Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Goodbye to All That

Our student teachers in the Social Studies department have rekindled some visits to World War I resources for me. I pulled out my Dad's pamphlet from his 1963 visit to the cemetery at Verdun. It begins, "400,000 Frenchmen died at the battles of Verdun." I think reading that account provoked the imagery I applied in the poem that follows this post. I also forwarded a clip of Kubrick's Paths of Glory, and loaned them our book, Battlefields of the First World War with its brutal panoramic photographs of the battle-ruined French landscape.

I also pulled out my copy of Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. It is a poignant first hand retelling of the end of the 19th century way of life in England at the hands of WWI. The misery of the trenches, the awful killing power of the technology, and the relentless waste of lives; all with names and stories that he shares. It is not heavy-handed, rather it shows through the daily increments of that war, the loss of innocence for an entire generation. I recorded a short passage of his first encounter with the trenches and have posted it on my library page.

As I revisit this era, I realize I am more distant from that time my Dad brought home that pamphlet (50+ years) than he was from WWI when he stood at Verdun (40+ years). History, even the stuff in black and white, is amazingly close.

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