our lek clurs in history series, taking you into college classrooms across the country. each night we debut a new lecture. friday a look at how the u.s. transportation system developed. we begin at 8:00 eastern with a development of parkways and freeways from an iowa state university lecture. then from the university of virginia, a look at the impact of cars on u.s. cities. at 10:30 eastern, the development of the electric rail system taken from a clemson university lecture. american history tv primetime friday. this weekend we'll explore the literary 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 literary culture of denver.

>> the original barnes and nobel superstores were modelled on this. >> juan thompson talks about living with his father and his book "stories i tell myself." >> you know, he was born in 1936. he didn't grow up in an era where fathers were typically heavily involved in raising kids, so that was part of it. second, writing was an important thing, family was secondary, for sure. >> also this weekend as part of our cities tour, some history of denver, colorado, on american history tv. 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 cabbing. we also have mill deer.

cocasually there's a bear in this area. >> and then kimberly field, author of the book "the denver mint: 100 years of gangsters, gold, and ghosts," talks 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-span 3 working with our cable affiliates and visiting cities across the country.

next we look at how world war 1 soldiers interpreted their war experiences. profess professor ishenwood looks at ways soldiers coped to the transition to civilian life. this class is about an hour 20 minutes. >> all right. we'll go ahead and get started with today's class. today we're covering as you can see, disillusionment of the first world war disillusionment and how we should approach the topic when we examine issues of the great war's memory. i'm going to begin this class in a way i never thought i would begin a class on the first world war's memory. i'm going to begin with a

canonical poem. what is regarded as the 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. double, like old beggars under sacks. we curse through sludge. still on the hunting, we turned our backs and toward our distant rest began to trudge. men marched asleep many have lost their boots but lumped on bloodshot. all went lame, all blind. drunk with fatigue, death to the five nines that brought behind. fittingly, we have a pockmarked,

shell torn landscape as they're dropping behind these soldiers there. gas, gas, 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 under a green sea, i saw him drowning. in all my dreams before my helpless sight, he plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning. if in some smothering dreams, you too could pace beyond the wagon we flung him in. if you could hear at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs. my friends, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. these are of course the words of wilfred owen, written as it was ongoing. wilfred himself was a junior officer in the british army in

the first world war. they are often reprinted words and they show us something about the brutality of war and the experience of war on the western front. 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 causes. the stakes of this one man's death from gas become very high

indeed in wilfred owen's eyes. this gives us a sense of what nations ask men to do in war. to complicate this, i want to give you a quote from another war writer, a patriotic novelist who fought on the western front. his name was ian hague. he was reflecting in the 1930s about war books. specifically about war books that show us the sortedness 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 which depict the men who fought as brutes and beasts, as living like pigs and dying like dogs, disillusioned, drunking and godless. some of these works are just

ordinary dull dirts -- he is not referring to wilfred owen as dull dirt, but sensationalized war novels. he says we do not need to worry about these sensationalized accounts, but others are undoubtedly sincere. they are genuine. their object is obvious and understandable, to paint war in such horrible colors that no one will ever fight again. you can certainly see that in owen's poems and you can see it in so much of the literature that comes out of the great war. so far, in this class, we have approached the topic of war and its impact on individuals, but also war's representations, and

what i'm going to call simply war's stories. how war story works in culture and how historians approach that story from within cultural frameworks. using two case studies that we have spent time with all semester 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 answered 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 do they change as a result of what they witnessed? and for this afternoon's class, how do they show change? how do they write about it? how are memories formed?

how are they 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 culture and literature. so for this afternoon, you have read some examples of how the war affected individual soldiers and how individuals then treated the war as a creative trope. the results of this creative enterprise -- their poems, their memoirs, their short stories -- at least are representations created culturally after 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 the way that we use 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. 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 collectivized cultural of the

wilfred owenization of the first world war. which has led britain to view the extremely complicated issue of the first world war's 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 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 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. 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 paradox 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 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 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 hours 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. we're going to 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 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 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. >> yeah. there is a little bit of a difference between the second world war and the first world war. a little bit of a difference. what i mean by that, of course, delicate way of saying big difference, right? the second world war was not at risk of being forgotten in the 1950s. and you get the impression from hemingway in the mid 19 you don't talk about the war

anymore. do you think this story has something to do with the way that americans remember the first world war? >> i think it says something about sensationalism about war. that those who did not participate, meaning the civilians left at home. especially in the u.s. where the war didn't come here, so the civilians didn't really have a context of this ultimate suffering the soldiers went through. so to the people at home who were waiting for their men to come home, they came back. it was a sensationalism. oh, my gosh. you were heroes in the war. now let's get on with our lives because i've been waiting for you. and i think that idea of civilians waiting, it kind of steam rolls soldier memory. the soldiers are not waiting in the same sense that the

civilians are. so congratulations, let's move on. >> that title. the steam roller of memory. steam rollers of memory. someone else? memory. someone had their hands up here. >> yeah. >> i think it says that because -- in world war i, there is nothing sensational about american involvement. but, we in the context of the larger story, what happens is we are really small and it make sense of what natalie is saying. that may have been in the papers for a day or two. other than that, there is nothing worth remembering because there is no glorified american charged. using those words that hemmingway says "are hollow."

>> that's scale. american involvement are much less major players. >> i think it is true. well that ignores the idea and perhaps it comes about a little later than in 20s. this idea that americans enter the war and bam, it is done. like oh, we saved it for you guys, no worries, we have been sweating it out in the fields. >> fields. yes, well, going along with the romantic idea of war, the field, of battle and glory. i think that and perhaps this could be a little later, america constructs their unexceptionalism in to the idea of war especially in world war i, we came over and saved it for you and now we can all go home and enjoy our lives and freedom.

>> this is going back to earlier readings how civilians don't understand war. i don't think civilians comprehend how much soldiers have changed throughout their experiences. kind of along what you are saying, natalie, that's not realistic. maybe four years in the trenches and that's something that changes you as a person and it is not a story that you are going to tell. it is something that's going to affect you long periods of time. >> it is interesting of those stories becoming in the 1920s. america, you know, the american lee gent, of course, of the classic examples. they feel like they cannot share a lot of those stories with the civilian public or their family members. it is interesting because you will run into hemmingway.

hemmingway's one of those names that come up. it is good for us to push back on the story of the way you are doing it now, figuring it out and it does not really fit in. that word is too general for us to get at the heart of what hemmingway's writing about. since i brought up the big d. lets talk about charles ca carrington. he wrote about the war. it is a memoir no longer in prints. he did write a revised half history and half memoir of soldiers returning. it is still in print. it starts with two battles.

like so many british soldiers, he was at both of those battles and it shows them in great details. what makes the book distinct activity -- i want to put an essay at the end of my book on the philosophy of war. that became the essay you read on militaryiiusm. >> this is an essay of generations and about warg war generations and how they are being interpreted. it is 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 am going to pull up three quotes from it. he writes his intentions of the

book as to strike a responsive cord in the hearts of soldiers who were tied in uniforms. for his time that the world remember that among the 15 millions who served, there were other types as well. pessimist, what he's saying is we've created a polarity here. most of us don't fit in with that. we are some where in between, right? soldiers were not disenchanted by the war. the war never offered them an enchanted prospect. they were just fed up. he engaged in it. he liked it less than expected but he proposed to see it

through. and which god forbids of similar circumstances, he would do it again. there are no great expectations of going in the trenches. no one naively looked at the war charles carrington and thought this was going to be a good time. when they got there, it was terrible. he gives this striking statement of martially. this does not fit in at all is what hemmingway is saying. the greater the horror, the nobler the triumph of the men who's not ruined by it. if i am a minister and i said that from a pope, you would be scared, right? >> moral ruination.

>> natalie. >> i kind of having a little bit of a problem in the second quote. in the sense that i think that is as 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 have looked a lot of prisoners of war and how they engage in their war. what i saw was those, especially, who were captured beginning of the conflict before they got in the trenches and they were still aboveground and had not really engaged too much in battles. they still approach the war with like i need to get back in the

front and i got to do my duty. i really want to be there and i want to be with my men in the front. that's an enchanted way of looking at the war. to contrast that at the end of the memoir, it was a doom and gloom man battle really stucked, sucked -- i mean, i would do it again but it is really awful. it is kind of a guy-esque. >> natalie is being hard on charles carrington. i think if charles is here, he would yell at you. >> what is carrington is getting with this essay? >> i have given you some choice because he speaks venomous.

he says things that are entertaining. he's getting something really serious here. >> yeah, i think he's trying to say that it is not the soldiers come home who have this disillusion idea coming back. 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 journalists and he blames the, you know, behind the trenches and the people who are misinterpreting the war experience for the soldiers that, you know, we keep on saying that our world war i was horrible. it was an experience that no other groups of soldiers had to do. it was the most gruesome of war. all soldiers suffer in war.

we should not be interpreting world war i as an exception. >> yeah, that's really an interesting point that he brings up where he's saying that one, the one hand of what kristen is saying that there is a generation of people under the age of 25. he gives you specific age and he calls those people, those who went off to war before their characters were formed. why do you think he's so careful with this designation with the idea of the wargen realization. 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 what happened at war, to carrington? they're like hitlers. they're 19 when they're in battles, right? and then what happens? >> it forms a character that was

not previously formed. >> it changes them and creates the adult that are. he goes back and examine and thought where he served and who he served with and contrast that with his own memories. really, really interesting guy. but in part because he's so young when he goes off to war. his character becomes formed in the western front. but, when these soldiers were so young and have these transformation experience when they come home as kristen said, they're talk nging in a differe way. they're cynical.

they are a bit rougher around the edges and they're swearing a lot. they are a bit different. society around them is interpreting that as being disillusion that war is kind of done something to the soles of these men. carrington is saying hang on, that's the wrong interpretation. you cannot be an anti-absolutist at the same time. a different way of looking at the war generations and a different way of looking at people coming home. he's just a little more force full about it, what do you think? he mentions something else that

i found interesting. he says as kristen indicated, that's interesting. but, he also says post war problems are issues that are time less, you know? other nations that fight in wars have problems adjusting afterwards and coming together and figuring out what wars were all about. he mentions specifically of the american civil war and southern states is trying to readjust that afterwards. in this class, we talked a lot about mythology and the lost cause, for example, and other mythology and now we are engaged with mythology of the first war. he's trying to give us a bigger essay as to what's going on in nation after war. >> how they're trying to reconcile trauma, lost, trying

to understand these things in term os f after national tenty and in terms of who people are. what do you take away from charles carrington. what's that i get from it. there is a lot else in here. jacob. >> i think for me, he's saying look at who you are blaming the blame on. it is easy for these politicians and guys involved in the war where people coming out delusional and yeah, these people had to support the war, the public did because they elected the poll tigs aiticians elected to go to war and the men in the public signed up to volunteer for the war. they come home and the public just want to place blame on someone so they blamed it on the government. war is a horrible thing. he does acknowledge that there

are some -- he sees the majority as fair weather pessimist. he comes in with a critiqu critique -- so if this did happen again, we would come back and fight. yeah, that's very interesting. it is hard not to read the experience of the second world war into that, too. i don't think we should do that. i am not saying we should. we should take carrington on his own terms. he does volunteer and does serve in 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, that the war itself was not, jacob, this goes on about the idea that you are

not going to be a pessimist when someone puts a gun in your face. it was 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 did not fight for anything because of this shift that people started to question why they went to war when in fact during the war they were completely for it. >> yeah. >> we see something similar with hemmingway's homecoming there. we see that in many ways the peace is changing the way people are actually viewing with war and that period of disenchantment of civilian life is what's changing of the memory of the conflict. there is wisdom in that. again, he's a person inside a decades to think about these issues and reconsider about them

and write his opinion about them. i want to point out two more examples before we finish off. because i like the quotes that i am going to give you. tl one that's from someone that you undoubtedly know. it comes from cs lewis. most of you know him. oxford dawn and writer of children's story, i am sure you all rhead the comic book of "narnia." >> the words drew a stake. so t no one did expect to like it or no one pretend to like it. the whole thing was a necessity.

that made all the difference. tribulation is easy to bare. run breathes comradery. the other mutual and distrust, conceal and confronting. how does this fit in of what we are talking about? does it? i think of dorm life when i read it. >> sort of similar to how carrington refers to the war as a shipwreck. >> yeah, it was simply something that was horrible. carrington writing about it as

being a great hshipwreck. >> it speaks quite eloquently of the idea that, you know, i am not really disillusion at all. i am kind of surprised that i am not as disillusion as people think i should be. that's an interesting idea that not many people write about >> certainly. he does not write much about it either. his war memory affected them. he carries his war wounds and his war memory affected him. people do describe lewis and his memory with him. >> i think especially coming from cs lewis -- seeing and

understanding the sedentary differences of many individuals and how you actually have people want each and every sight of conflicts that ends up breaking out and social classes that's coming together and experiencing this one mutual situation. >> yeah, kind of the idea of fellows suffer together. >> that's essential and it talks about the value of comradeship. one last light on this, we'll end with guy chapman. i want to end with guy chapman. this first twelve -- i want to remind you of it. it is a section of chapman's war

memo memo memoir in which he's talking about his battalion marching in the front. he goes in his present and past view effect from 1930s eyes looking back at his memory. having this memory of men marching off the front and you can envision that the battalion marching and the dust that's kicking up behind him and they're singing as they are marching. chapman writing your life and death is nothing to this field. do not upon and it won't make your world safe for your che children. that's disillusion stuff, is it? >> you won the love of those who watched you. all we remember is your living face and we loved you from being

our clan and spirit. that's not fitting in with the first half of the paragraph. guy chapman, why are ucoyou you confusing us? >> what are we supposed to take away with that? what's his memory showing us? is it showing us anything? >> experiencing in soldier sacrifices and the meaning behind it -- 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 a number but in

reality, you as one person have changed everything and i think that the one person may be nothing to the larger hole but to others that you know and serve with, you mean everything. >> yeah. >> i think that's nice interpretation. >> the soul s of the army and te experience of chapman is with the people he served with. he writes his second war memory a memoir and pieces it together and published it after he died. >> we talk about this idea of nobody dies for their country in a good way and sweeter and beautiful