as we have talked about kind of ad nauseum in the class, individual memories are not the same thing as a collective consciousness. and though individual writers' works are often held up as being the voice of a generation, or the experience of a war, or the one book that 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 example of this cautionary reminder is the way that we see and have examined the british war poet. 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 generational tragedy, a colle

collectivized cultural of the 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 war i glasses. in other words, 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 1920s, 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 because war writers of the 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. from our work in this class, you know that history is oftentimes 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. with interpreting it that way. 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 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 conflict through lenses designed for our own convenience. there is something very likable in us doing this. very much so. it's 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's 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 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 by his principal threater, the western front. the combat experience in the western front was brutal. soldiers adapted to their experiences, though, with surprising resilience. most who served in the trenches, most who served in the west returned 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.

now, 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 also 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 war memoirists and the poets is about lived experiences. it's about personal history. but memoirs are also written to show something greater than just a collection of war anecdotes, greater than war stories. the first first world war generated hundreds of american and british war books. many of them written by veterans struggling to find a way to tell their story. in the late 1920s, some of the best-known of these books were

written and published. "all quiet on the western front," "goodbye to all that," "understones of war," "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 our way through this last week. the second is ernest hemingway, which says something interesting about american war service and about an american soldier coming home. the third, much less well-known regrettably so is an essay, the epilogue to a war book written by charles kerrington 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 1920s to some americans and britains 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 1920s 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 the war books 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 war scenes have been justly acclaimed to be ex-lent. 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 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. rather caustic review of robert graves. when we left off with robert graves, we had him still in the trenches. last week, we examined graves serving in the western front. he's at the battle of luth. he witnesses what he regards as

this amazing screw up 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 says at the time, i am not dead, but thank you for publishing something nice about me. so, graves is wounded in the trenches. graves comes back and he's recuperating back in england. and he starts to think a bit 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 didn't fall into a regular group of -- kind of forms these friendships among the other soldiers, seems kind of like an outsider which we already saw from his life earlier than the war, seems it was the same situation. >> he seems to be 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's not a great team player. you see a little bit of that. so he's 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's 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's 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. it gives him a new experience he is able to put to use. >> graves appears to be a surprisingly, and slightly reluctantly, good soldier. he deeply loves his regiment. he admires many of the men he served with. he is able to recognize her -- heroic qualities in the actions he sees at the western front. at the same time, graves is very conscious of lampooning what he thinks is 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 kind of 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 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, well, how do you think graves' opinions are shifting and changing wards 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. so how does graves adjust? how does he reconcile this war experience with an idea of homecoming? what do you think? what do you think? what's your impression of him? yes, laura. >> eventually he tries to pick up where he left off. he goes back to oxford, even

though he doesn't technically finish it. it seems a rough transition going back into civilian life. they do talk about how he tried to go back with officers training and things before that and saw how he would be able to get back in the swing of things. but it was actually much more difficult. he kept having flashbacks to earlier parts of the war. so that didn't work too well either. >> right, graves comes back with a case of shellshock, right? he identifies coming back with these memories of the war and gives us all kinds of examples of them. 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 which he continues afterward to use, 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 then afterward in the last third of the book, he is really discussing this idea of trying to make a kind of 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 i think he really struggles. he tries oxford, he ends up going to egypt to do some teaching, which doesn't turn out to be that great. also, he's married. his wife is 18, i think, and 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. >> for a way he is

overcompensating for lost time. he does do a lot of things which would normally take a along time. over the course of a lifetime, he tries to do this fairly quickly. instead of taking things slowly. that's how it is. it's like he was trying to make up for lost time. >> yeah, yeah, i would agree with that. >> i totally agree with laura. i think one thing that he's trying to do, just as she was saying, he's trying to recover this lost time. he's 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 doing to say it seems on the small, day-to-day scale that his experiences are more aligned with a typical british soldier coming home.

the fact that he does react to everyday items in a new and kind of almost frightened way. so the little nuances and how it affected his daily life and how he interacts with people and objects seems more typical than this extraordinary going to oxford post war life 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. but they're all people in transition. charles carrington, 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 t.e. lawrence. why do you think he's including that in the book? why do you think graves is putting in this run-in with t.e.

lawrence? >> name dropping. >> name dropping. so 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 avengers, iron man. he comes out of the first world war as kind of this middle eastern adventure hero. and graves puts him in. he says 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's non-characteristic of graves to name drop t.e. lawrence. he has been doing that throughout the entire book.

>> right. he's name dropped everyone else throughout the book. he's talking to hardy about poetry. drinking ale with t.e. lawrence. he is talking to sassoon, helps them out when he is going to be court-martialed. kind of all these great british literary figures and he's putting himself in their world. because he very much was in their world. he writes a biography of lawrence that sells pretty well in this same period. small biography of t.e. lawrence that we can summarize by saying robert graves loves t.e. lawrence. he loves writing about him and loves lawrence as the idea. >> but he's struggling with himself. he's industrial writing war

poems. he is trying to make a living by his pen. he is living this bohemian life they're living in a cottage outside of oxford, trying to run a shop, et cetera. but then he's doing things that are pretty normal, ways in which he's trying to restart his life. he gets married. he has children. he obsesses over things like diapers. he on 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 hand at a professional life as a teacher. does not go well though, right? goes back to being a writer, and eventually he says goodbye to all that. now the really complicated question we need to ask with robert graves is 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. so i need you to try to help me figure this out. what is the takeaway of this man's autobiography? of his experiences in the war? >> i think one of the most remarkable about it is actually looking at how it's the guys in the trenches, who would have been noncommissioned officers, the leaders on the ground and in the trenches who are really making the movement. whereas the higher echelons of the british army, the ones in the regiment going through all of these difficulties, more firsthand than some of the officers is what he's going to look towards. >> i find find val's answer very interesting. does anybody else?

why do you think i find her answer so interesting? what she's saying -- if i'm doing it inaccurately, throw your pen at me. graves show us something about how military life works on the western front. the war is being fought by these junior officers and the men underneath them. 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 lampooning the higher ups. 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 doesn't redeem anything in the war. but i think they might not be listening to val as closely as they should be.

what she is saying is, though graves likes to lampoon heroism or military hierarchy, he does not really lampoon the notion of heroism of individuals, necessarily. he likes a lot of traditional martial things. do you think that's a pair docks within his writing? 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. i think that was somewhat of a common place in the british army is having that rigidity in social class as well as in the military, so it shows.

>> okay, 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. he's a bit more complicated than that. 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 the stuff at the beginning here, graves trying to show something of 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. that it's still being fought in this kind of traditional way where morale matters. more so 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. and he served in italy. and he was wounded in italy while serving in the red cross, he was hit by a trench mortar, and was severely wounded and had some major operations on his legs to recover from his wounds. so, he served as an ambulance man with the red cross. and then after he was wounded, he eventually came back home. so he's a little bit 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're reading it at the moment, aren't you? >> yes. >> maybe you can elaborate on that in a few minutes if you want. this quote 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 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 own war experience about how war changes

men in 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 like the stockyards at chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. typical hemingway -- lots of ands. there were many words you could not stand to hear, and finally the only places had names of dignity. abstract words such as glory, honor, courage were hallow i've seen alongside the concrete

names of villages, numbers of roads, names of regimens 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. survive. military objectives. living through it. right? hemingway is a 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 for crebs? 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 indoor baseball. that it's just -- compared to his experience in the war, this is kind of trivial. and 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 he always has to try and console her, because the civilians can't necessarily deal with a soldier's experience. so the soldiers have to kind of alter what they say to pacify, because nobody can relate to them. >> yeah. >> that was convoluted. >> no, no.

it's not convoluted at all. because you say a number of things we are able to pick up on. trauma, feelings of alienation, coming home, cruelty with the mom. hemingway loves those cruel lines, i don't love you. >> i think him coming home a year after everyone 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. 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. >> this may be a little bit kind of out there, but he has this sense of entitlement. when he's talking about, he doesn't want these consequences. he wants everything given to him.

it's interesting how that comes out. hemingway mentioned this guy is 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 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 landscape. everyone else has come home. he comes home pretty late. so of course, 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 himself for doing it, right? kind of, or he becomes apathetic from doing it, 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. i think that, i mean, it's hemingway so of course he says it elegantly, 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 a parallel

we can make between the little mother story and then of course the lying to the mother and saying, no, of course, i love you, but i don't love you, et cetera, that you run into with this. 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, when is robert graves lying? when is he fabricating? maybe, why is he fabricating? why is he exaggerating? surely he's conscious he's doing it 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 from guy chapman. weirs we're going talook 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 an international compendium to first world war writing, good stuff by the germans, the french, a lot of british. in it, in the introduction, he says the nearest context we have with truth, the nearest context with truth, are the accounts of eyewitnesses. he said they matter far more than 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 a memoir, they're 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 effect. 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 will be the memories of the war that really last, of 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 greater war. >> yeah. natalie? >> i think that that line, that segment reminded me -- i put it in the margins of the sheet. of the battle in that -- i mean, it is perhaps a very emotional story that the eyewitness, the flash witness, that we're going to remember later, but you also need to have that broader context of what's happening, and you just don't get that from someone in the trenches. an individual in any war. you just don't get the big picture. it's 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, 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 at bellowwood. 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' writings, showing they are the man who was there. one of hines' big argument in his book "the soldier's tale" he's trying to show that people write memoirs so they can feel a part of history, so they can tell people, i was there when 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 term of civil war regimental history, it's the same story. the 69th pennsylvania pops into my head the most just in terms of monument placement here at gettysburg. up at the angle and that story, but at the same time, it was the idea of being remembered as being honorable and being remembered as being 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 intrrp interpret this, they interpret this struggle. do you see that as the takeaway from the the story? the wider importance. 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 caught the fish. i threw my line in. i caught the fish. 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.

so he 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. right? 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. kristen. >> i was going to say, i think it's interesting that hemingway is trying to portray crebbs as the victim of coming home. i mean, i know carrington was mentioned in this as well, that 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 crebbs 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 home, the return home, as that victimization for these soldiers. >> but that's where it happens. >> i think crebbs comes home -- people don't understand him. he's changed and he's really 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. i think hemingway does a tremendous job. i mean this whole story, he paints the family. this is a unique family. the mom saying we're in this kingdom together, god's kingdom.

he says, wait a minute. what's this all about here? i have changed. i don't buy into all that stuff 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. right? the guy just fought for his country. >> i think if i were to explain this in those run-on sentences you just described, i would say it's about a guy who's dealing with the conflicted nature in him of making this decision to go to war, you know, and then looking for validation of that afterward. that's what he wants. he wants someone to recognize him. the only thing that will recognize him is the map. but the map is not going to recognize crebbs. 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's experienced because it happens so quickly so

that's what this period is. 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 essentially. sledge comes home and kind of -- his parents are like, 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. right? there's not a little difference. there's a big difference between the two wars. 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 for you. and i think that that idea of civilians waiting, it kind of steamrolls soldier memory. because the soldiers aren't waiting in the same sense that

the civilians are. so their experiences are kind of like, oh, great. congratulations. all right, let's move on. >> save that title. steamroller of memory. steamrollers of memories. someone else had a hand up. pete? >> i think -- i think it says that because -- at least this is what i'm thinking. in world war i, there's nothing sensational about american involvement. you look at history books nowadays and 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, yeah, bellowwood may have been in the paper, and 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.

>> it's a question of scale, american involvement is less than other major players in the first world war. >> yeah, 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 then bam, it's done. we saved it for you. don't worry. sweating it out in the fields for a few years, but we've got this. >> trenches. >> yes, well, 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 fraternal veterans organizations that spring up in participant nags from the first world war. america, you know, the american legion, of course, 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 their stories with the civilian public, with even their family members. it's interesting, because you

will run into hemingway. hemingway is one of these names that comes up. 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. carrington wrote his memoir that is no longer in print. he did write kind of a revised half history/half memoir called soldiers from the war returning, which is still in print. it's a memoir of a junior officer's service on the western front. and it shows two battles. like so many british soldiers,

he was at both of those battles and he shows them in great detail. what i think makes the book really, really distinctive is carrington felt a need, and he wrote his publisher about this, peter davis, and 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 was on militarism. this isn't some tome on here is what war is. this is an essay instead about generations and about war generations and how they are being interpreted. it's an amazing memorial document, a document that engages 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 soldiers who are tired of the uniform disillusion of mouth authors of war books. for it is time that the world remembers that among the 15 million who served, there were other types as well as the convention prussian militarists and equally conventional di disillusioned pessimists. we have created a polarity here between militarists 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, the common englishman, had not wanted war, but he had 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 looked at the war, charles carrington, 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 horror of battle, the nobler the triumph 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? moral ruination. not ruin nation. ruination.

one word. 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 is 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 really got into t trench system, when they were above ground and 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. i wish charles carrington was here. i think he would probably yell at you. what's carrington getting at the heart of with this essay? what's he trying to show in kind of a broad brush with this essay? i have given you some choice quotes because he spitz venom in them.

he says nasty things, which is entertaining. but he's getting at something really, really 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. he's blaming the people who are misinterpreting the war experience for the soldier. that, you know, we keep saying that, oh, 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

exception. >> that's a really interesting point that he brings up. he is saying that on the one hand, what kristen is saying is he's saying there's a generation of people who are under the age of 25, he gives you a very specific age. he calls these people those who went off to war before their characters were formed. why do you think he's careful with this designation, 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? to carrington? they're like him. they're 18 when they reach the western front. they are like graves. they are 19 when they are in battle. and then what happens? natalie. >> a very formative experience. it forms that character that was not previously formed. >> it changes them.

right? it creates in many ways the adults that they are. carrington certainly, his entire life, was interested in an anthropological survey of his own war experiences. 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 own memory. really, 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 becomes formed on the western 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. right? they are cynical.

they are a bit 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. carrington 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. that's kind of what carrington is doing here, but he's giving us an alternative, a different way of looking at the war generation. a different way of looking at people who are coming home. he is a little more forceful about it, i think. right? he mentions something else that i find really interesting.

he says, as kristen indicated, the first world war wasn't worse than any other wars. all wars are bad. that's interesting. 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 we're engaging with mythologies 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. jacob? >> i think for me, i think he's saying, look at who you are placing the blame on. because he's saying, it's very easy to look at the english government and these politicians who got us involved in this war where people came out disillusioned, but he mentioned, yeah, these people had to support the war, the public did, because they elected the politicians who elected to go to war, and the men in the public signed up to volunteer for the war. so they come home and then 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. he does acknowledge there are

some permanent pacifists, but he sees the majority of the pacifist public as fair-weather pacifists and he comes in with this critique basically saying it's very easy to be a pacifist when someone is not waving a gun in your face. if this did happen again, we would come back and we would fight. >> 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. i'm not saying that we should because i think we should take carrington on his own terms, but you can't help think when he writes that of 1939, just in 1929. carrington 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, jacob, this goes off what you were saying about the idea of you're not going to be 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 only after the war ended when it was kind of 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 actually viewing the war. that that period of readjustment, that period of disenchantment of readjusting to civilian life, is what is changing the memory of the conflict. i think there's wisdom in that. very much so in what carrington is writing. he's a person who 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 undoubtably know. it comes from c.s. lewis. most of you know c.s. lewis, popular theologian, writer of children's stories. the chronicles of narnia. 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, of course, 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 odious necessity, a ghastly

interruption of rational life, and that made all the difference. straight tribulation is easier to bear that tribulation that advertises itself as pleasure. the one breeds camaraderie when intense love between fellow sufferers. the other mutual distrust, cynicism, concealed and fretting 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. >> referring to the war as an odious necessity, how carrington refers to the war as a ship wreck. it's not something the nation chose. maybe something bad is necessary. >> it was simply something that was horrible, but we had to do it. yeah, carrington writes that about it being a great ship wreck. he goes on too many pages

talking about it, pushes that analogy too far. >> i think it also speaks quite eloquently of the idea 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 certainly is. he doesn't write much about it either. his war memories affected him. he carried his war wounds for the rest of his life. his war memories affected him. there are, you know, 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 between a lot of the individuals in that city in northern irland and how you actually have people on each and every side of conflict that will end up breaking out and also 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. yeah, no, 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. because we end with guy chapman, and he's a good place to end. >> we began with wilford owen. i want to end with guy chapman. this first quote you read earlier in the semester, but i want to remind you of it. it's a section of chapman's war memoir. in which he talks about watching

a battalion, his battalion, marching off toward 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, going 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 even a pawn. your death does not prevent future world. it won't make the world safe for your children. that's pretty disillusioned stuff, isn't it? by your courage and your tribulation, by your cheerfulness before the dirty devices of the world you have won the love of those who watched you. all we remember is your living face. that we loved you for being our clay and spirit.

that's not fitting in with the first half 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 memoir, pieces it together in the late '60s, early '70s, it's published by his wife after he dies. we began with owen. talking about 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. right? this is what owen 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. the impoverishment of life. referring directly to owen, the poetry is not the pity. to hell with your generalized pity. what the survivor remembers is not the fears he knew, the pains, but 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 in 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 upend it. thank you very much. and i will see you all next week. during american history tv in primetime this week, we're

showing our lectures in history sirichise takes you into college classrooms and we're debuting a new lecture each night. tonight, an overview of world war i with lectures on sea power during the war, the experiences of soldiers and myths about the u.s. during the first world war. "american history tv" in proom primetime starts at 8:00 eastern. this weekend, c-span cities tour along with our comcast cable partners will explore the literally life and history of denver, colorado. on book tv, we visit the tattered cover book store, founded in 1971, it's considered the cornerstone of literally culture of denver. >> if you look at tattered cover, you'll see in the store green carpets and sometimes grass fixtures in the dark wood. the original barnes & noble stores were models on this. then juan taumpsis talked about living with his father, hunter

s. thompson, and his book, stories i tell myself. >> he was born in 1936. when he's growing up, he didn't grow up in an era when fathers were, you know, typically heavily involved with raising the kids. so that was part of it. and second, writing was always, that was the most important to hunter. family was -- was secondary, for sure. >> also this weekend as part of our c-span cities tour, some history of denver, colorado, on american history tv. cindy, national fish and wildlife service ranger on the rocky flats nuclear site's transition into a national wildlife refuge. >> so we do have elk that use this area. they use the drainages for calving. we also have mill deer. so there may be some mill deer fawns out here. coyotes are other common mammals. occasionally, there's a bear in this area.

>> and then kimberly fields, author of the book "the denver mint, 100 years of gangsters, gold, and ghosts" talked about how the mint changed the city. >> by the 1880s, denver itself had gotten rich from mining. and it wanted to become the queen city of the plains. the center of commerce, the leader in the western united states. and the city fathers at that point decided that a mint they could be proud of was going to be part of that process. >> the c-span cities tour of denver, colorado, saturday at noon eastern on c-span2's book tv and sunday afternoon at 2:00 on "american history tv" on c-span3, working with our cable affiliates and visited cities across the country. >> with the house and senate returning from their summer break next week, join us tonight at 8:00 eastern. we'll preview four key issues

facing congress this fall. federal funding to combat the zika virus. >> women in america today want to make sure that they have the ability to not get pregnant. why? because mosquitoes ravage pregnant women. >> but today, they turn down the very money that they have argued for last may, and they decided to gamble with the lives of children like this. >> the annual defense policy and programs bill. >> all of these votes are very vital to the future of this nation in a time of turmoil and a time of the greatest number of refugees since the end of world war ii. >> gun violence legislation and criminal justice reform. >> every member of this body, every republican and every democrat, wants to see less gun violence. >> we must continue to work the work of nonviolence and demand an end to senseless killing

everywhere. >> and the resolution for congress to impeach irs commissioner john koskinen. >> house resolution 828 impeaching john andrew koskinen, commissioner of the internal revenue service for high crimes and misdemeanors. >> we'll review the expected congressional debate with susan, senior congressional correspondent for the washington examiner. join us tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span for congress this fall. on lectures in history, chapman university history professor jennifer keene looks at myths about america's involvement in world war i, including the misconceptions that the u.s. was not involved in europe prior to entering the war or that world war i failed to have a lasting impact on american society. this class is about an hour 20 minutes. >> all right, so today, we're going to talk about america

during the first world war, and i have called this lecture "americans at war, the myth busters edition." and i did that kind of intentionally. because when we think about understanding the first world war in general, there are so many myths and misconceptions that are attached to the war that it's really interesting for us to first understand why those myths exist and then to unpack them a little bit and learn more about the reality of the experience, right? i wanted to start first by sort of talking about how this connects to the first world war overall. it's not just america that has these myths but even the sense of how we understand the first world war to begin with, and we think of the kind of general narrative that we attach to it, one of the most common narratives is that world war i was a senseless slaughter, right? we have already talked about the uncertainty as to why this war ever even occurred, but once it's under way, there is this sort of predominant image and we

get that image a lot from popular culture, the images i have up here for you, of the idea that this really was just men sent needlessly to their deaths. i have two examples. one is all quiet on the western front. you're going to like this image. this is the cover for the first english edition of the novel. you'll recognize that image from something we discussed last class, last class was the german war bond poster and that soldier was meant to represent germany's last hope, the one who was willing to sacrifice for his country and now it becomes sort of recycled as a different image, now an image of a man who is needlessly sacrificed for his country. right? and then this one over here, which is from a movie from the 1960s called "oh, what a lovely war." and i think that this little part over here is pretty instructive. the ever popular war games with song battles and a few jokes. right? really the idea that the

politicians and generals play at war. it's a war game for them, but it's the men on the battlefield who actually have to suffer. now, i'm not trying to suggest to you that world war i did not involve senseless slaughter. what i do want to suggest to you is that this overarching image kind of obscures some other realities to the war. in a more general sense. so here's just one example of this, right? we have this notion of how many people die overall in the war. we have less of a notion that actually, the majority of soldiers will survive. most men actually will come home. so there's tremendous numbers of casualties, but there's also a high rate of survival. so here we have a statistic. 9 out of 10 british soldiers, for instance, will actually come home. so that's one thing that the senseless slaughter conception kind of obscures for us. and the other is, it obscures for us the reality that in fact

soldiers spent a lot of their time outside of the trenches. right? they were obviously fighting, but the majority of their time was either spent in reserve trenches or far behind the lines. we could take this even one step further to point out that for all those men that are in the front lines, there need to be like two or three men behind the lines supporting them. so there are a large number of men who survive, not just because they're not in the front lines that long, but because so many men are noncom bat nlts. they're serving in the rear. those are people that we never really factor into our narrative when we just think about the first world war as senseless slaughter. the last point i want to make here about this is that when we have this myth of senseless slaughter overall connected to the first world war, it kind of obscures the fact that in 1918, there is a learning curve that happens. and there is a breakthrough in the trench stalemate.

the war does end in 1918. i just have this map up here to kind of show you that at this moment, we had movement in 1914, trench stalemate, and 1918, there's movement again. so there is going to be some learning that occurs about how to fight this war, and that kind of challenges a little bit this notion of lions led by donkeys, that the generals are just stupid, obtuse, willing to sacrifice millions of men without thinking about it. they weren't trying to innovate and make improvements in how they thought. so the point i'm trying to make here is that we can think about myths not just to, you know, point out how they're wrong, but by dissecting them, we can actually learn a little bit more about the war itself. so this is something we can do overall for world war i. what about the united states? so what i have for you today is i have six myths about america and world war i that i want to talk about and kind of do the same thing i did in this introduction. so the first myth here, myth

number one, america was neutral until april 1917. right? april 1917, that's when the united states officially enters the war against germany. okay. and what i'm going to argue is untrue about this myth is that while officially the united states was neutral, that does not mean that americans were uninvolved. so the key point here is that neutrality does not mean noninvolvement. and we can get a sense of how this, this different concept, right, neutrality from noninvolvement if we take a look at what woodrow wilson tells the american people in 1914, right? here we have the countdown to war. something we have already discussed, how we get from the assassination of the arch duke ferdinand to the army invading belgium and this is the moment when woodrow wilson has to say to the american people, where

are we in this conflict? what is our stake as the war is spreading across europe? this is the quote that we always hear. this is the one that gets pulled out again and again. we must be impartial in thought, as well as action. right? that's what we say. woodrow wilson told us to be impartial. but there's another thing that woodrow wilson said that i actually think is a little bit more revealing of what's going to happen. and in that same neutrality address, he said, the effect of the war upon the united states will depend on what american citizens say and do. right? so he's recognizing right from the very beginning that the government can say america is neutral. right? the government can say that we have a policy of treating both sides the same, but what the government does is only going to be one side of the story. what american people decide to

do, that's going to really tell the tale of how america behaves in the so-called period of neutrality. now, what do the american people do? right? again, there are well-known parts of this story and lesser known parts of the story. what are some of the well known parts? well, we know, for instance, that the banks, american banks, lend overwhelmingly to the allied side. that's a pretty well known part of the story. we know that american manufacturers, right, excuse me, sell their goods overwhelmingly to the allied side. that's another pretty well known part of the story. what really is less well known is what the average american says and does. and what average americans overwhelmingly do is they reach into their pockets and they contribute to humanitarian aid causes.