In Touch

My puttee covered shins slip ever deeper into the muck as I fall back from the fire board into the slime strewn base of the trench.

Bloody Hell, I gotta get out of this!

Whistles blow, but instead of rising over the parapet, I’m sliding ever deeper down a quagmire from which I cannot extricate myself.

“What in hell are you doing?” Jennings yells to me over the din of our field artillery mixed with an explosion of a German trench mortar nearby.

What’s it look like I’m doing, becoming one with the bloody trench?

“Help me outa here!” I yell back, shifting my weight so that I can use the butt of my rifle as a crutch to hold me up against the moldy trench baseboards.

Jennings bends down, his kit falling forward on his back so that he almost topples on top of me.

Oaf!

“Damn it Hirsch, take my hand” he orders, reaching his right arm out to me.

“Kneel down, or we’ll both be stuck here.” 

He bends his left knee, firmly planting his right foot on the baseboard next to my rifle. Then, with his right hand, pulls me up, using his legs for the dead lift.

Yes, I’m free!

“Thanks Jennings!” I call out as my body ascends from the muck.

“Right-o mate, now let’s get some Jerry’s!” he blurts out as he continues lifting me so that my head pops up over the parapet.

I scramble up the muddy side of the trench, ending up on my belly as I make my way out toward our wire. Jennings is right behind me, having climbed out of the trench himself. We search for the white-taped opening our boys made in our wire for what seems like hours, but in reality must have been no more than five bullet whizzing by, explosions on top and around us, and blood curdling screams from dying men impregnated minutes.

Finally, we find the tape and the opening in our wire.  Pieces of dead men lay strewn about, as if tossed by some giant carelessly discarding partially chomped pieces of human flesh as he makes his way through a bowl while watching a football match.

These chaps didn’t even make it past our wire.

“Best get a move on then, we’ve gotta catch up!” Jennings calls out as he leads us through the hole in the wire.

I start running behind him, but can’t stop myself from looking to my left toward one poor sap laying there with an open stomach wound.  His hands are scrambling at his mid section as he tries to put pieces of intestine and other organs back inside his torn body.

“Stretcher Bearer!  Stretcher Bearer!” I scream out, “This man needs attention!”

He looks up at me with a pale face.

I can’t!

Without looking him in the eyes, I turn so that I can see where Jennings has run off.

I just have to keep going forward. No turning!

Jennings is directly in front of me, making his way over the shell strewn pock-marked, shell-hole covered ground of no-man’s land.  I fall in directly behind him, hoping to follow his steps across the broken landscape.

Just run, that’s all you have to do is run!

Sounds of bullets rip by me, breaking through the almost constant pitch of explosions not too far away.

Run, keep running!

As we approach the German wire I can see bodies caught up in it.  Some of them are still moving limbs, occasionally calling out “Help me mate!”  

Before me is the upper half of a man pulling himself forward with his arms, helmet still on his head.  His lower body has completely disappeared.  As he moves forward he leaves behind an expanding pool of black mass, possibly charred remains of what were once organs.

Run! Damn you Run! Stay up with Jennings!

I cannot stop.

I MUSTN’T STOP!

Over the German wire we run, using the decaying prone body of a dead German as a foot board.  

Just Run!

Jennings jumps feet first into the German advanced trench.  I follow, not timing my jump right so that instead of landing feet first, I tumble in, my kit rolling me over.

I made it! I made it to the other side!

“Bloody clod!” Jennings calls out.

Just as he finishes saying that a mortar round lands within two yards of us, exploding on the far side of Jennings blasting through my skull a high pitch ricochets from ear to ear and back again.

I open my eyes, not recognizing where I am.  

The ground looks different.  

Where is Jennings?

Pulling myself to my feet, I look around.

Where is Jennings?

I can’t see anything I recognize.

Walk, start walking, you’ll find Jennings.

Without telling my body to do so, my legs start moving.  A tingle descends down my right arm.  I brush the hand against my trousers, hoping to wipe off whatever was on me.

Why is this so unfamiliar?

Carrying on, I pick up my rifle from the ground before making my way into a communication trench connected to the front-line trench.

I can’t help but continue feeling this tingling in my arm.  I brush it against my trouser leg again before looking down at my blood and flesh covered lower body.

From behind me I hear “You use some help lad?”

Turning to see who said that, I realize I am surrounded by fellow Brits.

My body stops, but not to a standstill.  Instead it starts swaying in place.

“Yes, I can’t get this blood off my arm.” I say, softly letting the words fall out.

One of the soldiers approaches me, comes around my front, and stares me up and down.

Why are you looking at me like that?

“Call the stretcher bearer.” He orders one of his mates.

“I don’t need a stretcher, just a moment to breath.” I reply.

Stop looking at me.

Another soldier catches my elbow, preventing me from falling.

I didn’t even realize I was falling.

When I wake up I’m on a stretcher.  Raising my head to look around I realize I’ve ended up at a field hospital.  A rushed nurse comes by.

“Ms., Ms. Please!” I call out.

She approaches me with a rush in her step that betrays a sense of both urgency and anxiety.

“Yes dear” she says to me as she stairs at my forehead for a moment rather than looking me in the eyes.

“Ms, why am I here?” I ask.

“Well dear, you appear to be shot four times, and suffered a concussion.” She replies.

I was shot?!?

“Four times, but where?”

She looks at me, eye to eye this time.  “In the neck, hand, and back.”

I never felt like I was shot!

Is Jennings shot too?

“Is Jennings here?”

“Who dear?”

“Jennings, is he here?”

“Sorry dear, I haven’t seen a Jennings.”

“We were together.”

“I understand dear.  Lay back, and get some rest.  I'll see if there is a Jennings about.”

“Thank you!” I whisper as I close my eyes.

He’s probably right nearby.

Many soldiers become desensitized to their own bodies when in combat.  They keep pushing forward to stay true to their buddies, to carry on the mission, to simply survive.  With what they see, feel, hear, taste, and touch, their brains disconnect input from feeling.  This often leads to men carrying through despite severe injury.  Remember this next time you think of war. Wars are people disconnecting from reality in order to make it through.  How much of that can we have in humanity before there is no more reality?

Declaring Independence From Fear

Have you ever heard of the Kindermort?  I hadn’t either, until listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Podcast on World War I Blueprint for Armageddon. Long-story short, the Kindermort was at the first battle of Ypres, when German volunteer students exempt from the draft marched, almost arm-in-arm into the blazing guns of well-trained and rapid-firing British Fusiliers. All 25,000 of these fresh-faced youth were mowed down, having achieved nothing for their side.  A lack of training more than made up for the zeal with which they originally approached the battlefield.  Of all of the blatant disregard for troops survival demonstrated throughout World War I, the Kindermort may rank as possibly the most egregious waste of life so far revealed.

War is a constant waste of life, resources, national treasure, and the human capacity for thought.  World War I is one of the most demonstrable examples of this, but every war in history, from the shortest (38 minutes), to the longest (anyone?) continues this utter waste.  On a strategic level war is simply stupid: the waste is not worth the potential gain.  On a personal level, all war is a tragedy. The wars of history have taken sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers from the arms of their loved ones, thrust them into terrifying circumstances from which none can possibly return whole, if they return at all.

As a father of a 4 year-old son, the threat of war changing my son, or taking him from us forever, haunts me daily.  I look around the world, understanding the propensity toward war, and I am fearful.  Fearful for his future, for his life, and for humanity as a whole.  How can we keep having these wars?  How can we make war a thing of the past?  My fear drives a desire to turn the human mind away from war, if for no other selfish reason than to save the life of my son.

What I’ve come upon in my research is that wars are based off of fear.  Fear of the unknown, fear of what those we classify as the enemy is doing. Fear of the outcome if we do not fight.  Yet, as Peter Englund puts it so eloquently in his great work The Beauty and The Sorrow:

“Wars are and always have been paradoxical and deeply ironic phenomena that frequently change what people want to preserve, promote what people want to prevent and demolish what people want to protect.”

For anyone wanting to protect his son, and the son, daughter, mother, father, sister, and brother of everyone else, how do we stop war?  Not simply, we stop fear.  We can never get away from fear, but we can harness fear to stop war.  There are two ways to deal with fear: address it head-on and use the resources you have available to reduce its power over you, or let fear control your actions and limit your mind so that your only recourse is violence against yourself and others.  When you do not act out of fear you can make your most clear, reasonable, and rational choices, none of which will lead you to war. When you act out of fear, violence is the result.

Let’s take a look at how we can use fear to avoid war.

Addressing fear head on is one of the two methods of using fear.  If you invite in your lack of knowledge of “the other” and begin to learn about them you may come to realize that what you feared is simply what you misunderstood.  Beyond greater understanding of “the other”, you can also begin to look at what makes you fearful.  What are you afraid of?  Is it that you’ll lose something if you do not protect it?  Is it that you’ll be hurt in some way?  If so, think about how your actions will or will not lead to that thing being lost or that harm being inflicted.  It is your fear that will lead to those outcomes, not your ability to think beyond the fear.  Therefore, it behooves us to look at all cases of casus belli as opportunities to examine what we’re afraid of, and find within ourselves that there is no existential threat, but rather our nerves that are making us act out of fear.

Beyond confronting your fear, there is another, even more powerful, approach to using fear.  Look around you and take stock of your resources, your allies, your opportunities.  Whatever you are afraid of pales in comparison to your true power to produce the results you seek.  Think of all the strength you can muster, not merely military strength.  Can you achieve your desired outcome in another, less expensive, way?   Almost exclusively, the answer to that question is yes.

Let’s bring this back to a real-world example.  Tomes have been written on Germany’s actions leading up to and including their entry into World War I.  Yet, little has been written on how Germany could have achieved all of its goals through confronting its fears and tapping into its vast resources to gain the great power status it so coveted.  Germany, acting through fear, built the world’s second largest navy so that it could counter the British at sea.  From fear, Germany also produced the second largest army in the world (no one could outnumber the Russians at the time.)  Fear forced Germany to confront an international geopolitical system that demanded a three-front war: At sea, in the West, and in the East. This was a war Germany was ill-prepared to fight. It was a misapplication of resources due to fear of everything outside of Germany.  Germany held on tight to the one friend it had in the world, Austria-Hungary, compelling the Germans to do anything they could not to lose that friend, including entering into a war for which they were not equipped.

Instead, what if the Germans had looked around and realized that yes, there was the potential for the rest of Europe to gang up on them.  Instead of building arms, what if they had reached out to make friends with their potential rivals?  What if the Germans had worked with the French to figure out a way to administer Alsace-Lorraine so that both sides got what they wanted out of the deal (coal and steel)?  What if the Germans, instead of building a navy which achieved nothing in the war, used all of those resources to increase their industrial capacity, their ability to trade by building the largest merchant fleet in the world, and improving their infrastructure?  What if the Germans had maintained their friendship with the Russians?  What if the Germans, upon request from the Austrians to enter a war together against Russia, thought beyond their fear of encirclement, and realized that a war on 3 fronts was just not in their best interest?

The Germans committed one of the most frequent mistakes countries make when it comes time to consider international politics.  They heightened the tension, rather than released the pressure.  This was true of all of the countries of Europe in 1914, as I don’t want to single out the Germans.  Yet, compare that to what occurred after World War II.  The Germans, French, Italians, and most of the rest of Europe came together to build a coal and steel community, a common market, and eventually a customs, monetary, and hopefully soon a banking union.  These actions were driven by fear (of the Soviet Union) as well as by encouragement (The Marshall Plan). Harnessed fear drove the creation of the most stable, economically vibrant, and enduring Europe the world has seen since the height of the Roman Empire (also built on fear, but that’s for another article).

We can look at East Asia and see another region dominated by fear.  Japan and China are the two biggest countries in the region economically, militarily, and politically.  They have a common fear of each other, for good cause.  China has a history of dominating the region.  Japan has a history of violently doing so during the last century.  Both sides hold strong animosity toward each other not too different than what existed between the French and Germans until the end of World War II.  China and Japan, and to a lesser but still very important extent the United States, Korea, Australia, and several other countries, are locked in a ratcheting up of tension based on fear of the other, their actions, and projected intent.  A lack of understanding on both sides simply increases this tension.  Each side does what it can on a daily basis to manage the relationship, while at the same time increasing the pressure by taking actions that destabilize it.  There will be a shock to this system, and unless that is managed well, war will be the result.

Instead, though, there is an option.  By learning more about the other side, both sides can begin to see what is going on, rather than base decisions on perceptions of what is going on.  This can be done by educating the citizens of these countries truthfully.  Who’s doing what, how, and why?  Not using propaganda to make one government or the other look good.

Beyond that, the potential adversaries can invite the other in to economic cooperative programs that harness the resources of the region in a way that allows every party to benefit from their exploitation. 

Finally, the countries can consider an economic union that ties together their financial systems and future in a way that makes war between them much harder to start. 

Germany and France had to exhaust themselves through a massive blood-letting in order to make this happen.  Japan and China should not have to learn the same lesson.

For the sake of the sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers the world over, let’s use the fear that we’re building around the world to harness the true resources we have available.  Let’s declare our independence from our Lizard Mind by thinking beyond fight or flight.  What can you do to harness the world’s fear of war?  Invite in your enemy.  Learn from them.  Work with them.  Build something together.  Only in this way can we end the pestilence that is war.  Only in this way can your family, as well as mine, be safe in the knowledge that our little ones will never be called upon to die for nothing.