Memorial Day

It was a serendipitous choice when I pulled from the shelves of the Sidney library The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Blasco Ibanez. Having finished it yesterday, I add it to the other defining books of World War 1 that I have read and that leave me humbled and distressed by the era: Goodbye to All That by Graves, All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque, A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, The Guns of August by Tuchman, and even the films Wings and Paths of Glory.

Published just a year after the end of the war, Ibanez's book was an international best-seller; selling over a million copies. It is powerfully anti-war, blatantly an indictment of martial German culture, and unforgivingly a portrayal of the actual personal cataclysm of battle. His chapter on the incremental and then inundating tide of the battle of the Marne is unforgettable as is his journey through the hopelessness of the trenches.

And then again, Ibanez often spoke with haunting prescience as in:

What was most irritating Tchernoff was the moral lesson born of this situation (Imperialism) which had ended by overwhelming the world—the glorification of power, the sanctification of success, the triumph of materialism, the respect for the accomplished fact, the mockery of the noblest sentiments as though they were merely sonorous and absurd phrases, the reversal of moral values . . . a philosophy of bandits which pretended to be the last word of progress, and was no more than a return to despotism, violence, and the barbarity of the most primitive epochs of history.

As I head down to our town's Memorial Day observance this morning, I will carry the images and loss of that terrible chapter in our history a bit closer than before.