canonical poem. a poem that comes out of the first world war and is 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. not need, coughing like pegs, we cursed through sludge. still on the hunting, we turned our backs and toward our distant began to trudge. men marched asleep many have lost their boots, but slinked on bloodshot. all lying. drunk with fatigue, outstripped

five nines's. fittingly, we have a pockmarked, shell torn landscape behind the soldiers. quick, boys, in ecstasy of fumbling. fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, but someone was still yelling out and stumbling then through the misty panes and thick green light as in a green sea, i saw him drowning in all my dreams he plunges toward me, choking, drowning. if in some smothering dreams, you too could pace if you could hear at every jolt, the blood, gargling from the frost corrupted lungs, my friends, you would not tell with such high

zest to children ardent for some great glory. that it is sweet and fitting to die for s country. these are of course the words of wilfred when, 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 show us something about the brutality of war and the experience of war on the front. the totality of war. they also show us something political. in an argument here, especially in the last part where he talks about men dying for nations, for national cause. the mistakes of this one man's

death 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 quotation from another war writer, a patriotic novelist who fought on the western front. his name was edwin hague. he reflected on war books, especially war books that show us the sore deadness of the great war in british memory. he writes, for the last 10 years, we've been submerged by a flood of so-called war books that depict the men who fought as brutes and beasts. dissolution, drunken, and godless.

some of these works are just ordinary dull dirts -- he is not referring to wilfred owen as builder, 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 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 representation, and what i will simply call war's story. how war story works in culture and how historians approach that story within two frameworks. using two case studies that we have spent time with all

is midwester long, the impact of the civil war, of course, fought around us in the fields of gettysburg and more recently in the last few weeks our discussion about combat experience about the first world war, we've been able to recognize certain similarities within the cultural narrative s that are created by people who fight, but to 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 witnessed? in this afternoon's class, dhou 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 war's impact on individuals and the much larger question of the memory of the war within british and american literature. you have read some examples about how the war impacted individual soldiers and how they treated it as a creative trope. the result 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 works demonstrates for a 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 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 look at this as a tragedy, a wilfred owenization of the first world war. it looks at the impact through the lens of doomed youth.

doomed youth, lost generation, what ever 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. we need a new prescription for the war's memory. we are going to be more aggressive -- we should cut out the cataract off 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. how we use it interchangeably with disenchantment, as war writers of this period did. it is a cultural trope. 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. you 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 starts, 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. in order to understand who we are, sometimes we cut corners with the historical past.

we see 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. how messy history is. how frustrating it is. and it made 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 stride 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 go into 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. an 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 return home afterwards. although 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 author's sentiments to the public at large. they are a forum for doing so. memory in the hands of the writers, the poets is about 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,"

"a farewell to arms." today we are questioning the way in which 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. next, ernest hemingway, which says something interesting about the american soldier coming home. the third, much less well-known known, an essay, the epilogue to a war book written in 1929. through these three accounts, we hope to get at 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. he was a british historian who avidly reviewed war books in the 1920's for the times literary supplement. i rather liked him because he compiles his war book reviews into a rather slim book called "war books," in which he gives a paragraph reviewing all of them 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 claimed 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 suicides were as common as blackberries. he is, in short, another example of an intellectual, whose intelligence into the war penetrates a much shorter distance than that of the plain man. a 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 witnesses what he regards as the amazing screw up of the

british army, 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 says at the time, i am not dead, but thank you for publishing something. so, graves is wounded in the trenches. he comes back and is recuperating back in england. he and 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

regular group of doughboys. he was on the fringes from the older soldiers. he was an outsider, which we saw from his life earlier. my 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 is he changing during the war, do you think? kevin, what do you think? >> he views it as a 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 and to the regimental history. he takes a lot of pride inervi , even if he is not necessarily the most liked figure. it gives him a new experience he is able to put to use. >> graves appears to be a surprisingly, slightly reluctant, good soldier. he deeply loves his regiment. he admires many of the men he served with. he is able to recognize her relic qualities and a lot of the action he sees that the westerns 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, this great sense of esprit de corps of the royal welsh fusiliers, but at the same time war conduct is not ideal on time war conduct is not ideal on the western front. when i say the words conduct is not not ideal, 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 those graves are just? how do you reconcile this war experience with 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. he goes back to oxford, even though he does not really finish it. it

rough transition going back to civilian life. but you talk about him trying to go back into officers training before that and now he thought he would be able to get right back in was much more difficult. he kept having flashbacks to earlier parts of the war. but did not work out too well either. >> right, graves comes back with a case of shellshocked, right? he identifies 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 peoples cars as they are passing on country lanes. his foul language, 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 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 a normal life? would you consider robert graves's homecoming to be typical of british veterans? yes? >> i think it was a little more intellectual than most of them coming back you really did struggles. he goes to oxford, is 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 thinkhe 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. >> for 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. it was 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. >> yeah, natalie? >> i was going to say on the small, day-to-day scale, his experiences are more aligned with a lot of 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 way that it affects his everyday life seems slightly more typical than extraordinary >> 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. also 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. so both you 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 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 kind of people he gravitates toward though. it is 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 tom as a party, talking about poetry. drinking ale with t.e. lawrence. he is talking to sassoon, helps them 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 he was hanging out with t.e. lawrence. he wrote a biography of them that sold pretty well during this time. we can summarize and say "robert graves loves t.e. lawrence." he is still writing war poems. he is trying to make a living by his pen. he is living this bohemian life 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, 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 hand 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. what do you think he says about british war memory? 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? >> 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, the ones in the regiment going through all of these difficulties, he is more disposed towards them than some of the officers. >> i find find val's answer very interesting. anybody know why?

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. the war is being fought by junior officers. in the words of charles carrington "it is a sub all turn's war." it is a war being waged on the front lines. graves is trying to show us that. he is trying to show a something of spirit or spree to court within these small units. i find this really interesting. i think there are people out there who would push 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. 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? he likes a lot of traditional martial things. 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 it definitely shows. it shows 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 is rather nuanced. is that what i am getting? graves is more complicated. kevin, you're shaking your head 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. 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. and within an elite regiment like the royal welsh, what val said is essentially right. it is being fought in this 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 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." i think you are reading it at the moment, aren't you? >> yes. >> this comes from "a farewell to arms," a novel that he writes that kind of sort of describes real experiences. it is not a novel. it is based on his service in italy and he was serving in italy during the war and the protagonist in it, frederick henry, gets blown up in 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 hemingway sharing wisdom he gains from his war experience about how war changes men and the first world war. what he writes is -- "i was always embarrassed by the war's 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. these were the names of the places. abstract words such as glory, honor, courage were hallow 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. living through it. right? hemingway say soldier's home. he examines, a veteran returning home. going back to the midwest. coming back home and trying to readjust to civilian life. what's that homecoming like? natalie? >> i mean, it's really difficult. at least i didn't get the sense that he was really 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 baseball, that it's just -- compared to his experience in the war, this is kind of trivial. he hasn't yet dealt with the trauma of the war. and i think that we can see that the most in the scene with his mother when she asks him if he loves her and he says no. and this sense that at the always has to try and console her, because the civilians can't necessarily deal with a soldier's experience. so the osoldiers have to alter what they say to pacify, because nobody can relate to them. >> yeah. >> that was convoluteconvoluted >> no, no. trauma, feelings of alienation, coming home, cruelty with the

mom. hemingway loves the cruel lines, i don't love you. >> i think him coming home a year after efrp else affects his homecoming, because everyone comes home, they tell their experience and by the time he comes home, no one wants to hear it. he tries to talk to people but no one is listening. that bottles everything up for him inside. he can't really express himself. >> i love that scene. jac jacob? >> when he does talk to people, they only want to listen when he is exaggerating his experience. he doesn't like that because he feels like he's telling lies and it's not true. but it's the only way he can get people to listen. the public is enraptured with the idea of extremes. >> maybe a little bit kind of out there, but he has this sense of entitlement. when he's talking about, he doesn't want the consequences. he wants everything given to him. it's interesting how that comes out. hemingway mentions he's a marine. because of the elite nature of the marines, it's almost like --

hemingway, at least for me, leads me to believe this comes from what his service was like. you are so elite that you get certain things or entitled to certain things. >> he does want some kind of recognition. but he finds himself in a competitive land scape. everyone else has come home. he comes home pretty late. so, oh with his homecoming, all the stories -- the war stories have been told. most of them have been lies that he's found. that's not what service was like. if he wants his own voice to be heard, he needs to tell a bigger lie. he hates him self for doing. so he stops doing it. he wants to talk about his experiences, because he's found that they are good for him to talk about. >> i think that's an interesting meditation on memory and war books and this idea that memory is an imperfect thing.

it's hemingway. of course he says it very elegantly, that to be listened to you have to lie. that kind of -- it's curious, because you have to kind of approach then most if not all memory sources as this kind of lie but talking about a broader truth. and it's just interesting because there's a really big debate going on with memory studies and how reliable are the sources, because it is kind of like an exaggeration or lie. you misremember things. i think hemingway gets at that concept. when soldiers do tell the truth, that's not what the public wants. do you love me? do you love your mother? no, i don't. that's not what i want to hear. i'm going to cry until you tell me otherwise. i think it's an interesting observation on memory studies as a whole as well. >> right. there, of course, is the paur l -- the parallel we can make and the lying to the mother and saying, i love you.

but i don't love you. i think what natalie is saying is interesting, more broadly. it is a difficult thing whenever you are dealing with memory sources to figure out -- kevin, i was talking to you during office hour about this. we were expressing our frustration of trying to figure out, what is robert graves lying? when is he fabricating? maybe, why is he fabricating? why is he exaggerating? he is conscious he's doing in certain instances, right? men aren't actually using the water from their water cold machine guns to boil tea. that's one of the examples he gives. right? they're not tapping out machine gun bullets according to song rhythms. okay? he's kind of fabricating that stuff. he's doing it for a narrative purpose, to show us something bigger, i think.

it's interesting, natalie, that you should bring this up. there's a quote -- we will look at some of chapman's reflections on his war experiences in a few minutes. chapman compiled -- he was like falls in he was interested in reading war books and compiling them. chapman compiled this book, a collection in 1937 he put together a first world war writing. it's eninternational beginning -- a lot of british, french. in it, in it the introduction, he says that the nearest context we have with truth -- the nearest are the accounts of eyewitnesses. he said that they matter far more in historical accounts or anything else, they will be far more lasting in terms of the war's impact. what's interesting is chapman was smart enough to know -- he was a memoirist, that accounts

by eyewitnesses are subject to inaccuracies. after all, when memoirists write, they are constructing a story. like you all do when you are relating the best weekend you've ever had to your friends, you are cutting corners with the story. you are telling it for narrative affect. after all, it's not going to sell if you don't. right? hemingway is writing a story. we need to be conscious of the fact he is writing a short story. this is fiction. he's hoping to show us something more significant about the way people remember the war. what they are bringing home from it. kevin? >> i think it's interesting that his character, given all that, is so interested in waiting for all the histories to come out and the accurate maps. even as chapman is saying these are the memories that last, the lies, the exaggerations, the

soldier himself, the character soldier is saying, well, this isn't true, i want to wait until all this stuff comes out so i can put myself on the map where i was when and understand what role i played in the war. >> yeah. natalie? >> i think that that line, that segment reminded me -- i put it in the margins of the sheet. i mean, it's -- it is perhaps a very emotional story, the eyewitness, the flesh witness, that we're going to remember later. but you also needed to have that broader context of what's happening. you just don't get that from someone in the trenches. an individual in any war, you just don't get the big picture. tease always good to have both how this larger war impacted the individual but then you also need that context. >> i think it's really interesting, too, when he is

looking through the maps and he's looking at the entire war narrative, he designates himself, vsi was a good soldier. my story is important enough that it should be told. people should look at it. i was a marine. that right there is the real ordeal by fire for a lot of the marines during world war i. for him i think it's really tough for him. and then the fact that he's coming back home and the only thing that has changed for him and for the community is that the girls have gotten older. and so i think he has trouble, why isn't my story important? it's huge. it's huge to the context of the war. i think that debates through his mind. >> yeah. that interest in kind of military history is a way to insert himself back into

history. you read that piece in the beginning of the semester about the importance of soldiers writing, showing they are the man who was there. one of his big arguments in his book, he is trying to show, the people write member waoirs so tn tell people, i was there while great events were going on. crebbs wants to do that, too. his family won't let him but he wants to do it. >> play along that, exactly. wanted to bring up the fact that depending on what soldier experienced is going to influence what and how they portray what they saw. even if there are specific lies or stretched truths, what you are really getting are the things that they found most important or that people might want to hear the most of. but at the same time it's important to look at why they chose that and why they didn't choose that. in the sense of historical

memory -- that's something more telling. in terms of history, it's the same story. the 69th pennsylvania pops into my head the most just in terms of monument placement here at gettysburg. and that story but at the same time it was the idea of being remembered as being honorable and the rock. just the terms of how you want to be remembered is what you will say. >> yeah. definitely. that's great. way to work the civil war into it. we need to. we're here at gettysburg college. the story though -- i think this is great analysis. this is really well done. when the story is read, it's read as what -- the one word that natalie was using is soldier trauma, feelings of alienation from family. people interpret this struggle. do you see that as the takeaway

from the the story? the question i love to ask all of you, if you are explaining this story to somebody who doesn't know anything about the first world war, how would you explain it in a few sentences? run-on sentences like hemingway. right? and it was good. i caught the fish. i ate the fish. the fish was delicious. he wouldn't say delicious. he would say good. i gutted the fish. i cooked the fish. i ate the fish. the fish was good. i went to bed. >> i would describe it as a story about a soldier coming home and finding that it the rules he had learned around him were no longer working for him now that he was home. sew felt kind of out of place. i mean, because of the war but not the war itself but rather the homecoming that really kind

of changes things on him. >> that's a good separation there. between the war itself and what he saw and experienced in the war and then coming home. girls' hair cuts are different but he's not interested. his 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. >> i was going to say, i think it's interesting that hemingway is trying to portray crebbs as the victim of coming home. i know it was after the war that you started getting this disillusionment and confusion. but i feel like hemingway is sort of following that in a way that he is coming home, he's 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 -- i mean, he had to take that disillusionment idea and he had to kind of run with it in his own story telling. i feel like he as well as carrington both look at the coming hocome ing home -- the return home as the victimization for the soldiers. >> but that's where it happens. >> i think crebbs comes home -- people don't understand him. he is struggling. he comes home a year later. nor does he then understand the people that are left there. they were kind of -- they were in their own world. he is in his own world. hemingway does a tremendous job -- he paints the family -- this is a unique family. the mom saying we're in this together, god's kingdom. wait a minute. what's this all about here? i have changed. i don't buy into that anymore.

i think it's a struggle from both sides, the family that's left there as well as crebbs coming home. >> it takes forever for his dad to let him take the car out. he fought for his country. >> if i were to explain this in the sentences that you described, i would say it's about a guy who is dealing with the conflicted nature in him of making this decision to go to war and then looking for validation of that afterwards. that's what he wants is he wants someone to recognize him. the only thing that will recognize him is the map. it's going to recognize the 6th and 5th marines. it's really interesting in that because everyone wants him to move on. he doesn't have time to deal with anything he has experienc d ed because it happened so quickly. it's kind of common when you look at certain memoirs that make it into the big stage.

if anyone has seen the pacific recently one of the main characters, they are the same person. sledge comes home and kind of -- we don't understand you. we want you to move on. it's interesting how it's unique that hemingway creates it but it's something we see in reality, too. >> there is a little bit of a difference -- a little bit of a difference between the second world war and the first. a little bit of a difference. what i mean by that, of course, is a delicate way of saying there's a big difference. there's not a little difference. there's a big difference. the second world war was not at risk of being forgotten in the 1950s. you get the impression from hemingway in the mid 1920s when this is written that people don't want to talk about the war anymore. do you think that this story has something to do with the way that americans remember the first world war?

>> i think it says something about sensationalism in war. in that those who didn't participate, meaning the civilians left at home, especially in the u.s. where the war didn't come here, so the civilians didn't have a context of this ultimate suffering that the soldiers went through. and so to the people at home who were waiting for their men to come home, they came back. it was a sensationalism in the sense that you guys were heros in the war. now let's get on with our lives because i've been waiting forbe you. and i think that that idea of civilians wait iing, it kind of steam rolls soldier memory. the soldiers aren't waiting in the same sense that the civilians are. their experiences are, oh,

great, let's move on. >> save that title. steam roller of memory. someone else had a hand up. pete? >> i think -- i think it says that because -- at least this is one what i'm thinking. in world war i, there's nothing sensational about american involvement. you would think americans were god on earth in world war i for saving everyone. in the context of the larger story of what happened, we were really small. it makes sense that what natalie was saying of the civilians at home -- it may have been in the papers for a day or two, but other than that there's nothing -- almost nothing worth remembering because there was nothing glorified american charge, using words that hemingway says are hollow. >> it's a question of scale, american involvement is less than other major players in the first world war.

>> i mean it's true. but i think as well that ignores the idea -- perhaps this comes about a little bit later than the '20s but this idea that america entered the war and it's done. we saved it for you. don't worry. we have this. in going along with the romantic idea of war, in the fields of battle. glory, yes. so i think that -- perhaps this could be a little bit later. but america constructs their exceptionalism into this idea of war, especially in world war i where we came over, we saved it for you. now the world is safe for democracy. we can go home and enjoy our lives in freedom. >> i think also this is kind of going back to earlier readings from the semester about how civilians don't understand war. i don't think civilians

comprehend how much soldiers have changed throughout their experiences. they kind of along with what you were saying, you expect to hear the story once and they move on. but that's not realistic. they have spent -- like graves, maybe four years in the trenches. that's something that changes you as a person. it's not a story you will tell once. it's something that will affect you for a long period of time. >> it's interesting, the stories become important in the 1920s. there are a lot of veterans organizations that spring up in nations from the first world war. the american legion, of course, a classic example. veterans getting together to share stories with each other. they feel like they can't share a lot of those stories with the civilian public, with their family members. it's interesting, because you will run into hemmiingway. i think it's good for us to push

back a little bit on the story, the way that you have done it now, and to figure out, what's at the heart of the story. disillusionment doesn't really fit in. that word is too general for us to get at the heart of what hemingway is actually writing about. since i brought up the big d, let's talk about charles carrington. he wrote a book, a memoir no longer in print. he did write kind of a revised half history, half memoir, which is still in print. it's a memoir of a junior officer's service on the wet earn front. and it shows two battles. like so many british soldiers, he was at two battles and he shows them in great detail. what i think makes the book

really, really distinctive is that he felt a need -- he wrote his publisher about this. he specifically wrote his publisher and said, i want to put an essay at the end of my book on the philosophy of war. that became the essay you read, which is on mill ta richl. this isn't some tome on here is what war is. this is an essay about generations and about war generations and how they are being interpreted. it's an amazing memorial document, a document that engaged with concepts of war memories not only in britain but bigger war memories than just britain. i'm going to pull up three quotes from it. he writes his intentions of the book is to strike a responsive cord in the hearts of some old

sold who are tired of the uniform and disillusion of most authored of war books. it is time the world remembered that amongs the 15 million who served, there were other types as well as the conventional disillusioned pessimists. we have created a polarity here between militaryists and disillusioned pessimists. most of us don't fit in with that. we're in between. right? he says soldiers were not disenchanted by the war. the war never offered them an enchanting prospect. they were just fed up. he had not wanted war. but he engaged in it. he liked it less than he expected. but he proposed to see it through. if which god forbid similar circumstances arose in 1929, he would do it again.

there are no great expectations of going into the trenches. no one naively look at the war and thought this is going to be a good time. when they got there, it was pretty terrible. then he gives us this striking, striking statement of how this doesn't fit in with what hemingway was saying. he says the greater the haorror of battle, the nobler of the man who is not morally ruined by it. if i was a minister and i said that from a pulpit, you would be scared. right? natalie. >> i kind of have a little bit of a problem with the second

quote. in the sense that 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 oh, this sh going to be so much fun but certainly thinking, like, let's go do this. i've looked a lot at prisoners of war and how they engage with their war and what i saw was that those -- especially those who were captured at the beginning of the conflict before they got into the trefnch syste, when they hadn't engaged too much in battle, that they still approached the war with this very i need to get back to the front because i've got to do my duty and fight for my country. i would be anywhere but in this prison. i want to be with my men at the front.

that seems like a very enchanted way of looking at the war. then to contrast that, it was a very doom and gloom, man, battle really sucked. i would do it again, but it was awful. it provided a very stark contrast that kind of goes against this idea that -- kind of a guy chapman way of looking i didn't go into the war with any illusion. you sit there, did you though? i think a little bit. >> natalie is being hard on charles carrington. he would probably yell at you. what's he getting at the heart of with this essay? what's he trying to show in a broad brush with this essay? i have given you chose quotes because he spits venom in them. he says nasty things, which is entertaining. but he's getting at something

serious here. >> i think he is trying to say that it's not the soldiers coming home who have this disillusioned idea when they come back. it wasn't their -- their experiences were not that horrible as we interpret it to be. instead, we did have fun once in a while. but he blames the journalist, he blames behind the trenches. we keep saying that world war i was horrible, it was an experience that no other group of soldiers ever had to do. it was the most gruesome of wars. but he is saying, everybody suffers. all soldiers suffer in war. we're not the exception. thus, we shouldn't be interpreting world war i as that excepti exception. >> that's a really interesting point that he brings up.

he is saying that on the one hard what chr hard, you have people under the age of 25. he calls those people those who went off to war before the characters were form. why do you think he's careful with this, with the idea of the war generation? why do you think he's so careful with that? under the age of 25, before their characters were formed. they went to war and then what happens in war? they are like him. they are 18 when they reach the western front. they are like graves. they are 19 when they are in battle. and then what happens? >> they have a very formative experience. it forms that character that was not previously formed. >> it changes them. it creates in many ways the adults that they are.

he certainly, his life was interested in a survey of his own war experience. he's a fascinating guy to look at because he goes back and re-examines where he fought, where he served, who he served with. tries to figure out his own history, his own personal history and contrasts that with his memories. really interesting guy. in part, it's because he was so young when he goes off to war. within most of your age brackets, right? when he is serving in war. his character is formed on the west he were front. when the soldiers who were so young and have this transformational experience, when they come home, they are talking in a different way. they are like crebbs. they are cynical. they are rough around the edges. they are like graves, swearing a lot. they are a bit different.

society around them is interpreting that as being disillusioned. that war has kind of done something to the souls of these men. he is saying, hang on. that's the wrong interpretation. of course, he is creating his own alternative generational narrative which has its own problems. right? you can't be an absolutist and an anti-absolutist at the same time. he is giving us an alternative. a different way of looking at the war generation. a different waiy of looking at people coming home. he is a little more forceful about it, i think. right? he mentions something else that i find really interesting. he says, first world war wasn't

worse than any wars. all wars are bad. but he says post-war problems are issues that are timeless. other nations that fight in wars have problems adjusting afterward, coming together, figuring out what wars were all about. he mentions specifically the american civil war. southern states as trying to readjust afterward. in this class, we have talked a lot about mythology, about the lost cause, for example. and then about other mythologies, now of the first world war. he is trying to give us a bigger essay as to what's going on in nations 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 this? that's what i get from it. there's a lot else in here. >> i think for me, i think he's saying, look at who you are placing the blame on. esshe is saying, it's easy to l at the politicians who got us involved in the war where people came out disillusioned but he mentions, yeah, these people had to support the war, the public did, because they elected the politicians would elected to go to war. the men in the public signed up to volunteer for the war. and then so they come home and the public just wants to place blame on someone. so they place it on the government. there are these pacifists who are like, war say horrible thing. does he acknowledge there are some permanent pass sicifists.

and he comes in with this critique basically saying, it's easy to be a pacifist when someone is not waving a gun in your face. we would fight if this happened again. >> that's very interesting. it's hard not to read the experience of the second world war into that. i don't think we should do that. you can't help think when he writes that of 1939 just in 1929. he does volunteer and does serve during the second world war. >> i find this quote on page 206 to be really interesting, that 1919 being the end of the war was the moment of disenchantment. the war itself wasn't. i think this goes off what you were saying about the idea of you're not going to he a pacifist if someone is waving a gun in your face. during the war, they were like we need to fight the war.

it was after when it was a quiet change overall post-war, that people were like, wait a second, does that mean we didn't fight for anything because there wasn't this dramatic shift, that 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 there. right? we see that in many ways the peace is changing the way people are changing the war, that that period of readjustment -- that period of disenchantment of readjusting to civilian live is what's changing the memory of the conflict. i think there's wisdom in that. very much so in what he is writing. he's a person who has had a decade to think about these issues. to try to reconsider them and then write his opinion of them. i want to point out two more examples before we are going to

finish up. because i like the quotes that i'm going to give you. i think they will leave us in a good place. the one is from someone that you know. it comes from c.s. lewis. most of you know c.s. lewis, popular, writer of children stories. he served on the western front. in his memoir, he sums up partly his war experience. i am surprised i did not dislike the army more. it was detestable. the words drew the sting. it's different than the public school. the public school might have been worse. no one did not expect to like it. no one said you ought to like it. no one pretended to like it. everyone you met took it for granted that the whole thing was an owedous necessity, a gasly interruption of rational life. that made all the difference.

tribulation is easier to bear. the one breeds camaraderie when intense love between fellow suffer sufferers. the other distrust, cynicism, resentment. how does this fit in with what we are talking about? does it? i think of dorm life when i read this, kind of. >> it's a necessity, similar to how carrington refers to the war as a ship wreck. >> it was something that was horrible. but we had to do it. he writes about that as the great ship wreck. he goes on for too many pages talking about it. >> i think it speaks of the idea

th that, i'm not really disillusioned at all. i'm kind of surprised i'm not as disillusioned as people think i should be. i think that's an interesting idea, that not many people write about. >> yeah. it it is. he doesn't write much about it. his war memories affected him. his war memories affected him. people do describe lewis as carrying the war memories with him. he doesn't necessarily look back at them in the same way that a lot of people would. val, you were going to say something? >> his last bit about the love between fellow sufferers and how they share this new mutual understanding between one another. i think it's poignant coming from c.s. lewis being someone from belfast himself, seeing and understanding the sectarian

differences and how you have people on each and every side of conflict that will end up breaking out and within each social class that are coming together and experiencing this one mutual situation to fret over. >> kind of that idea of fellow sufferers together. that is essential. it plays into so many different memoirs that talk about the value of comradeship. even graves writes about this uncynically. one last slide. we will end with guy chapman. he's a good place to end. we began with wilf re d owen. it's a section of chapman's war memoir. he talks about watching his battalion marching to the front.

he goes into this present and past sort of view of things from 1930s eyes looking back at a memory. he recalls from 1930 goes back and having this memory of men marching off toward the front. you can envision the battalion marching and the dust kicking up behind them. they are singing as they are marching. chapman writes, your life and death are nothing in the fields, nothing, no more than it is to the man planning the next attack. you are not a pawn. your death does not prevent future world. it won't make the world safe for your children. that's disillusioned stuff. isn't it? by your courage and your cheerfulness before the dirty devices of the world, you have won the love of those who watched you. we loved you for being our clay and spirit. of the paragraph. guy chapman, why are you

confusing us? what are we supposed to take away from that? what's his memory showing us? is it showing us anything? >> war experience and soldier sacrifice and the meaning behind it is -- makes an impact on an individual, not a national level. that an individual sacrifice impacts the individual's life and the people in that life and the army sacrifice impacts the nation. >> i think really what he's trying to say is to leadership, to the nation, your death is nothing. you are just -- you are a number. but in reality, you as one person have changed everything.

i think that the one person may be nothing to the larger whole. but to others that you know, that you served with, you mean everything. >> yeah. i think that's a nice interpretation. the soul of the army, of the experience for chapman is with the people he served with. chapman writes a second war memoi memoir, pieces it together. it's published by his wife after he dies. we began with owen. talking abr:c this idea of nobody dies for their country in a good way, in a sweet or beautiful way. right? owen is known for his lines. the pity of war. the poetry is in the pity.

this is what he is known for. chapman engaged with that directly later in life. he says, i'm never grateful for comment however sensible in the war for men who are not in it. probably would not like everything we have said here today. my gain from it is of importance only to myself for the rest i am conscious of loss, the lost friends i knew for a short time. referring to owen, the poetry is not the pity. to held with your generalized pity. what the survivor remembers is the fears he knew, the pains, the faces and the few words of the men who were with him. so as we leave this class, we should embrace i think to some degree the messiness that is history and historical memory. that 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 to somebody what a historical source is, to summarize it an easier convenient way, that we will always find people who are representing that war or pushing back against that war experience in a way that will surprise the way that we have interpreted it or up end it. thank you very much. and i will see you all next week. the c-span cities tour takes book tv and american history tv on the road. traveling to u.s. cities to learn about their history and

lit teary life. this weekend we partners with comcast for a visit to boulder, colorado. >> my book is "the beast in the garden." it's a book about an animal we would have called a beast, the mountain lion in what it really a garden. that is boulder, colorado. in many ways, it has been altered by human kind. when you get this wild animal coming into this artificial landscape, you actually can cause changes in the behavior of that animal. a mountain lion's favorite foot is venison. then the deer living on the outskirts of this lush city where we have irrigated gardens and lawns, the sit it attracted the deer. we had a deer herd in boulder. the lions were in open space, then they discovered there were

deer in town. then the lions discovered they could eat dogs and cats. that's food for them. the lions were learning and they have learned that this is where they will find food. there is food up there, too, but there's lots to eat in town. >> this is a retreat generally in a beautiful place for enrichment and enlightenment, entertainment and coming together. the people who were intended to be the audience were really what we would call the middle class. the programs at most of the areas were similar. acom a combination of speakers of the day, a variety of both what we might consider high-brow and low-brow entertainment, opera, classical music and probably what would be considered the vaudville of that day. >> watch our events saturday at