Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

 I read this book as part of my WW1&2 reading list and thought it deserved its classic status.  Incidentally, I learned while reading Adam Fergusson’s ‘When Money Dies’ that this book was banned in post WW1 Germany as unpatriotic.  According to George Orwell ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations’ so perhaps something similar applies to war literature.  It was also the case that ‘Death of A Hero’ by Richard Aldington was censored. 

Throughout the book, I was surprised by how poetic it was and how much I enjoyed the prose.  Given that I read an English translation of the original German text, I’m not sure how much of this is down to the original author and how much the translator (A.W.Wheen).  Nonetheless, certain passages, like this one describing taking comfort from the earth, were very moving and well drawn:

“From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us - mostly from the earth.  To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier.  When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; she receives him again and often for ever.

Earth! - Earth! - Earth!” p55

Equally, when writing about observing prisoners of war from a distance when billeted behind the line, the language is both pithy and profound - ”but as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.” (p193)  The prose has a simple and straightforward style but this doesn’t prevent it from being evocative. There were many instances when a phrase or paragraph struck me with particular force.  For example, when writing about the sounds of wounded horses, they are ”wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.” (p62)

The book gave a pithy and unpretentious account of the experiences and emotions of war and battle.  It also describes the brutal psychological after-effects of the experience and it is a theme that’s constantly recurring in one form or another.  

Even in the boredom of endless waiting that trench warfare entails, there is the unrelenting threat of shelling.  Based on this book and others I have read about WW1, this seems to have been extraordinarily heavy and must have wreaked havoc with the soldiers’ nervous systems as well as inflicting huge amounts of physical damage.  The utter helplessness of those shelled is shocking: 

“The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen.  We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty.  Over us, Chance hovers.  If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all;  we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.” p101

Against this backdrop, it seems like the adrenalin and agency of offensive operations or combat might have come as a relief, however counterintuitive that may seem.  The chance to escape the background danger of shelling for circumstances that are probably even more dangerous but, crucially, feel like they have an element of self-determination appears to have been a welcome change.  Equally, Remarque doesn’t write of fury and anger towards the enemy.  Rather it seems something more like a haze of self-preservation, fighting more against the fear of death than against anything like a clear conception of the enemy.

“We have become wild beasts.  We do not fight, we defend ourselves from annihilation…No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged.” p113

This life of constant threat and suffering, combined with extreme privation from comfort and mind-numbing boredom, seems only to have been endurable in a state of constant stimulation.  Living on one's nerves more than one’s wits.  In one sense, it is incredible testimony to the human ability to adapt to prevailing circumstances.  It would seem more natural if a bunch of late teenagers, ripped from quoutidian German life and thrown into the horrors of war, had simply run away or committed suicide.  I’m sure many did those things, but the majority seem to have endured it until they were killed or returned home injured.  They lived on a mixture of comradery, nervous stimulation and denial.  Even those who survived the horror cannot be said to have escaped unscathed or, perhaps, even to be counted among the lucky.  

“We forget nothing really.  But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once.  If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago.  I soon found out this much: - terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; - but it kills, if a man thinks about it.” p138

In these extraordinarily strained circumstances, the soldiers seek out and scavenge what little comfort they can.  Mostly, they take it from the fact that others around them are experiencing the same thing.  The solidarity they feel with their peers is described with such intensity, perhaps because of the extremity of their circumstances, perhaps because it is all they have.  As with their ability to adapt and survive in unimaginable conditions, it spoke to me about something fundamentally social in the human condition.  That people can endure so much and place themselves in such danger out of some sense of ‘esprit de corps’.  I found the following passage especially poignant and beautiful:

“These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed.  They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, the most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.

I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; - I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.”  p212

The rare moments when the soldiers enjoy something that would be recognisable as pleasurable in civilian life are savoured and remembered with intense relish.  Paul and Kat’s illicit goose roasting is probably the best example (pp 91-97) and it makes a stark juxtaposition with the tone and atmosphere of the rest of the book, as it must have done in the soldiers' lives at the front.  A darker, but equally memorable, example of the men enjoying themselves is the story of how they beat up the officer Himmelstross.  This officer had enjoyed abusing them during their training at the barracks and the men take their revenge lustily when he comes to the front (pp45-50).  These bursts of prohibited pleasure amidst the suffering bind the men even closer together and the memories sustain them through the harsher times.  The feast of two suckling pigs the men have while billeted in a village (Chapter 10) is of a similar type albeit it is interrupted by shelling.  Like the comradery between the men, it seems like their pleasurable experiences are intensified by the horrendous circumstances.

There’s a good deal of acerbic criticism in the book and not just for commanding officers who give the men stupid orders or abuse them.  Their former school teacher Kantorek, who uses nationalist and patriotic arguments to persuade the school leavers to sign up for service, is a prominent symbol of those who encouraged the war and its destruction of youth without personally exposing themselves to its horrors.  Remarque seems to recognise that such feelings were common and even well intended around this time in Germany, but it doesn’t seem to diminish his anger.

“There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best - in a way that cost them nothing.” p12

Surprisingly, another group who are criticised are the French women the men meet and sleep with while billeted amongst civilians in chapter 7.  Paul finds the experience almost too much of a contrast with their normal life to bear and describes his “desires as strangely compounded of yearning and misery” (p149).  The adventure leaves him feeling unhappy and he is ultimately angry with his lover when he returns the next night and tells her he may not see her again because he is going on leave.  Initially, he is almost afraid to tell her but when he does he despises her cool response.  “If I were going up to the front, then she would have called me “pauvre garcon”; but merely going on leave - she does not want to hear about that, that is not nearly so interesting”.  May she go to the devil with her chattering talk.” (p153)  Here, I see a mixture of the kind of disgust Paul feels for people like Kantorek alongside his hatred of the fetishisation of war, which he experiences while on leave.  In this instance, he is being fetishised himself - the soldier as an object of sexual desire.  It reminded me of the extremely acerbic treatment women receive in parts of ‘Death of A Hero’.  Aldington rails against the women who give white roses to men of fighting age who they encounter in civilian life to brand them cowards.  This is very similar to Kantorek.  Worse still, these same women, who will never experience the horrors of war themselves, not only encourage men to go but then lust after and lionise those who do.  I think I remember him asking why women want to bear the children of the murderers with the most blood on their hands!  Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic outlook and the women are more impressed by the bravery of men who go to war.  However, I can still follow the logic of the point he’s making.  I suppose the extremities of the soldiers’ experience would create all sorts of resentful emotions, perhaps especially about those who’d managed to avoid their fate but still encouraged it.

Doctors and nurses in general, and perhaps especially during a war, are normally depicted as more or less saintly individuals.  However, in this book, as is probably the case in life, they are a far more mixed bunch.  In chapter 10, when Paul gets hit with shrapnel and goes through the medical system, he tells of sadistic surgeons persuading young soldiers into unnecessary operations which leave them crippled and nuns who keep the convalescents awake with noisy prayers!  This helped me form a more realistic picture of the variety of characters involved in the war and not just to see them all as the ‘war heroes’ nationalist nostalgia wants us to believe they were. 

A theme which is familiar from ‘Death of A Hero’ is the feeling of no longer fitting in when back on leave.  It’s as if the experience of the front has changed or broken the men so irrevocably that they can no longer function in civilian society.  They walk through worlds they used to know, enjoy and love in a kind of daze of half comprehension.  The scenes and people are recognisable from their past but they no longer understand them and even dislike them.  It’s as if the war has opened up a gulf between them and the civilian world that they can look across but cannot traverse.

“But now I see that I have been crushed without knowing it.  I find I do not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world.  Some of these people ask questions, some ask no questions, but one can see that the latter are proud of themselves for their silence; they often say with a wise air that these things cannot be talked about.  They plume themselves on it.

I prefer to be alone, so that no one troubles me.  For they all come back to the same thing, how badly it goes and how well it goes; one thinks it is this way, another that; and yet they are always absorbed in the things that go to make up their existence.  Formerly I lived in just the same way myself, but now I feel no contact here.

They talk too much for me.  They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend.  I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this.  They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes that is it - they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.” p168-169

One way of interpreting this dazed detachment is as a form of psychological self-preservation.  The ordeal of the war is too brutal to be considered or understood in a civilian context, or perhaps in any context at all.  The men must avoid what might be too damaging to confront head on.  But like the French girls who indirectly glorify the suffering and senselessness of war, Remarque points out how offensive this can be to those who have lived through it.  Of course, during a war, the war itself is certain to be a major topic of conversation in the civilian world.  However, for a returning soldier this could amount to a near constant reminder of everything he’s trying to forget.  Yet people focus on it continually in a way he finds impossible to bear or comprehend:

 

“My mother is the only one who asks no questions.  Not so my father.  He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him.  There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it.  I realise he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words.  I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.  What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?” p165

Another major theme of the book was a depiction of war as the thief of youth.  The men enrol in their late teens and early twenties with all the enthusiasm for life, hopes and dreams normally associated with that age.  The experience of war crushes their youthful idealism and leaves them cynical:

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.  I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.  I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.  And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me.  What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account?  What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing; - it was our first calling in life.  Our knowledge of life is limited to death.  What will happen afterwards?  And what shall come out of us?” p263-4

In a way which is redolent of Paul’s experience of not fitting into civilian life when back on leave, the men also talk about how the war has left them mistrustful of the world.  There is a sense in which they long to return to it but, because the changes the war has brought about are so profound, are no longer able.  War has ruined them, their lives and their ability to enjoy them.  It is all the more tragic because they are so young.  In this moving passage, Paul chats with Albert about their hope and fears for ‘peace-time’:

 

“When I think about it, Albert,” I say after a while rolling over on my back, “when I hear the word ‘peace-time’, it goes to my head: and if it really came, I think I would do some unimaginable thing - something, you know, that it’s worth having lain here in the muck for.  But I can’t even imagine anything.  All I do know is that this business about professions and studies and salaries and so on - it makes me sick, it is and always was disgusting.  I don’t see anything at all, Albert.”

All at once everything seems to me confused and hopeless…. 

Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”

He is right. We are not youth any longer.  We don’t want to take the world by storm.  We are fleeing.  We fly from ourselves.  From our life.” p87

In a more general sense, the war is also portrayed as a laying bare of man’s fundamental cruel and violent nature.  It may be that this plays a major part in robbing the men of their youth.  Such cynicism usually takes longer to set in during life.  However, the war forces them to face the plain fact of man’s most brutal and destructive instincts, removing the thin veneer that usually masks them in society.

 

“For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his nature.  And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too.  The things are precisely the same.  In himself man is essentially a beast , only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.” p43-44

Paul’s experiences after his injury also have a profound effect on him and he struggles to comprehend how it can be permitted.  The contrast between normal society and war is hard to reconcile.  How can the brutality of war be tolerated, and even encouraged, by a society whose stated ideals are at such odds with it?  This seems to play a part in the moral and psychological confusion the book portrays so vividly.

“A man cannot realise that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round.  And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia.  How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible.  It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands.  A hospital alone shows what war is.” p263

I really enjoyed reading this book and felt it was very well written and constructed.  The narrative and characters are believable and there’s no attempt to overplay the narrative.  The prose was clear and matter of fact with some beautiful, poetic passages.  I would thoroughly recommend it as a moving, accessible account of the war.  This is probably why it’s a classic!

Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads

This was chosen by a book club I’m a member of, but I would’ve also happily read it of my own accord.  I think I’ve read ‘The Corrections’ and ‘Freedom’ by this author, but don’t seem to have made any notes.  What little I can remember is of vivid characters and flowing prose with a tendency towards loquaciousness and a pretentious habit of using long words.  At its best, it can be totally enthralling and easy to consume in large quantities, with the exception of some clunky vocab.  I would say this book outperformed these positive half-remembrances for the first few hundred pages and then drastically underperformed them later on.  

The book isn’t chronological and we flit back and forth from the past to the ‘present’ day, which plays out over a few years in the early 1970s.  The prose has largely lost Franzen’s former florid vocabulary and is highly readable.  In a way, it’s hypnotic and soothing.  There’s rarely a clunky sentence, with the exception of sex scenes that are littered with references to ‘nether parts’ and other atrocities.  As such, it’s easy to gobble down quickly; albeit in a way that half lulls you to sleep.  When I managed to stay more awake, I realised it is full of more or less unnecessary stuff, like a couple of pages on how Christianity spread around Europe or a couple of pages on good carsalemanship.  It also struck me as a different form of showing off; as opposed to using vocabulary, he uses mansplaining subjects to the reader regardless of whether they’re relevant to the story or not. 

I also felt this way about certain parts of the narrative that seemed to have been thrown in incongruently. Taken individually, it doesn’t seem to matter but taken cumulatively it feels indulgent and was probably one of the reasons I felt the book was too long.  I think this book could have used some severe editing. Maybe Franzen’s editors feel like he is such a big deal now it’s hard to cut stuff from his drafts or criticise his ideas.   At the end of this review there’s a brief precis that attempts to detail the main narratives of the book. It leaves a few things out but not much and looking back I am staggered to think that this story took more than 600 pages to describe.

 

The characters were engaging and I also liked the depiction of small town 60/70s America and found it believable.  The main themes I could detect were, first, an assessment of Christianity as a very strong motivating force in America during this time.  Franzen seems to paint it in mixed colours as it is often the motivation for people to do good things but also seems to be the cause of a lot of suffering and bad decisions.  Adultery and sexual desire are also fairly readily identifiable themes, which are treated in an even handed and credible way.  These positives aside, I found it quite hard to get really excited about the book.  It draws you along as a reader, largely on the early strength of the characters, the readable prose and the believable depiction of the world it describes.  However, just when you’re really enjoying it and empathising with the characters, the plot turns into something from a soap opera.  This is especially the case in the second half, where hysterical and hyperbolic moments abound.  

The more action there was in the book, the less I liked it.  Nothing much really dramatic happens in the first third or half of the book, although there are references back to Marion’s extremely dramatic past.  It was during this part of the book I felt really engaged with the characters, Russ and Perry especially, and I felt they were really well drawn.  Once the story shifts to Arizona, things seem to get overblown and out of control.  There’s too much action and the story takes on a rushed feeling, like the author can’t wait to finish or is trying to cram as many ideas and plot lines into it as possible.  The end of the book is less frantic but has a similarly rushed feeling of tying up loose ends with minimal effort.  After the narrative orgy of Arizona, we dash through a brief summary of the lives of each of the main protagonists.  It makes for quite a jarring juxtaposition with the more placid pacing of earlier chapters and their quotidian feel.  Overall, it gave the book a highly uneven feeling and I didn’t care for the second half at all.  

Delusions of grandeur abound in this book’s conception.  It was originally a humbly entitled “super novel” of three parts, each 25 years apart.  However, the author decided that would be of insufficient scale to encapsulate the scope of his vision and expanded it into a trilogy!  To make matters worse, he also chose to name the trilogy “The Key To All Mythologies”, a reference to the Rev Casaubon’s doomed magnum opus from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch”.  In fairness to Franzen, he says it's a joke about starting such a long project in his 60s but I think it takes a lot of self belief to draw comparisons between yourself and a book like ‘Middlemarch’.  

Each time I read ‘Middlemarch’, I feel like it’s a masterpiece and contains a timeless, lucid depiction of humanity.  On finishing this, I felt like I had just binge watched an average soap opera.  For this reason, I think inviting comparison with such an amazing novel is a dangerous game for Franzen and one he can only lose from!  Reading Eliot is like having a guided tour around humanity by someone who’s mastered its mysterious complexity.  Reading Franzen is like the unedited notes of someone who’s good at describing scenes and characters and has mastered the art of suspenseful narratives to link them together.  Occasionally, he lights on something great but the approach is so long-winded and hit-or-miss that the overall effect falls far short of the profundity of Eliot.  Franzen’s plots are more overblown and less emotionally astute as well.

In the end, I found a promising start deteriorated into a disappointing ending.  I’m not sure I would recommend this book or read any more of the trilogy but it certainly had some strong points.

NARRATIVE SUMMARY

A man, Russ, grows up in a weird, insular Mennonnite community.  He is excused from military service in WW2 because of his religious beliefs and goes to work on tribal reservation in Arizona with the Army.  Here, he forms a bond with some Native Americans and decides he won’t go back to his family.  After military service he moves to a city, joins a slightly more normal church and meets a young, fervently Christian woman (Marion) among the congregation.  They fall in love and get married, have four children and the husband pursues a career as a priest while the wife looks after the home and children in small town Illinois.  

What he doesn’t know is that his fervently Christian wife has a dark past, including a father who committed suicide and a mother who disowned her in the aftermath. Following the disintegration of her family, she moves to LA to become an actress, which fails, and then has an adulterous relationship with a car salesman who gets her pregnant.  As if that wasn’t enough, her obsession with the car salesman makes her mentally unstable. She loses her job and then is taken advantage of by a skeevy landlord who drugs and sexually abuses her in exchange for an abortion.  Finally she ends up in a mental hospital after being picked up by the police, while drugged, deranged and walking the streets. She meets Russ while living with her uncle after rehab.

We join the story in the early 1970s as the family begins to fray around the edges and then tear apart.  Russ is working as an assistant minister, warring with the hip, young leader of the church youth group, Rick, and lusting after a young widow in his congregation.  Marion is upset about her weight, secretly in therapy and about to revisit the extreme trauma of her youth.  

Child 1, Clem, is away at university and has a girlfriend for the first time.  He is having sex, also for the first time, and he will go on to rebel against his father and his pacificist principles by quitting university and trying to enroll in military service to go to Vietnam.  

In the past, Clem had been close to Child 2, Becky, but they eventually fall out over Becky’s choice of boyfriend.  Becky is a pretty, popular cheerleader but also a bit of a god botherer and muddles along between these two paths before getting a semi-god bothering, musician boyfriend, having a child, moving out and rejecting her parents over their infatuation with Child 3.  

Child 3, Perry, is painted as a precocious and naughty boy for drinking and taking drugs.  He gets hooked on coke and burns down a farm building on a church youth group trip to Arizona, back where Russ first met the Indians and continues to go for annual church buildathons.  This incident lands Perry in juvie / a rehab that his parents can scarcely afford.  It also turns out he has been stealing money from his siblings to fund his drug habit.  This prompts the parents to use the money Child 2  inherited from her dead aunt, Marion’s sister, and is one of the reasons why Becky resents Perry, as she feels he is overindulged.  

Counterintuitively, Perry’s misdemeanours rekindle the parents' love.  They continue as a couple in spite of the fact that Russ admits to sleeping with the young widow in Arizona, which represents the geographical hot spot where most of the storylines climax.  Child 4, Judson, is pretty young during all this and doesn’t play a major role.  We leave the family with Clem having failed to get into the army but still estranged from his parents.  Becky is living with her partner and child but rejecting her parents.  

Richard Aldington - Death Of A Hero

I chose this book as part of my WWI and WWII reading list and knew absolutely nothing about it before reading it except that it was about one of the world wars!  I think I must have got some of the reading list from another book.  I suspect it was Edward Thorp’s ‘A Man For All Markets’.

The early tone of the book is so acerbic and mocking it takes a while to get used to.  The hero, George Winterbourne, is immediately presented as a rather unflattering suicide in WW2 and I initially thought the title might be in some way sarcastic.  His family history, childhood and adolescence are then recounted by an unnamed narrator, a fellow WW2 soldier with whom George had seemingly discussed these events.  These episodes are filled with such scorn and derision I began to wonder if there was going to be anything the narrator didn’t dislike and treat with disdain.  The prose’s main characteristic is anger and its objects of attack are Imperial Britain, the public school system, the ‘kicked back side of the empire’, society and its strange habits.  This constitutes the first book.

The second book is about George’s attempts to be an artist in London and his love affairs while he is living there.  Sexually it is quite a liberated book and I somehow hadn’t placed Freudian inspired open relationships in pre-WW1 England.  The narrator is critical of conventional attitudes to relationships and sex.  This aspect is probably semi-autobiographical and, like many of the scenes and experiences, could be from the author's life.

The language and style are quite alien and it feels dated to read.  There are lots of strange phrases like ‘toadying’ and an assumed fluency in Classical Mythology, French, Latin and all sorts of other things that don’t feature so heavily in the modern consciousness but seemingly did amongst certain classes in the early 20th Century.  A positive interpretation of this could be that the book is historically accurate.  Unscientific though it is, the book had a feel of authenticity about its scenes, characters, internal monologues and goings-on.  

The third book is where the prose really loses its angry, acerbic tone and changes to one of gravity as it relates scenes of heartbreaking exhaustion and deprivation.  As well as the many harrowing descriptions of violent and bloody trench warfare, perhaps equally distressing is George’s return on leave to London.  The contrast between before and after the war is stark.  It is a distressingly bleak and unresolvable picture of a broken man.  Discombobulated and unable to function in a society that simultaneously glorifies and wants to forget about the war, he wanders the embankment emptied of homelessness by the war and wonders how a government can find £5m a day to fight the Germans during war but couldn’t find any money to help the homeless during peace.  Unaccustomed to anything but snatches of sleep during shelling and material discomfort he struggles to adapt to the world he left behind, seemingly changed, or broken, irrevocably. I found the poem at the end very moving after the emotional battering I had taken in Book 3!

“Eleven years after the fall of Troy 

We, the old men - some of us nearly forty -

Met and talked on the sunny rampart

Over our wine, while the lizards scuttled 

In dusty grass, and the crickets chirred.

Some bared their wounds;

Some spoke of the thirst, dry in the throat,

And the heart-beat, in the din of battle;

Some spoke of intolerable sufferings,

The brightness gone from their eyes

And the grey already thick in their hair.

And I sat apart 

From the garrulous talk and old memories,

And I heard a boy of twenty

Say petulantly to a girl, seizing her arm:

“Oh, come away; why do you stand there 

Listening open-mouthed to the talk of old men?

Haven’t you heard enough of Troy and Achilles?

Why should they bore us for ever

With an old quarrel and the names of dead men

We never knew, and dull forgotten battles?”

And he drew her away,

And she looked back and laughed

As he spoke more contempt of us,

Being now out of hearing.

And I thought of the graves of the desolate Troy

And the beauty of many young men now dust,

And the long agony, and how useless it all was.

And the talk still clashed about me

Like the meeting of blade and blade.

And as they two moved further away 

He put an arm about her, and kissed her;

And afterwards I heard their gay distant laughter.

And I looked at the hollow cheeks 

And the weary eyes and the grey-streaked heads

Of the old men - nearly forty - about me;

And I too walked away

In an agony of helpless grief and pity.”

I started out thinking this was an average and overblown book but by the end I thought it was both beautiful and insightful.  It was a heartbreaking description of the chaos that war can wreak on a single human life.  Its brutality seems so at odds with the sentient humanity of an individual like George, it was unbelievably sad to read about his psychological demise and suicide.  In the end the angry, sardonic tone of the first two books seems more understandable given the kind of trauma the narrator must have endured.  He too knew George, and countless others, and would have experienced first hand what a senseless destruction of life it all was.  

Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of A Fox Hunting Man

I chose to read this as a prelude to ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’, which is part of my WW1&2 reading list.  This is the first part of a trilogy, of which ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’ is the second installment and ‘Sherston’s Progress’ the third.  It’s indicative of the kind of reticent emotional life upper class Englishmen were living around the time of the wars that Sassoon choses to write his first volume of memoir with a specific focus on fox hunting.  Having safely assured his audience that no ghastly subjects like feelings, emotions or sexual desires will rear their ugly heads, Sassoon waxes lyrical about the joys of village cricket and fox hunting.  In some ways, it struck me as a bit absurd.  However, in its best parts, it also had a meditative, golden quality of people and places warmly remembered. 

As far as friends or companions go, he only really mentions his groom, Dean, and a friend Stephen.  He seems to be on friendly terms with the people he meets from school at point to point races and hunting but, for the most part, he’s a very solitary figure living a sleepy village existence with his old aunt.  He travels quite large distances by train or bicycle in order to go hunting as a young boy.  He pines to live in a neighbourhood where hunting is more active and when he does manage to leave, seems to enjoy life more.  His aunt is in agreement about this, and is said to have bemoaned the situation of such an active boy in such a decidedly quiet milieu.  

For a book purporting to be a memoir, it’s strange that there’s scarcely a mention of his immediate family in the entire book except to say his parents separated when he was 4.  Wikipedia relates that his father later died when he was around 9, which doesn’t get a mention.  His mother lived until 1947 (when Sassoon was 60ish) but is never mentioned, nor are his two brothers.  This all gives the impression that family life was not happy and, therefore, should not be discussed.  It’s terribly bad form to bring up topics that aren’t jolly, don’t you know old bean?  It's rather strange to have such silence on subjects like family but Sassoon bashes on undaunted by the fact that the only relationships where he seems willing to discuss his feelings are those with servants or horses!  “Aunt Evelyn”, the woman he lives with while not at school, does feature on occasion but always in a kind of Bertie Wooster and Aunt Agatha “aged relative” sort of way.  Sassoon does an admirable job of portraying her as a warm, kind woman.  However, he describes their relationship in such a distant way it really is almost like a “Jeeves and Wooster” character, only not as amusing.

When he’s not at school, another topic that goes almost completely untouched, Sassoon lives with his aunt and subsists on an independent income that allows him to do some hunting and play village cricket.  In many passages he seems to indicate that he’s not that rich, but the reality seems quite the contrary.  He goes to Cambridge for a couple of years, which also goes unremarked upon, and leaves without a degree to take up hunting in earnest.  This kind of indifference to his career struck me as a privilege only a rich person could afford.  His neglect of his career rather endeared him to me, with the exception of the fact that I don't like hunting.  

A subject that does receive major attention is the horses he buys and sells.   I found it telling that there is more information about the first hunting horse he buys than there is about any human being.  His relationship with his groom, who also acts as his mentor in hunting matters, also receives voluminous coverage.  The groom seems to be one of his major companions in early teenage life and tells a lot of stories from the various hunts, cricket matches and point-to-point races he’s involved with.  The image I was left with from his recollections of early life was of a sad, lonely boy estranged from his family with plenty of money but only a servant as a friend.

As he becomes more proficient in hunting, he graduates to riding with his old school friend, Stephen, who lives nearby in an area where they hunt more intensively.  This is one of two relationships that seem especially close in the book, although obviously Sassoon would never mention this himself.  There are clues, like describing people he especially likes in glowing terms as sportsmen and making more frequent reference to them, but, on the whole, he seems more comfortable reserving feelings of affection for horses or servants.  One inkling of a closer relationship comes when the war starts and Sassoon shows one of his fellow soldiers a photo of Stephen he carries with him, which struck me as an odd thing to do if Stephen really were just a hunting friend.  The other ‘special friend’ Sassoon seems to make is Denis, who is master of the hunt for a couple of years near where Stephen lives and employs Sassoon as some kind of assistant.  When he moves to a bigger hunt, he takes Sassoon with him and the two spend lots of time together working, living and hunting but never revealing anything deeper about their relationship.  In both of these cases, I felt there may have been more to the relationship but Sassoon seems determined to only write about coverts, hounds, ‘chicken hearted skirters’ and ‘hard bitten sportsmen’ and never writes an emotional line in the entire book.

On the whole, I found this book quite boring and remarkably unforthcoming for a memoir.  In this sense, I suppose it’s a good example of the buttoned-up, repressed style of operation that was in fashion for men of this time and social class.  He wants to present himself as ‘a hard riding swell’ and a gentleman, but is totally disinterested in opening up in any meaningful way.  The book gives a fair representation of the author’s love of hunting, although it seems a very class conscious and stuffy world.  It was at its best recalling idyllic pastoral scenes with a faintly mournful tone, which is probably given more context in the second book of the trilogy, ‘Memoirs of An Infantry Officer’.  My favourite quote was,

“It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of spring was knocking at my heart.” (p101)

Maybe he writes such an idyllic, nothing-could-be-jollier type of nostalgia because he wants to draw a stark contrast with the war later on.  Maybe he does it because that’s the way ‘officer and a gentleman’ type WW1 British public schoolboys go about talking about their lives.  Namely, by fastidiously avoiding the main events of their lives and focussing predominately on fox hunting, jolly hockey sticks and depicting himself as the freshest of all country bumpkins.  

Taken on its own, I found it a rather strange little book of nostalgia.  It’s well drawn in places but suffers for simultaneously attempting to be personal while staunchly refusing to broach any feelings more intimate than, ‘I loved hunting and found it immensely good fun’, which, in the final analysis, is not frightfully illuminating stuff! 

Adam Fergusson - When Money Dies

 Originally published in 1975, The Death of Money covers hyperinflation in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s.  I chose to read this book as I became increasingly worried about ‘modern monetary theory’ in 2021.  This period of low interest rates and bond, and even equity, buying by central banks to stimulate the economy began after the global recession and despicable bank bailouts of 2008.  Many, including me, speculated that this would create inflation and this book, first published in the 1970s, was re-published around 2008-10.  Inflation actually remained remarkably low, undershooting the US / UK central bank target of 2%, for most of this period.  This book was also the beginning of a reading project about WWI, the intervening period and WW2.

Germany funded WW1 using debt in the form of war bonds, which caused its currency to weaken even before hyperinflation.  After Germany lost the war, and was burdened with huge reparations to be paid in hard currency, money printing began in earnest.  Not having been invaded, Germany still had large amounts of industrial infrastructure intact after the war ended and, with the help of a weakening currency, began to undergo an export boom.  The stock market also boomed.  This confused Germany’s leadership, who thought the economy needed to be stimulated in order to meet reparations payments. The central bankers refused to raise interest rates for this reason and even argued it would make inflation worse by raising the cost of capital.  Instead, all monetary problems were solved by printing money.  However, as the mark weakened and weakened against its foreign counterparts, officials thought that it was the strength of foreign currency that was causing the problem rather than inflation or devaluation of their own.  As Fergusson writes,

“That the government and the Reichsbank were dominated by the notion that a huge ‘passive’ balance of payments made constant devaluation inevitable hardly seems sufficient explanation of their total, blind refusal to connect the mark’s depreciation with the money supply…the budgeting deficits of the Reich and states alike were considered by writers and politicians ‘not the cause, but the consequence of the external depreciation of the mark’.  (p251)

The situation continued to deteriorate as French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr to guarantee payment of reparations in goods like coal.  The German government provided financial support to domestic resistance in this region, again by printing money.  Thus the  Reichsbank ended up in a situation where it was printing money to buy foreign currency to pay reparations, printing money to fund projects and finance entrepreneurs to bolster the economy and printing money to pay for striking workers in the occupied territory.  All this left the country awash with worthless paper money.  However, the continued printing helped political and commercial interests, in the short term, and so it went on:  

“It remains so that once an inflation is well under way (as Schmolders has it) ‘it develops a powerful lobby that has no interest in rational arguments’.  This was as true for Austria and Hungary as for Germany.” (p253)

In a similar vein, Lord D’Abernon, British ambassador to Germany at the time, remarked, “Inflation is like a drug in more ways than one… It is fatal in the end but it gets its votaries over many difficult moments.”

Fergusson rejects any suggestion of scheming or Machiavellianism on the part of the government or the Reichsbank and sees these institutions as overwhelmed by their circumstances and the enormity of their difficulties:

“In practice, inflation proved no means of escaping foreign obligations except so far as it contributed to the economic collapse of 1932 which wrecked the reparations programme for good.  

The Reichsbank’s display of naivete in its credit policies of 1922 and 1923 should finally dispel any suspicions of financial Machiavellianism on the part of Havenstein and his associates.  They staunchly denied that higher discount rates would moderate the inflation and, on the contrary, opined that they would merely raise the cost of production and push up prices further.  Loudly as they later asserted that these inexplicably cheap credits were given principally for ‘profitable’ projects, the favoured firms who benefited from this largesse turned the money to their best advantage - either by turning it into material assets or into foreign currency, or simply using it to speculate against the mark and drive it downwards.  The only financial conditions which Havenstein understood were those which prevailed before 1914” (p252)

The government was trying to keep the country stable and keep up payments on an impossible schedule of reparations.  Commercial interests were trying to maintain, or even increase, the value of their own interests using the government and the central bank as a source of cheap credit to buy assets or even speculate against the mark, the exact opposite of what politicians and central bankers wanted.  As such, the country blundered along towards hyper-inflation and eventual stabilisation in 1923.  Even though it seems perfectly obvious in hindsight, it’s noteworthy that neither one of the government, monetary institutions nor the general public had much interest in tackling inflation as it occurred.

The biggest losers from this situation appear to be the middle classes and retirees.  Many had fixed pensions or other types of annuities, or had invested in war bonds or other fixed income assets that paid a set number of marks.  These rapidly lost all value during the early 1920s.  Meanwhile other asset owners, and especially manufacturers, initially benefited from the weakening of the currency and the subsequent export boom as foreigners flocked to buy things cheaply.  Likewise, initially unionised workers could demand pay rises by threatening to strike.   The middle class and the unorganised labour force felt the pinch severely as the cost of living soared and their wages failed to rise enough to keep pace.  As the situation deteriorated, a more general, and perhaps far greater loss took place - that of what could loosely be called ‘societal principles’.  As the rules of preexisting order crumbled around them, citizens did whatever it took to survive:

“There were few in any class of society who were not infected by, or prey to, the pervasive soul-destroying influence of the constant erosion of capital or earnings and uncertainty about the future.  From tax-evasion, food hoarding, currency speculation, or illegal exchange transactions - all crimes against the State, each of which to a greater or lesser degree became for individuals a matter of survival - it was a short step to breaching one of the other of the Ten Commandments.  Whereas the lower classes with the further goad of unemployment might turn to theft and similar crimes (the figures up by almost 50% in 1923 over 1913 and 1925) or to prostitution, the middle and upper classes under a different kind of strain would resort to graft and fraud, both bribing and bribable.” (p236)

The rising tide of money had covered many financial indiscretions and when it was withdrawn, scandals abounded.   Some of the more noteworthy figures involved in scandals were Barmat (p238), Kutisker, Jacob Michael and the Shlarek brothers.  Many of these people were Jewish; hyperinflation was a period when antisemitism became more intense.  After stabilisation, many high ranking government and bank officials were found to have been taking bribes in exchange for credit.  More generally, the receding tide of credit uncovered those who’d been swimming naked:

  

“Stabilisation had ended the period when entrepreneurs could borrow as much as they wished at the expense of everyone else.  A vast number of enterprises, established or expanded during monetary plenty, rapidly became unproductive when capital grew short.” (p228)

Attempts were made to reevaluate mortgage and government debt, the latter at 2.5% of face value and that only after reparations had been paid (chp 14). Even though the general losses are inestimable, some indication of the monetary devastation that had occurred emerged.

“The seal of permanence had been put on the people’s losses; as Bresciani-Turroni described it, ‘the vastest expropriation of some classes of society that has ever been effected in time of peace’. (p207)

The monetary fiction was over, and German society lay in a sickly state that it would not recover from for decades:

“With inflation alone, noted Gunter Schmolders, can a government extinguish debt without repayment, or wage war and engage in other non-profitable activities on a large scale:  it is still not recognised as a tax by the taxpayer.” (p249)

Another important consequence of the inflation was political radicalisation.  Some parts of German society still felt that the loss of WW1 had been a capitulation by politicians and that the army would’ve won the war if it had been given a fair chance.  These same factions opposed reparations as a gross injustice.  The appointment of President von Hindenburg (1925-34), a former general and war hero, could be seen as an example of this mindset.  Another could be the banning of “All Quiet On The Western Front” as unpatriotic.  After the inflation, when many people had lost everything, the rules of what had been known as ‘normal’ society had evaporated and antisemitism was on the rise. The country was highly unstable.  

“The population is ripe,” Joseph Addison wrote home to Alexander Cadogan (both British diplomats) “to accept any system of firmness or for any man who appears to know what he wants and issues commands in a loud, bold voice.”  Addison had another significant point to make:

“Economic distress is leading the people to be much more amenable to authority as representing the only hope of salvation from the present state of affairs.  Unemployment is taking the gilt off the gingerbread of democracy, while the working classes realise that striking is useless since nothing would be more welcome to employers.” (p188-9)

Fergusson writes that:

“In German minds democracy and Republicanism had become so associated with the financial, social and political disorder as to render any alternatives preferable when disorder threatened again…” (p248)

And, assessing the condition of the German people, concludes elsewhere: 

“They had little enthusiasm left for democracy, and were themselves moving towards authoritarianism through sheer weariness of spirit and an almost complete indifference to anything except their own lack of material comforts.” (p189)

Such was the downtrodden state of the vast majority of Germans, a narrative that squarely blamed foreign imposed reparations and the preceding government while promising some degree of material security and the restoration of national pride was a very appealing one.  And those not polarized towards Hitler and the right went towards the Russia-backed revolutionary left, which was scarcely less destabilising in terms of the effect it would have had on foreign politics if it came to power. 

“It is thus not astonishing that there are in this country great numbers of ordinary mankind - excellent fathers and husbands of families - who can think of foreign politics only in terms of war.” (p245) Lord D’Abernon 

All this made me wonder if ‘modern monetary theory’ will eventually lead to disastrous consequences like hyperinflation and societal collapse.  It certainly seems like a loss of faith in money can have extreme outcomes.  In the modern world, there doesn’t seem to be a direct equivalent to reparations.  On the other hand, the refusal to raise interest rates, even in the face of increasingly buoyant markets and economies, and the huge amount of cheap credit available today both seem similar.  Perhaps central bankers are overconfident about their ability to finely control inflation and the economy.  I wonder if they’re unwittingly enacting Lenin’s famous quote - "the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency."  When inflation rises, it may become very hard to control.  Currently, central bankers say they will target an average of 2%.  So if it has been lower for a long period, it can afford to be higher for a few quarters or years.  However, it seems dangerous to me to have negative real interest rates for so long.  Such heavy manipulation of the bond market by central bankers and the seeming necessity for easy credit conditions to keep the party going are both highly worrisome as well. 

This was a good and thoroughly researched book with lots of interesting vignettes.  The book relies heavily on contemporary British political and diplomatic papers relating to Germany.  It shows its age a bit in the academic language and tone. I found it a bit lacking in terms of a clearly sketched overview of the period it deals with along the lines of the ‘Epilogue’ chapter that does exactly that for the period directly after the inflation.  It also wasn’t very detailed in its explanations of the technical aspects of monetary policy and central bank discounting.  In fairness, it is a general account and not a technical one.  The book is well indexed and footnoted and makes frequent reference to Bresciani-Turroni’s ‘The Economics of Inflation’, so perhaps that is the place to turn!  

NOTES

P195 - point about inverse of Gresham's law

Andrea Pirlo & Alessandro Alciato - I Think Therefore I Play

 This was a fun 150 pages of war stories and anecdotes.  Written informally and littered with average jokes, Pirlo clearly wants to give the impression he’s a laid back guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

He loves playing for Italy, taking the piss out of Rino Gattuso for being stupid and playing PlayStation against Alessandro Nesta.  He complains about Simone Inzaghi’s infantile diet, plain spaghetti and baby biscuits, and his pre-match ritual of going for several shits and stinking out the dressing room.  He’s still haunted by the 2005 Champions League final when AC Milan squandered a 3-0 lead and lost on penalties to Liverpool.  He modelled his iconic free kick technique on the Brazilian Juninho Pernambucano and hoped to be the all time top scorer of freekicks in Serie A history.  An internet search reveals he came up four short of Sinisa Mihajlovic’s record of 28.  He’s a big fan of Antonio Conte, his coach at Juve, and is full of praise for the owners of the two clubs he played the most games for - Silvio Berlosconi (AC Milan) and Andrea Agnelli (Juventus).  

Aside from some great stories and a lot of not-so-great jokes, Pirlo has a lot of opinions and presents himself as something of a thinker. 

“I know how to think…Generally speaking, I reckon I’m a fairly switched on guy and I’m not ashamed to express it, defend it and, where necessary, shout it from the rooftops.” (p143) 

On the basis of this book, I’d say the jury was still out!  Among his better judgements is a prescient argument for introducing video technology, the omission of which he rightly claims is very unfair on referees.  This book was published in 2013 and it was duly introduced in the biggest European leagues between 2017-19.  

However, some sections make his thinking look confused.  He complains about being man-marked and says it goes against the spirit of football, which seems somewhat self-interested, to say the least.  He also makes the unsubstantiated claim that Deportivo La Coruna’s players might have been on drugs during the 2004 Champions League quarter final when they beat AC Milan 4-0 to overturn a 1-4 defeat in the first leg.  Generally, he seems admirably anti-racist and goes out of his way to defend Mario Balotelli.  However, he also gives a rather wooly exposition on how racist incidents should be handled when talking about Kevin-Prince Boateng’s decision to leave the pitch in the face of racist abuse.

“If one of my team-mates was a victim of intolerance and refused to carry on playing.  I’d go along with his wishes and those of the rest of the team.  It would be up to him to tell us how he felt and to take the final decision.  I’d leave the field only if the whole team was in agreement, though.  I think you’d have to actually experience something like that to know how you’d react.  It’s too delicate a subject to plan your response in advance.” (p132)

This seems to me to raise more questions than it gives answers!  So he would leave the pitch, but only if everyone agreed, which makes me wonder why players who haven’t been racially abused should have a say?  It also strikes me that the more “delicate” a subject is, the more need there is to plan your response in advance, not vice versa!  

Equally, Pirlo presents himself as above suspicion when it comes to fair play, doping and match fixing but also gives a half-hearted defence of Juve’s role in the “Calciopoli” scandal (p104).  I don’t know about the scandal in detail, but it seems a bit rich for him to slag off cycling for doping when Italian football is fairly notorious for corruption.  He also opines it would be a good thing if clubs could offer win bonuses to other clubs in the league to help motivate them, which doesn’t strike me as particularly thoroughly thought out.  Perhaps the best evidence that Pirlo isn’t quite as “switched on” as he likes to think are his comments about his tattoos.

“I’ve got well-hidden tattoos: my son Niccolo’s name in Chinese letters on my neck.”

This brazenly ignores the fact that Chinese doesn’t have “letters” but uses logograms called “hanzi”.  This makes “writing” a name like “Niccolo” impossible in any Western sense.  Usually names are “translated” by using a few characters to approximate the sound of the name, even though the meaning will be completely different.  So what Pirlo actually has tattooed on his neck are some random characters that might sound a bit like “Niccolo” but mean something completely different.  It’s not the sort of stuff that makes you think he’s any more intelligent than your average footballer!  Why on earth he wants a tattoo in a language he doesn’t even seem to understand, let alone speak is beyond me! 

In fairness to Pirlo, some of these woolier parts of the book may come from either the ghost writer or translator.  For example, the sentence “he was worn out and refused to speak to anyone apart from Daniele [Rossi] and I.” (p40) This uses the subject “I” when it should use the object “me”.  This wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it wasn’t for the fact that the book then goes on to mock Gattuso for getting his grammar wrong on pp 48-49!  Obviously, I can’t tell if the error was Pirlo’s, the ghost writer’s or the translator’s, but if you’re going to mock other people for making grammatical mistakes, it’s probably best not to make your own a few pages before.  The “Thanks” written at the end of the book by the ghost writer may give a clue as to why it isn’t the best written book though.  Alciato, an Italian journalist, thanks everyone he can think of and then thanks his family finishing with the final sentences, “They’re always the first names on my teamsheet.  All of them.”  (pp 151-2)  To me, this begs the question of why they aren’t the first names on the thank you list but maybe I’m being too pedantic!  Whatever the case, I thought it was clunky and, generally speaking, I found the prose lost clarity and cohesion when tackling complicated ideas or subjects.  It has a nice informal tone when dealing with funny stories though, which is a redeeming feature.

I would recommend this book to football lovers as it is very short, takes no time at all to read and contains some wonderful stories and insights.  It has a light, jocular tone and even though some of the jokes are more likely to produce a groan than a laugh, it’s better than someone who takes themselves too seriously.  It’s not very well written, can be sycophantic and is more confusing than enlightening on topics like racism in the game and the “calciopoli” scandal, in spite of Pirlo’s claims to being an insightful thinker!