The morning dawned cold and rainy. I fastened the buttons of my coat, pulled my green wool cap over my head, and tightened my red plaid scarf around my neck. Did I wish the weather on that Belgian morning had been more agreeable? Sure, I did. But I was heading to Flanders Fields and the site of what was once known as the northern part of the Western Front during World War I. During the years of 1914 until the end of 1918 this was a place of unspeakable horror for hundreds of thousands of young men.
So, no. I was not going to complain about the weather on that morning of March 14, 2023, the day I turned seventy years old. I was still alive and about to pay my respects to youth who no longer were. The weather could be endured.
Sometimes the primacy of nature and nurture are hard to separate. I was born seventy years ago as a male and as a male I was raised. Strongly embedded within the experience of growing up male is the meaning of manhood. We are nurtured with unmistakable messages as boys that to be a man involves the adoption of very specific traits. High among them is to display a selfless bravery to squarely face danger without hesitation. To battle when needed. To overcome one’s foes. And if vanquished, to go down fighting, which will at least preserve honor, even if life is extinguished.
Beyond this manner of masculine upbringing, I also have speculated about the role of nature in shaping men to be men. The expectation for boys to grow into men who are virile, strapping, and courageous is a presumption that is as old as history. At some point in this long and patterned progression of raising boys to be warriors it could be that the widely associated behaviors of manhood became finely integrated into the souls of men. An a priori masculinity may accompany the birth of each and every baby boy born into this world. This axiomatic essence of dutiful manliness then simply needs to be massaged during rearing to result in a fighter, a defender, a soldier.
Whether or not a boy grows to become a crusader, a crucial part of being a man is in reconciling or harmonizing the man one has become with the type of man one is supposed to be. Sometimes this urge toward manly expression goes awry, leading to overly aggressive males. However, for most of us men we need to find causes to sustain, people to protect, and missions to fulfill. These proclivities may not be played out on a literal battlefield, but they must find expression somehow, even in passivity. Like it or not, we men are preordained to live out as best we can the manifest calling inherent in our gender. Exploring this notion was in large part the motivation and need for reflection I was drawn to pursue on that birthday at Flanders Fields.
Young men from Germany, the British Commonwealth countries, France, the Low Countries, and eventually the United States and Italy converged at the Western Front, which stretched from Flanders Fields to the Swiss frontier with France. They were there to engage in a slaughter of one another. Their precious manhood was both exploited, abused, and celebrated during this horrific enterprise. The soldiers of the First World War were robbed of their innocence, their zest for life, and in far too many cases, their very existence.
The confrontation known as the Great War or World War I was among the greatest tragedies of humankind. It did not need to happen. But it did. Most of those who fought and died during the conflict were born during the last decade of the nineteenth century. As young boys they had every right to expect a high standard of guidance from their elders. They should have been shown by their parents’ generation how to love all people and how to try to make the world a better place than they found it.
Instead, this generation of young men were let down by their elders. They were squandered, misused, and harmed. Their lives were deemed expendable and not of precious value. Those poor souls who came into this world only to leave it too soon were robbed of their manhood and of their lives. Shame befalls those who encouraged this cataclysm to happen. The decisions, values, and hubris of the elders driven by their xenophobic mindsets starkly displayed a stunning lack of morality.
Some backstory will bring clarity to what happened. However clear history may be, the justifications for this debacle will never make sense of what happened. Historians categorize the causes of World War I into four domains: mutual defense alliances, imperialism, expanded and modernized militarism, and nationalism. I tend to group all these causes under the rubric of one foremost cause, that of domination.
The world of 1914 was a powder keg of outdated and maniacal monarchies committed to a ruthless competition for control over as many people and resources from around the world as could be made possible. Command, control, authority, and supremacy were the overriding principles of the world’s leaders, particularly in Europe. European empires, along with their colonies and spheres of influence, jostled for advantage. This led to a tangled network of alliances allegedly designed to ensure domestic stability and security while providing a nationalistic influential edge in world affairs.
By 1914 the stage was set for a ruinous chain reaction. European empires had been in existence for hundreds of years led by Great Britain, Spain, The Netherlands, and France. However, nationalism as we know it today has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Nationalism is based on the idea of group identity with common beliefs, values, languages, stories, and cultural traditions. The practice of forming nation states had been exercised all over the continent throughout the nineteenth century. At least this was true of those parts not already under the thumb of an empire.
The motivation to nationalize was strong by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. For example, by 1871 smaller kingdoms were culturally compelled to unify into the nation states of Italy and Germany. One downside of nationalism is that it can leave people of different nations distrustful of one another. Borders can help to protect and to preserve, but they also can confine and cause cultural atrophy. Unhealthy rivalries can result based on resource distributions and perceived threats to cultural integrity. Such mistrust took hold in Europe.
The inspiration to nationalize swept across the Balkan region of southeast Europe in the years leading up to 1914. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania are among the many countries that make up this region today. At the time, the people of the Balkans were squeezed between two prevailing and powerful empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. These empires exerted influence and pressure in the Balkans, which only encouraged nationalistic tendencies.
Meanwhile, a complicated assortment of defense alliances was established across much of Europe. Key alliances which led to World War I were that Russia was allied with Serbia in the Balkans and also with France, Germany was allied with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Great Britain was allied with France and Belgium. Such was the international stage when a Bosnian acting on behalf of Serbia assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife while they were visiting the Balkan city of Sarajevo on the 28th of July 1914. The consequent string of war declarations became the First World War.
The brutality of this war was made worse by the steady militarization of the European powers in the preceding years, which included the development of weapons marking the advent of modern warfare. Much more massive artillery guns and shells, machine guns, tanks, poison gases, and military aircraft were strategically introduced creating exorbitantly high death counts.
For those armies reliant on outdated battlefield strategies and tactics these weapons proved to be especially lethal. Along the Western Front in Belgium at Flanders Fields, infantry charged on foot from deeply dug trenches into machine gun fire, exploding shells, and even chlorine gas, which choked its victims, and mustard gas, which caused skin burns. The absurdity of asking young men to rush into such an onslaught is unthinkable.
A significant part of my wanting to visit Flanders Fields on that rainy and chilly day was to not only reflect on and feel sorry for the inhumanity inflicted on those unfortunate men, but to wonder what it would have been like for me to face the horrible challenges they did. My seventy years have never come close to war or any conflict that carried with it the risk of death or bodily injury. The stresses and strains of life that we all experience, which in my case were nearly all the result of my own flawed decision making, pale in comparison to the tensions of war.
Looking back to my younger years, I remember the confusion and uncertainty tinged with fear of the possibility of having to fight in the Vietnam War. I was on the young side of the age when unseasoned men were being drafted to fight in that conflict on behalf of the United States. My thinking was quite resolute in that I did not want to participate. The thought of moving to Canada was a serious notion I considered for a while.
My father, a World War II veteran who lost his only brother during that war and who was a proud American, said to me when I was sixteen or seventeen years old that he did not want me to fight in Vietnam. Even he could see the clear pattern of one generation after the next of young men fighting and dying in what seemed like an endless succession of foreign wars. My father’s realization of wanting to resist having his son go to war led to his distancing from the veteran’s organization, The American Legion. This memory is one of the very few where to this day I am grateful for my dad’s love.
So, had I been born in 1898 instead of 1953, and had I been born in Germany, Russia, Britain, France, or Belgium or in the United States at that time, I could very well have been confronted with the imperative that I must viciously fight for my country. I do not doubt I would have felt fear. What I do not know is if the nationalistic propaganda I would have been steadily fed would have trumped my fear.
Would I have felt that my life really amounted to a calling to “defend” my country even if it meant making the ultimate sacrifice? Would I have charged across fields of mud with a bayoneted rifle screaming a battle cry as bullets whizzed by striking down my comrades? Or would I have cowered in the trenches wide-eyed and gulping air as if each gasp were to be my last? Or would I have clung to my last shred of self-determination and committed suicide? I will never know. This deliberation will forever remain open-ended.
During that day at Flanders Fields, I paused at different cemeteries to place my hand on random gravestones. I tried to remain unrestricted and free to notice if I felt any kind of sensation or had any kind of inkling resulting from gently but intentionally touching those stones. At the German cemetery I crouched to place my left hand on a ground-level dark gray stone with the words, “Vier Unbekannte Deutsche Soldaten” etched upon it (translation, “Four Unknown German Soldiers”). I felt only pity. At a British cemetery, I placed my hand on the clean white standing gravestone of R. Porter, of the West Yorkshire Regiment, who died on the 28th of October in 1915 at the age of twenty-two. I was witness to a tragedy.
Toward the end of that day, I was at another British cemetery. The rain had stopped. Sun was breaking through the still thick clouds. A stiff breeze rendered the air from cool to cold. I was starting to feel fatigue from the long day. This time, while standing amidst the rows of white stones, I reached over to rest a hand upon the top of one from behind. I deliberately did not look to see whose stone it was. On this occasion, I felt something else. A ripple of energy coursed gently through my body. I experienced a slight disequilibrium. Was this a quantum or supernatural sensation of sentience, I wondered. Maybe it was just a symptom of not having had much water that day. I still wonder.
The flat green fields of West Flanders.
Now moist and quiet and peaceful.
Near Ypres the land rises.
Once Germans held the high ground.
The British held the city.
Evil descended upon the area.
A half million souls lost
In a steady ugly stalemate.
Numbing.
A waste.
To be human can be severe.
