Introduction
ONCE THERE WAS A WAR: AN INTRODUCTION
ONCE UPON A TIME there was a war, but so long ago and so
shouldered out of the way by other wars and other kinds of wars that even
people who were there are apt to forget. This war that I speak of came after
the plate armor and longbows of Crécy and Agincourt and just before the little
spitting experimental atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I attended a part of that war, you might say
visited it, since I went in the costume of a war correspondent and certainly
did not fight, and it is interesting to me that I do not remember very much
about it. Reading these old reports sent in with excitement at the time brings
back images and emotions completely lost.
Perhaps it is right or even necessary to forget
accidents, and wars are surely accidents to which our species seems prone. If
we could learn from our accidents it might be well to keep the memories alive,
but we do not learn. In ancient Greece it was said that there had to be a war
at least every twenty years because every generation of men had to know what it
was like. With us, we must forget, or we could never indulge in the murderous
nonsense again.
The war I speak of, however, may be memorable
because it was the last of its kind. Our Civil War has been called the last of
the “gentlemen’s wars,” and the so-called Second World War was surely the last
of the long global wars. The next war, if we are so stupid as to let it happen,
will be the last of any kind. There will be no one left to remember anything.
And if that is how stupid we are, we do not, in a biologic sense, deserve
survival. Many other species have disappeared from the earth through errors in mutational
judgment. There is no reason to suppose that we are immune from the immutable
law of nature which says that over-armament, over-ornamentation, and, in most
cases, over-integration are symptoms of coming extinction. Mark Twain in A
Connecticut Yankee uses the horrifying and possible paradox of the victor’s
being killed by the weight of the vanquished dead.
But all this is conjecture, no matter how
possible it may be. The strange thing is that my dim-remembered war has become
as hazy as conjecture. My friend Jack Wagner was in the First World War. His
brother Max was in the Second World War. Jack, in possessive defense of the war
he knew, always referred to it as the Big War, to his brother’s disgust. And of
course the Big War is the war you knew.
