Thoughts About World War I

      More Letters From Paradise
      Thoughts About World War I
I have been reading a lot about WWI lately, and have learned much more than I had known previously. For instance, did you know that during WWI,Britain was drafting men from ages 18 to 40, and then the required number rose from age 15 to 50! And by 1918, half of the British infantry was under age 19! A British soldier in the trenches of France would often only last six weeks before being killed or wounded.A  million young men died, and  Britain was left with a million widows  without men to marry. I remember when I was in the Navy stationed in Panama, a ship full of women from England arrived to transit the canal. They were all going  to Australia or New Zealand to find husbands. This was after WWII. Both wars had stolen their chances to wed and have children.  

I heard today on the radio that it was the anniversary birthday of Mickey Spillane, the crime novel writer. How well I remember him. His first crime novel came out in 1947, and caused a sensation. The title of the  paperback novel was "I the Jury," and had a cover showing a young woman in act of disrobing. My father had a copy of the book and I read it too. I will always remember the final scene when Mike Hammer shoots the girl in the stomach. She ask him" Why?," and he replies "It was easy." Some critics said his books were garbage, but Micky Spillane said that they were "good garbage." He also said that his books were the "chewing gum" of American literature.

But getting back to the subject of the"Great War," Two great books to come out of that war I think, are "Goodby to All That," by Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." I had my students read Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," but I doubt that they could grasp what it was all about. I think that the final scene where Catherine dies, and he walks out into the rain, is one of his best. Students of the war should read the poetry of the war, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sasson,  John McCrae, Robert Service and others. There is a lot to be learned from reading them.

There is a public radio request show here in Honolulu on Sunday morning. Some guy always requests the Kipling poem "Mandalay," as sung by Kenneth McKeller. Fine poem by Kipling, I memorized it in high school. But though the song is good, it omits the part in the poem where a Briitsh soldier talks about how he is treated back in England,and  though he walks with fifty housemaids, beefy faced and grubby, he has a girl back East in a sweeter greener land. A severely edited song, and it is driving me crazy, Cannot the record be broken or lost?

     Aloha
     Grant