Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front

Life, Death, and Growing up on the Western Front
© 2013 Anthony Fletcher
352 pages

In 1914 Britons marched to war, and with them they took their hearts. Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front takes in the experience of the average Tommy as he lived, endured, and died in the trenches of France and Belgium. Taken from a cross-section of Great Britain, from all classes and creeds,  half the subjects of the book will perish before war's end. But death and horror are not the fixation here; instead, author Anthony Fletcher stresses how the constant stream of letters between home and the Front allowed absent fathers to parent from afar, to give missing brothers the chance to encourage their younger siblings left behind, and constantly work to buttress the spirits of their parents and wives who they knew to be suffering.

While very much concerned with the Great War, Life, Death, and Growing Up is more a personal history than a martial one; through the letters, readers become the acquaintances of the men soldiering on, become versed with their dreams for their families, their hopes, their fears. Their letters betray a mix of bravado and anxiety about the beginning of the war, and call to mind the memory of how storied public life was in earlier times. They seem far less cynical than us, honestly believing themselves to defending a land of hope and glory against the brute force of empires.  Their dreams of defending the realm make them chivalric knights both at large and at home; they face a tension between wanting to  bare their souls to someone about the life they lead on the front, and wanting to protect their loved ones from fear.  Though Fletcher's own modern jadedness flickers through a few times, he hesitates from criticizing a band of men who he has grown to admire through their letters.  Despite the horror they witness, some of the men who live look at the war years as some of the best of their lives. While the past is always a prettier place in retrospect, their letters give some idea as to why that judgment might be sincere;  some men are overjoyed at the wildness of the front, rejoicing that they have not showered in several days, gloating in the fact that there they are able to be dirty.  It's as if they were boys playing in a yard again. More  substantial are the bonds of brotherhood forged in war; Fletcher remarks on how, despite the awful waste and obscenities seen in war, it entrances us, brings to life instincts that set the soul on fire. The soldiers are devoted absolutely to their comrades, and it is that feeling of being part of a great troop that they miss when the peace is come and they find themselves turned out, sent back to ordinary lives. The horrific impact of war is brought home in full to the reader during the Battle of the Somme, however, when the book's subjects begin dying, and the last recorded is one the author has focused on most. Having grown to know these men as sons, brothers, and fathers -- not just as members of the unit -- their sudden and seemingly senseless deaths are a dark shock.   Life, Death, and Growing Up is thus quite effective in  communicating the human experience, and cost, of the war.

Related:

• To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild
• Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Max Arthur
• Conscience, Louisa Thomas

The Red Baron

The Red Baron
Manfred von Richthofen
© 1969 ed. Stanley Ulanoff
240 pages

The average man on the street may not know the first thing about the Great War, but he'll have heard of the Red Baron. Attribute that to a silly song, or a Peanuts comic trip, but in the Great War Germany had no hero like Baron Manfred von Richthofen, a true knight of the air.  Beginning as a cavalry captain, von Richthofen joined the air service and soon proved a frightful natural. The Red Baron constitutes his memoir through the war, and what cannot be told by his death is told by others, namely his brother and an English pilot.

Owing either to the author's military precision, German directness, or the consequences of translation, The Red Baron is short and to the point.  The memoirs open with reports from his time riding with the Uhlans in Russia before he announces that he is joining the air service.  His reports from time at the front are largely devoid of emotion, but they are aided by interspersed letters to friends at home in which the Baron reveals his joy at flying, his thoughts about his foes, and eventually  his fear about the inevitable. His record was exceptional; before his own death, the Baron was responsible for no less than eighty kills in the air. He expresses little pleasure in this, aside from a hunter's quiet pride in having gone out and gotten his quarry, and never rails against his foes. The French he regards with a little disdain because they prefer ambushes in the air, and experienced pilots are too wise for that approach to work long; the English are far more worthy opponents, even if they enjoy theatrics a little too much. (So says the man with a bright red 'crate').  But having dispatched so many opponents himself, and seeing Germany lose ground and his many friends dead, the Baron could feel death coming for him.   After expressing anxiety about what was to come -- and shoving it out of the way, knowing he must do his duty -- the memoirs end, followed by a narrative by his brother, the account of an English pilot, and an article about his burial.  The appendices are quite good, including diagrams of all the major fighter planes mentioned throughout.

The Red Baron takes a while to warm to a reader, being very staid for the most part and translated imperfectly, but it does have the virtue of being the thoughts of the man himself, and not just speculations and praises of him. That remains its chief selling point, though there are dashes of information that give interested readers a feel for what it might have been like to  fight in the air.


"We found Richthofen. His face, particularly peaceful, had an expression of gentleness, of refinement. Suddenly I felt miserable, desperately unhappy, as if I had committed an injustice. There could be no feeling of joy that there lay Richthofen, the greatest of all!   In my heart I cursed the force that is devoted to death. I gnashed my teeth. I cursed the war!  If he had been my dearest friend, I could not have felt greater sorrow". - Captain A. Roy Brown, RFC/RAF

The American Tory

The American Tory
© 1972 ed. Morten Borden, Penn Borden
141 pages

American colonists yearning for independence from Britain called themselves Patriots, not in opposition against the not-yet-arrived royal army, but to set their cause against that of the Loyalists. Not all colonists supported separation from Britain; even in the steamy summer of 1776, with war already waging, some congressmen were reluctant to shove away any hope of reconciliation with the mother country. They were bristling against their rights offended as Englishmen, were they not?  The American Tory collects the reactions and thoughts of loyalists during the revolutionary period to the turmoil happening around them, as well as accounts of how they were treated by the revolutionaries, and how they and the patriots regarded one another.

'Tory' first described the defenders of the king's cause during the English Civil War, and is sometimes used as a byword for conservative. In the United States, 'tory' seems have been hurled at loyalists with particular hatred. Good, then, that they be given a chance to speak. This is exclusively a collection of excerpts from letters, speeches, assembly minutes, and official proclamations from the period, including two essays comprising histories of the revolution from the patriot and loyalist views. The collection offers a look into the myriad reasons that loyalists gave for staying true; ardent devotion to England,  fear of revolution driving everything to ruin,  and an abiding distrust of those agitating for separation. The Congress made a lot of noise about violated rights, but what if their real motives were more base? What if Adams and Washington simply wanted to create grander names for themselves than peace and cooperation allowed for?  And where did those rights come from, after all, if not the English law, embodied in the person of George III?

Although the patriots liked to dismiss the loyalists as fainthearted and timid, too afraid to make a progressive leap into the future, the abuse many endured for their abiding convictions puts the lie to that. The far easier course would have been the sunshine patriotism Tom Paine grumbled about in The Crisis.  There is pragmatic sense in the tories' belief that rights depended on the application of force -- rights unobserved have no functional existence--  and the able bedrock of the law --  but who wants to depend on the state for the defense of their rights?  The United States still avers to live by natural rights, but do the actions of its government live up to that? Certainly not, and nor did the king and his parliament's.  The struggle between a people's rights and their government's desires is never over, and the strife between the tories and patriots was less a battle between good and evil and more the ancestor of our own debates today.   There is much value in this little book, not only for giving the loyalists a nuanced opinion, but in showing how similarly their passions were expressed.  Both sides used the same language, referring to the respective opposition as a junta, and both taking stands in defense of liberty. The tories saw liberty threatened by disorder and wars; the patriots, by a peace accomplished at the price of subservience; both feared the others' banditti. 

Such realizations are helpful now, as in any time, to realize how people are more often linked than their passion will allow them to admit. There is still room for civility, here evidenced by one Tory expressing his admiration of George Washington and hoping, if he is defeated, it is a noble defeat, one worthy of the man.   This is in short a fascinating and profoundly helpful work for those seeking to understand the revolution and its causes.