army's officialdom and how the british army is screwing

up the war as it is ongoing. he is able to talk about the great heroism of his own regiment, great sense of esprit de corps of the royal welsh fusiliers, but at the same time recognizing that the war's conduct is not ideal on the western front. when i say the war's conduct is not ideal in graves' eyes how do , you think his opinions are shifting and changing toward the notion of the war? the last section of his memoir is largely about graves coming out of the trenches and trying to deal with homecoming. trying to create a life after the war, ok? how does graves adjust? how does he reconcile this war experience within an idea homecoming? what do you think? what do you think? what is your impression of him? yes, laura.

>> eventually he tries to pick up where he left off. as far as, i mean he goes back , to oxford, even though he does not technically finish it. it seems like it is a bit of a rough transition going back to civilian life. but you talk about him trying to go back into officers training and things before that and now he thought he would be able to get right back in was much more -- and it was much more difficult. he kept having flashbacks to earlier parts of the war. it is kind of frightening at the time. but that did not work out too well either. >> right, graves comes back with a case of shellshocked, right? he identifies himself coming back with these memories of the war and gives us all kinds of examples of this. not being able to answer a telephone for the fear of a shock coming from it. commandeering private people's cars as they are passing on country lanes. his foul language, which he

continues to use afterwards, military style language, even though he has an infant at home. he changes that. everyone has to change that eventually. graves changes that. this is a period of adjustment for him as he is coming back. he marries pretty quickly during the war and in the last third of the book, he is discussing this idea of trying to make a normal life. but would you consider his life kind of a normal life? would you consider robert graves' homecoming to be typical of british veterans? yes? >> i think it was a little more intellectual than most of them coming back, and he really did struggle. he tries oxford and ends up going to egypt to do some teaching, which does not turn out to be that great. also, he is married. his wife is 18, i think. he is 22. they have four children fairly quickly. i think he is really struggling. it is typical for the veterans

to struggle, but i don't see -- i don't think you see a lot of them going to oxford and egypt to teach. >> right. >> in a way, he is overcompensating for lost time. he does a lot of things -- he tries to do all of this fairly quickly, like going to oxford and taking the job in egypt. instead of taking things kind of slowly, granted some opportunities came to him, but it is like he was trying to make up for lost time. >> yeah, yeah, i would agree with that. >> i totally agree with laura. i think something he tried to do, just as she was saying, he was trying to recover this lost time, and he is also trying to redeem himself intellectually. like, i am going back to england. i am going to redeem myself. i am going to go to oxford and i am going to restart my life and hopefully progress. >> i mean, do you get a sense -- yeah, natalie? >> i was going to say on the small, day-to-day scale, his

experiences are more aligned with the typical british soldier coming home. the fact that he does react to a everyday items in a new and kind of almost frightened way. so the little nuances and how the war affected his daily life and how he interacts with people and objects kind of seemed slightly more typical than this extraordinary going to oxford kind of postwar life that he led. >> yeah, you do see the struggle for normalcy that happens with graves. on one hand he does go to oxford and finds oxford to be full of ex serviceman, right? full of young officers going back and getting an education. they are all people in transition. charles carrington, it he went to oxford around the same time as graves. there are a lot of ex officers. he runs into and becomes a super fan of t.e. lawrence, right? he runs into him and is hanging out with him. why do you think he is putting

that in his book? >> name dropping. >> name dropping. >> he said at the start of the book he wanted to include things that would make it more popular and t.e. lawrence was so popular. >> yeah, he is like the >> yeah, he is like the superhero, like the avengers, iron man. he comes out of the first world war as this middle eastern adventure hero. and graves puts him in. he says kind of snidely later on, he puts them in to sell more books, but it is pretty apparent that graves really, really likes hanging out with lawrence. >> he has this tendency to be an individualist unless he is hanging out with someone uber-special. these just seem to be the kinds of people he gravitates toward though.

it is not non-characteristic of graves to name drop t.e. lawrence. he has been doing that throughout the entire book. >> right, he is done that through the rest of the book. he is sitting with thomas hardy, talking about poetry. drinking ale with t.e. lawrence. he is hanging out in the trenches with sassoon, helps him out when he is going to be court-martialed. all of these great, great british literary figures and he is putting himself in their world, because he was in their world. he is hanging out with t.e. lawrence. he writes a biography of lawrence that sold pretty well during this time. a small biography. we can summarize it by saying -- "robert graves loves t.e. lawrence." he loves writing about him. but he is struggling during this time to really establish

himself. he does a lot of things we would consider intellectual, on one hand. he does a research degree at oxford. he is still writing war poems. he is trying to make a living by his pen. he is living this bohemian life with his wife. they're trying to run a shop, etc. and he is doing things that are pretty normal, ways he is trying to restart his life. he gets married. he has children. he obsesses over things like diapers. he obsesses over things like money. so he does try to have very much a normal life. when he leaves oxford and he goes off to cairo, he is trying his hat at a professional life as a teacher. does not go well though, right? goes back to becoming a writer, and eventually he says goodbye to all that. the really complicated question we need to ask with robert graves is, what do you think he says about british war memory? because i got to tell you, i

don't know the answer to this question. and i've been struggling with this for a long time. i always ask students, what are we supposed to get from graves? i can't figure it out yet. i need you to try to help me figure this out. what is the take away of this man's autobiography? his experiences in the war? val? >> i think one of the most remarkable things about it is actually looking at how the guys in the trenches, who would have been noncommissioned officers, the leaders on the ground and in the trenches who are really making a movement, whereas the higher echelons of the british army, perhaps the ones that he would lampoon in his writings -- but the regiment going through all of these difficulties, he is really going to look toward as being his allies. >> i find val's answer very interesting.

anybody know why? why do i find it so interesting? she is saying, to paraphrase -- if i do this inaccurately, throw your pen at me, ok? what she is saying, graves is showing us something about how military life works on the western front. and that the war is being fought by junior officers. in the words of charles carrington, the title of his book, "it is a subaltern's war." it is a war being waged on the front lines. graves is trying to show us that. he is lampooning the higher ups, but he is trying to show a something of espirit de corps within these small units. i find this really interesting. because i think there are people out there who would pushback back against what val is saying and say, hang on, graves does not redeem anything in the war.

but i think they might not be listening to her as close as they should be. because what she is saying is, though graves likes to lampoon heroism or military hierarchy, he does not lampoon the notion of heroism of individuals, right? necessarily. and he likes a lot of traditional martial things. do you think that is a paradox? yes? >> i certainly think it is a reflection of himself and his life before as an intellectual. he is representational of the split in classes and how that is parallel to the military. he is certainly doing that. i think that definitely shows. i think that was somewhat of a commonplace in the british army,

having that rigidity in social class, as well as in the military. >> ok, that makes sense. that makes a lot of sense. you are approaching the memory of graves as rather nuanced. is that what i am getting? graves is more complicated. kevin, you're shaking your head -- he is a bit more complicated as that. but when the book comes out, people like falls only see one side of robert graves. they see the name dropping charterhouse school boy with a bad attitude. but what they are overlooking to some degree is graves is trying to show something about battle. trying to show that this war is a little bit different. a little bit different in the way it is being fought. but that within an elite regiment like the royal welsh, what val said is essentially right. it is being fought in this kind of traditional way where morale matters, more than

patriotism, more than anything else. comradeship seems to matter most in the trenches to graves. so we are walking away with a different impression of what the war's memory looks like. let's turn our attention to ernest hemingway and "a soldier's home." now hemingway was in the first world war. he was in the red cross. he served in italy. he was wounded in italy while serving in the red cross, hit by a trench mortar, and was severely wounded and had major operations on his leg to recover from his wounds. so, he served as an ambulance man with the red cross, and after he was wounded, he came back home.

so, he is a little different than graves. he is not, you know, a four-year veteran of the war. he is not serving in an infantry regiment. he is serving in a different way. and the quote we have here is from his novel "a farewell to arms." natalie i think you are reading , it at the moment, aren't you? >> yes. >> maybe you can elaborate on that in a few minutes. this comes from "a farewell to arms," a novel that he writes that kind of sort of describes real experiences. not real experiences, because it is a novel. but it is based on his service in italy and he was serving in italy during the war and the protagonist in it, frederick henry, ends up getting blown up and wounded in the same way that hemingway does. but hemingway puts in this one quote, and it is frequently put in anthologies, because it is

seen as hemingway sharing wisdom he gains from his war experience about how war changes men in the first world war. what he writes is -- "i was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glory, and sacrifice, and expressions in vain. we had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain, almost out of earshot, so that only be shouted words came through, and he had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by bill posters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and i see nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were the stockyards at chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. typical hemingway -- lots of ands. there were many words that you could not stand to hear, and finally only the names of places had dignity. certain numbers were the same way and certain dates, and these were the names of the places that you could say and have them mean anything. abstract words such as glory,

courage, were hallowed -- i've seen alongside the concrete names of villages, regiments, and dates. he is trying to say these big abstract words that you see on war monuments, they are all hollow to soldiers who go through war. instead what they are focusing , on are more pragmatic things. survival. military objectives. living through it, ok? hemingway's "a soldier's home," he examines a veteran returning home. going back to the midwest. harold krebs. coming back home and trying to readjust to civilian life. what is that homecoming like?

natalie? >> it is really difficult. i did not get the sense that he expressive before the war, but we certainly get the sense that when he comes home, he has a really hard time relating to others, being outgoing, having genuine interest in a lot of things that are mundane, like going to watch his sister play indoor baseball. it is just, compared to his experience in the war, it is kind of trivial and he is not -- has not yet dealt with the trauma of the war. i think we can see that the most in the scene with his mother where she asks him if he loves her, and he says no. and the sense that he always has to try to console her, because the civilians can't necessarily deal with a soldier's experience, so the soldiers kind of have to alter what they say to pacify, because nobody can

relate to them. that was convoluted. sorry. >> no, that is not convoluted at all. you said a number of things we can pick up on. trauma, the feeling of alienation, cruelty with the mom. hemingway loves those cruel lines. "no, i don't love you." you know, those kind of lines are quintessential hemingway. >> i think him coming home a year after everyone else really affects his homecoming. because everyone comes home and tells their experience, and by the time he comes home, they do not like to hear it anymore. no one is listening. he bottles everything up inside. he can't really express himself. >> right. i love that scene, right? jacob? >> when he does talk to people, the only time people will listen is when he is exaggerating his war experience. he does not like that because it is not true. but it is the only way you can get people to listen. the public is just enraptured with the idea of the extremes.

>> i don't know, this might be kind of out there, but he has this sense of entitlement, you know? when he talks about he does not want these consequences. he essentially wants everything given to them. it is interesting how that comes out. hemming in -- hemingway mentions this guy is a marine. because of the elite nature of the marines, it is almost like -- it leaves me to believe this comes from what the service was like. you are so elite that you get certain things. >> he does want some kind of recognition, right? but he finds himself in a competitive landscape. everyone else has come home. he comes home pretty late. of course with his homecoming, , all of the war stories have been told, and most of them have been lies, that he found. that is not what service was like. so if he wants to his own voice to be heard, he needs to tell a bigger lie. he hates himself for doing it, right? kind of, or he becomes apathetic from doing it, so he stops doing

it. but he just wants to talk about his experiences because he has found that they are good for him to talk about. >> i think it is an interesting meditation on memory and war books and this idea that memory is an imperfect thing, and i think it is hemingway, so of course he says that very elegantly, that to be listened to, you have to lie. it is curious, because then you have to approach most, if not all, memory sources as kind of lie, but talking about a broader truth. it is interesting, because there is a really big debate going on with memory studies because it is like an exaggeration or a lie or you misremember things. i think that hemingway really gets at that concept. and then when soldiers do tell the truth, it is not what the public wants. that -- do you love me, do you love your mother. no, i don't. that is not what i want to hear,

so i'm going to cry until you tell me otherwise. i think it is an interesting observation on memory studies as a whole. >> right, i mean, yeah. of course, there is the parallel between the little mother's story in gravesend deal -- in graves and lying to the mother. yeah, i love you, but i don't love you. i think what natalie is saying is really interesting, kind of more broadly, because it is a difficult thing whenever you're dealing with memory sources to figure out -- and kevin, i was talking to you actually during office hours about this, and we were expressing our frustration trying to figure out, well, when is robert graves lying? what is he fabricating? why is he fabricating? surely he is conscious he is doing it in certain instances. men are not actually using the water from their machine guns to boil tea, one of the examples he gives, right?

they are not tapping out machine gun bullet strafing according to song rhythms, right? he is kind of fabricating the stuff. but he is doing it for a narrative purpose, to show us something bigger, i think. it is interesting, natalie, you should bring this up. there is a quote from guy chapman. we will look at some of his reflections on his war experiences in a few minutes. he compiled -- he was like cyril falls and that he was interested in reading a lot of war books and compiling them. chapman compiled this book called "vainglory" in 1937. it is an international compendium. it has stuffed by the germans, by the french, a lot of british. in the introduction, he says the nearest context we have with truth are the accounts of eyewitnesses.

he says that they matter far more than historical accounts or anything else, they will be far more lasting in terms of the war's impact. what is interesting is chapman was smart enough that accounts by eyewitnesses are, of course, subject to inaccuracy. after all, when memoirists write a memoir, they are constructing a story. and like you all do when you are relating the best weekend you have ever had to your friends, you are cutting corners with the story. you are telling it for narrative of facts. after all, it is not going to sell if you don't, right? so, hemingway is writing a story. and we need to be conscious of the fact, he is riding a short -- writing a short story.

this is fiction. but he is hoping to show a something more significant about the way people remember the war, what they are bringing home from it. kevin? >> it is interesting that his character, given all that, is so interested in waiting for all of the histories to come back, it -- and the accurate maps, even as chapman is saying these will be the memories of the war that will really last, the soldier himself, the character soldier is saying, no, this isn't true. i want to wait until all of this stuff comes out to my so i can put myself on the map where i was when and understand what role i played in the greater war. >> yeah. natalie? >> yeah, i think that line, that segment reminded me, and i put it in the margins of the sheet, of keegan faces battle, in that -- it is a very emotional story, the eyewitness, the flesh witness that we are going to , remember later, but you also need to have that broader context, and you just don't get

that from someone in the trenches. an individual in any war. you just don't get the bigger picture. it is good to have both, both of -- how this larger war impacted the individual, but then you need that context. >> i think it is really interesting, too, when he is looking through those maps and the entire war narrative, he designates himself -- i was a good soldier. why do i have to lie to get attention from people? i was a good soldier. my story is important enough that it should be told and people should look at it. i was a marine. i was there. that right there is the real ordeal by fire for a lot of these marines during world war i, and for him, i think it is really tough for him. and the fact that he is coming back home and the only thing that has changed for him and the community is the girls have gotten older.

i think he has trouble -- why isn't my story importance? -- important? it is huge. it is huge to the context of the war. i think that debates through his mind. >> yeah. it is interesting, kind of military history, as a way to insert himself back into history. you read that piece at the beginning of the semester about the importance of soldiers' writing, showing they were the man who was there. one of the big arguments in that book, he is trying to show that people write war memoirs so they can feel part of history. they can tell people, i was there when great events were going on. krebs wants to do that, too. his family will not really let him, but he wants to do it as well. >> depending on what that soldier experienced, it is really going to influence what and how they portray what they saw.

even if there are specific lies or stretched truths, what you're getting are the things that they found most important or what people might want to hear the most of. at the same time, it is important to look at why they chose this is why they did not choose that. that is something that is even more telling and in the sense of civil war regimental history -- it is the same story. pennsylvania pops into my head the most. just in terms of monument placement here at gettysburg. at the same time though, it is the idea being remembered as honorable and just the terms of how you want to be remembered. >> yeah. definitely. yeah, val, that is great. and way to work the civil war into it. we need to. we are here at gettysburg college. the story though, i think this is a great analysis. this is really well done.

when the story is read, it is read as -- the one word that natalie was using. soldier trauma. the feelings of alienation from family. this, theyrpret interpret this struggle. do you see that as the take away from the story? do you see wider importance? a question i love to ask all of you -- if you're explaining the story to someone who does not know anything about the first world war, how would you explain it in a few sentences? run-on sentences, like hemingway, right? [laughter] and it was good. i caught the fish and i ate the fish, and it was delicious. he would not say delicious. he was say was good. i caught the fish. i threw my line out. i caught the fish. i gutted the fish.

i ate the fish. the fish was good. i went to bed. >> i would describe it as a soldier coming home and learning the skills he learned around him were no longer working for him when he was home, so he felt kind of out of place not because of the war, not the war itself, but rather the homecoming really changes things on him. >> that is a good separation there, right? between the war itself and the coming home. girls haircuts are different, but he is not really interested in that. mother makes him the same breakfast and wants him to be in the same place he was before the war, but he's not anymore. kristin. >> i think it is interesting that hemingway is trying to portray krebs as the victim of coming home. i mean i know carrington was , mentioned as well. it was after the war he started

to get this disillusionment and confusion. i feel like hemingway is sort of following that in a way. krebs is coming home, he is confident in his war experiences, he was a good soldier, and then because he came home to a community that really had no interest in his story anymore, he had to take that disillusionment idea and he had to kind of run with it. in his own storytelling. but i feel like he, as well as carrington, both look at the return home as that victimization of the soldiers. >> that is where it happens. ok. >> i think krebs comes home, and people do not understand him. he has changed. he comes back a year later. nor does he then understand the people who were left there. they are in their own world and he is in his own world or it -- world. i think hemingway does a

tremendous job. i mean, this whole story. this is kind of a unique family. the methodist, saying we are all in this kingdom together god's kingdom. minute, what is this all about? i have changed. i do not buy into all of that. i think it is a real struggle on both sides. >> it takes forever for him to let his dad take the car out, right? a guy who fought for his country. >> i would say it is a guy who is dealing with the conflicted nature of making a decision to go to war and then looking for a validation, because that is what he wants. he really just want someone to recognize him and the only thing that will recognize is the map.

it is really interesting because everybody wants him to move on and he does not have time to deal with anything he is experiencing. it happened so quickly. it is also kind of common when you look at certain memoirs that make it to the big stage. if anyone has seen "the pacific," recently, eugene sledge, sledge comes home and kind of goes about for a few months. his parents do not understand. we do not understand you. we want you to move on. it is interesting that it is unique, but it is something that we see played out in reality, too. >> yeah. there is a little bit of a difference between the second world war and the first world war. a little bit of a difference. i mean that as a delicate way of saying there is a big difference, right? not a little difference. a big difference. the second world war was not at risk of being forgotten in the 1950's. and you get the impression from

hemingway in the mid-1920's when this is written, people do not want to talk about the war anymore. do you think that this story had something to do with the way americans remember the first world war? >> i think it says something about sensationalism and war, and that those who did not participate, meaning these civilians left at home, especially in the u.s. where the war did not come here, so the civilians did not have a context of this ultimate suffering the soldiers went through. and so to the people at home waiting for their men to come home, they came back, it was a sensationalism in the sense of, oh, my gosh, you guys were heroes in the war. now let's get back to our lives because i have been waiting for you. i think that that idea of

civilians waiting, it kind of steamrolls soldier memory, because the soldiers are not waiting in the same sense that the civilians are. so their experiences are, great, congratulations. all right, let's move on. >> save that title. "steamrollers of memory." [laughter] someone else over here. think, talking about sensationalism, right -- this is what i am thinking. in world war i, there is nothing sensational about american involvement. yeah, you look at history books nowadays and you think that americans were god on earth for saving everyone, but in the context of what was happening, we were really small. that may have been in the papers for a day or two, but other than that, there's almost nothing worth remembering, because there

was no glorified american charge. using those words that hemingway says are hollow. >> right, and that is a question of scale. american involvement is much less than the involvement of other major players in the first world war. >> yeah, i mean, it is true. but i think as well that ignores the idea -- and perhaps this comes about later than the 1920's -- but this idea that america entered the war and bam. it is done. we saved it for you guys. we have been sweating it out in the fields for a few years -- >> fields? trenches. >> yeah, going with the more romantic idea. the fields, the trenches, the battles. it is a little bit later, but america constructs their own exceptionalism into this idea of war, especially into world war i, where we came over, we saved it for you. now the world is safe for

democracy. we can all go home and enjoy our lives in freedom. >> also, this is going back to earlier readings from the semester about how civilians really do not understand war. i don't think civilians could comprehend how much soldiers had changed through their experiences. you expect to hear the story once and move on, but that is not realistic. they have spent, like graves, four years in the trenches. that is something that changes you as a person. it is something that is going to affect you for a long time. >> it is interesting. the stories become important in the 1920's. there are a lot of fraternal veterans organizations that spring up. in america, the american legion is a classic example of veterans

getting together to share their stories with each other, because they feel like they can't share a lot of the stories with the civilian public or even family members. it is interesting, because you will run into hemingway -- whenever you have people talk about american war memory, hemingway is one of these things that comes up. i think it is good for us to push back a little bit on the story, the way you have done now, and figure out, what is the heart of the story? disillusionment does not really fit in, or that word is too general to get at the heart of what hemingway is actually writing about. since i brought up the big d, let's bring up charles carrington. charles carrington wrote a memoir that is no longer in print. he did write a kind of revised half history, half memoir called "soldiers from the war who are returning" which is still in

print. it is the memory of a junior officer serving on the western front. it shows principally two battles. like so many british soldiers, he was at both of these battles and shows them in great detail. what makes the book really distinctive is carrington felt the need -- and he wrote his publisher about this, peter davis -- and he said i want to put an essay at the end of my book on the philosophy of war, and that became the essay you read, which was "on militarism." and that became the essay you read, which was "on militarism." this was not some kind of tome on here is what war is. this is an essay instead about generations and about war generations and how they are being interpreted. and it is an amazing memorial document. a document that engages with concepts of war memories, not only in britain, but baker war memories -- bigger war memories.

i am going to pull up 3 quotes from it. he writes that his intention for the book is to strike a responsive chord in the heart of some old soldiers who are tired of the uniform dissolution of most authors of war books. for it is time that the world remember that among the 15 million that serves, there were other types as well as the conventional prussian militarists and equally conventional dissolution that feminists. what he is saying is we have created a polarity between militarists and disillusioned pessimists. most of us do not fit in with that. we are somewhere in between, right? he says soldiers were not disenchanted by the war, for the war never offered them an enchanting prospect.

they were just fed up. he had not wanted war but he engaged in it. he proposed to see it through. when circumstances arose and 19 -- in 1929 he would do it again. there were no great expectations going into the trenches. nobody naãvely looked at the war, and thought that this was going to be a good time. and when they got there, it was pretty terrible. he gives us this striking statement of marshy alley. -- martiality. this does not fit in with what

hemingway would say, the greater the battle, there is no limit to the triumph of the man who is not morally ruined by it. if i was a minister who said that by -- from a pulpit, you would all be scared. ruination, one word. >> i kind of have a little bit of a problem with the second quote. i think that that is a very disenchanted way of looking back on soldiers and war experiences, because i think that a lot of soldiers did go into the war, maybe not thinking that this would be so much fun, but certainly thinking, let's go do this.

i have looked a lot at prisoners of war, and how they engage with their war, and what i saw was that those, especially who were captured at the beginning of the conflict before they got into the trenches, when they were still above ground and had not engaged too much in battle, they still approached the war with this feeling that i have to get back to the front because i have to do my duty and fight for my country and i want to be anywhere but this prison. and to me that seems like a very enchanted way of looking at the war. and you contrast that to the end of the memoir, the battle really sucked. i would do it again but this was awful. it kind of goes against the idea that -- the way of looking like i did not go into the war with any illusion. did you? a little bit. >> natalie is being hard on charles carrington. he would probably yell at you. what is carrington getting at the heart of with this essay? what is he trying to show in kind of a broad brush with this essay? he spits venom in them, he says some nasty things about eric remark -- but he is getting at

something very serious. >> i think he is saying it is not the soldiers coming home who have this disillusioned idea when they come back, their

experiences were not that horrible, as we interpret it to be. instead they did have fun once in a while, but he blames the journalist, he blames -- behind the trenches, he is blaming the people who are misinterpreting the war experience for the soldier, that we keep saying that world war i was absolutely horrible, it was an experience that no other group of soldiers ever had to do, but he is saying, everyone suffered. all soldiers suffer in war and we are not the exception. and we should not see world war i as the exception. >> that is interesting point that he brings up, where he is saying, he is saying that there is a generation of people who under the age of 25, he called these people those who went off to war before their characters were formed. why do you think that he is so careful with this designation? the idea of the war generation? why do you think that he is so careful? under the age of 25, before their character is formed. they went to war and then what happens in war? they are like him, they are 18.

they are 19 when they are in battle. and then what happens, natalie? >> that experience forms the character that was not previously formed. >> it changes them. in many ways it creates the adults that they are. carrington, certainly his entire life was interested in the anthropological survey of his own war experiences. he goes back and re-examines where he fought. where he served and who he served with. trying to figure out his own personal history, to contrast that with his own memory. he is a very interesting guy. but impart it is because he is so young when he goes off to war. within most of your age brackets. his character becomes formed in the western trenches. so when the soldiers who are so young have this transformational

experience, and they come home, they are talking in a different way. they are cynical and a bit rough around the edges. they are swearing a lot. they are a bit different. and society around the misinterpreting that as being disillusioned. that war has done something to the souls of these men. carrington is saying, hang on,

that is the wrong interpretation. carrington is creating his own alternative generational narrative, which has its own problems. you can be in -- you can't be an absolutist and an anti-absolutist. but he is giving us an alternative, a different way of looking at the war through generations, a different way of looking at people who are coming home. he is just a little bit more forceful about it, i think. he mentioned something else that i find very interesting. he says, as crispin indicated, the first world war i, and all wars are bad, that is interesting but he says postwar problems are issues that are timeless. other nations that fight in war have problems adjusting after,

coming together, figuring out what the wars were all about. he mentions specifically the american civil war. a southern state is trying to readjust, and in this class we have talked a lot about mythology, about the lost cause, for example and in other mythologies, and now we are engaging in the mythologies of the first world war. so he is trying to give us a bigger essay as to what is going on in the nation after war, how they are trying to reconcile trauma, loss, trying to understand these things in terms of a national identity. in terms of who people are. what do you take away from charles carrington? that is what i get from it. there is a lot else in here. jacob? >> for me he says, look at who you are placing the blame on. it is very easy with the english

government and these politicians, where people came out to salute him but he mentioned, yes, these people had to support the war, the public good because they like to the politicians, and they elected to go to war and the men in the public signed up to volunteer for the war, so they come home and the public wants to place blame on someone. so there are these pacifists who say that war is a horrible thing, he doesn't knowledge that there are some -- he sees the majority of the public as fairweather pacifists, and he comes in with this critique that basically said it is very easy to be a pacifist when someone is not waving a gun in your face. we would come back and we would fight.

>> that is very interesting and it is hard not to read the experience of the second world war into that. i think that we should take carrington on his own terms but you can't help but think that when he writes that in 1939, in 1929, he does volunteer and serve in the second world war. >> there is this quote on page

206, it is interesting that 1919 , the end of the war it was the moment of disenchantment. that the war itself wasn't and it goes back to the idea of, you won't be a pacifist if someone is running -- waving a gun in your face. everyone was like, we totally need to fight this war and it was after the war ended that this was a quiet change overall, postwar, people were like, does that mean we did not fight for anything because there was not a dramatic shift and people started to question why they went to war when, in fact during the war, they were completely for it. >> we see something similar with hemingway's homecoming. we see that the piece is changing the way that people are actually viewing the war, that the time of readjustment -- that time of disenchantment to readjusting with civilian life is changing them -- the memory of the conflict. there is wisdom in that with what he is writing, and he is a person who has had a decade to think about these issues and reconsider them and write his opinion. i want to point out 2 examples before we finish up. i think the quote will leave us in a good place. the first one is from someone you undoubtedly know, it comes from cs lewis. most of you know cs lewis, popular theologian, the oxford

don and the writer of the chronicles of narnia. in his memoirs, he talks about his war experience, i am surprised i did not dislike the army more, it was the testable. -- detestable. -- >> how does this fit into what we are talking about? does it? i think of dorm life when i read this, kind of. >> talking about the war as an odious necessity, like carrington refers to this as a shipwreck. it is not something that the nation shows and was justified. >> it was simply something that was horrible, but we have to do

it. carrington writes about this as a great shipwreck, he pushes that analogy too far. >> it also speaks eloquently of the idea that i am not really disillusioned at all. i am kind of surprised i am not as disillusioned as people think that i should be and that is an interesting idea that not too many people write about. >> he does not write too much about it either. he carries his war wounds, and his memories affected him. there are people who described him as carrying those war memories with them, but he does not necessarily look back at

them the way that a lot of people would. you were going to say something? >> the last bit about the fellow sufferers and how they shared the mutual understanding with each other, i think that it is especially poignant coming from cs lewis being from belfast. and understanding the sectarian differences between a lot of the individuals in that, without you actually have people on every side of conflict within each social class coming together,

and experiencing this one mutual situation to fret over. >> that is essential. and it plays into so many different memoirs that talk about the value of comradeship. even graves writes about this. we will in with guy chapman. this is a good place to end. we began with wilfred owen. i want to end with guy chapman. the first quote that you read earlier in the semester -- i want to remind you of it. this section of his memoirs in which he talks about watching a battalion, his battalion marching off to the front. he goes into this with both present and past, and view of things from the 1930's looking back into memory, and he recalls 1930, going back and looking at having this memory of men want -- walking off to the front. and you can imagine the dust kicking up behind them. and chapman writes about how your life and death are nothing, no more than it is the next man -- the man planning the next attack. it will not make the world -- the world safe for your

children. this is pretty disillusioning stuff. if by courage and tribulation, with the dirty devices of this world you have won the love of these people and all we remember our your living faith, and we love you for being part of our spirit, that is not fitting in with the second half of the paragraph, guy chapman, why are you confusing us? what are we supposed to take away from that? what is the memory showing us? is it showing us anything? >> experience and soldier sacrifice and the meaning behind it makes an impact on individual and not a national level, the individual sacrifice impacts the

individual's life and the people in that life, and the army sacrifice impacts the nation. >> i think what he is trying to say is to leadership and the nation, your death is nothing and you are just a number. but in reality, as one person, you have changed everything. i think that the one person may be nothing to the larger whole, but to others, that you know, that you serve with, you mean everything. >> i think that this is a nice interpretation. the soul of the army, is with the people chapman served with. chapman writes a second war memoir, piecing it together in the late 60's and early 70's, published by his wife after he dies. we begin with -- he talks about the idea that nobody dies for their country in a good way,

olin is known for his line, the pity of war. this is what olin -- oh when -- owen is known for. he writes -- would probably not like everything we said here today. my gain from it --my lost friends i knew for such a short time and the impoverishment of life, referring directly to the poetry if not the pity, to hell with your generalized pity. it is not the fear he knew or the pains, but the faces and the few words of the men who were with him. we should embrace. just when we think we have a narrative worked out, just when we think we have a way of explaining in short or long, sentences, what a historical source is, to summarize this in