The War of 1914

 

A Sopwith Camel

My grandfather almost didn't make it through officer's training camp, which was in Florida, which is were he would live his last days but was quite exotic to him in 1942. When he arrived there, he had a day's leave before the camp started and he took it to go out to the beach and lie in the sun. With the type of skin he had, he fried himself and gave himself an excruciating full-body sunburn. He looked like a lobster. The next day one of the first things the trainees had to endure was a long run in full gear. 

Somehow he was able to endure this. He had a great deal of motivation. 

"If he had said one peep of complaint, he would have been out," my uncle Mark told me one day when I was visited him.

Mark was his second child, born right after the war, a couple years younger than my mother. It is from Mark that I know many of the details of my grandfather's war experience, which he means he was willing to speak about these things at least to his son. The more I think about, the more it occurs to me that maybe my grandfather didn't speak about his early life and war experiences to me because he thought his grandson, me, would not be interested in that. Maybe he thought he would be boring me with that. I could totally see that about him. "He doesn't care about those things," I can hear him saying to himself. Thinking about that possibility breaks my heart, but that was the way many men thought. That had endured so much so that the new generation would not have to live those trials.

But war has a lingering effect, and I could start writing my own life story, it would begin with World War II, just as I am doing now (See the House of Atreus for reference).

After becoming an officer, he tried to go to flight school. He was always interested in airplanes as a boy and dreamed of being a pilot, like a World War I fighting ace. These guys had been the heroes of the war to many, and he grew up with that image, wanting to emulate them. He and my grandmother always delighted in discussing the character Snoopy from Peanuts, who fantasized that his doghouse was a Sopwith Camel and he was fighting the Red Baron.  

As a boy I piggy-backed on his lifelong obsession with World War I aircraft. The mythology that arose over that infiltrated me as well, which was not uncommon among boys my age. Like other boys my age in the 1970s, we could discuss the ins and outs of various aircraft of the nations that fought in the First World War.  That war---the Great War as it was originally called---the War of 1914---was still in the living memory of people of the older generation when my first memories of the world were being created. My grandfather could easily discuss that war, which took place before he was born. There was a sense, I think, that many people felt, that the earlier war, despite its immense carnage, was more civilized in some sense. 

Years later, in 1990 to be precise, when I was traveling in Poland, in a region that had been the theater of both of those terrible wars, my Polish friend there showed me a tiny graveyard from the first war. There were graves of both Russians and Germans, with Eastern and Western crosses carved on the rows of headstones. I was struck by how civilized it felt, to bury the dead of both friend and enemy with respect and digntity according to the faith. I remarked at the time that in the second war, there was no such respect afforded. There were mass graves. It is clear to me in retrospect what many people suspected at the time, that in fact the War of 1914 was the destruction of Western Civilization, and that we have been living in the ongoing completion of that demolition until the present day, where it seems well advanced.

I want to say that my grandfather went to flight school outside San Antonio. I know he was there at one point in his training. 

"Thankfully he flunked out," my Uncle Mark told me. Evidently he got the jitters.

"Most of those guys who made it through didn't make it through the war," Mark said. "If he hadn't flunked out, then I would probably not be here."

I owned this book as a child, and I'm pretty confident it is in my sister's possession in Colorado. She is old enough to know about the World War I aircraft obsession of my grandfather, and their continued fascination with Snoopy as above. Certainly it would deserve a place of honor in a collection of classic children's literature.