It is the unhappy fate of some men to stand as symbols of the human being’s natural reluctance to realize that the world has changed. They survive into a day that they cannot understand, and the simple fact that they do not understand it remains beyond their grasp; and since this is the case, the solutions which they attempt for the problems that the changed world brings them are completely inadequate. When these men stand in positions of high authority the results can be tragic.
Since the world has probably seen more sweeping change in the last 50 or 75 years than in any preceding half-dozen centuries, this inability to adjust to change —inability, indeed, to see that any adjustment is necessary—is one of the melancholy hallmarks of our era. An eminent example is the case of that distinguished British soldier, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig.
Haig had many military virtues. He had integrity, devotion, long training in his profession, the sort of iron-hard determination that a successful general must have. He would have made a first-rate soldier in Wellington’s army; his trouble was that he commanded British armies in a war that resembled Wellington’s war only in the fact that men still shot each other. He believed in throwing massed numbers into a head-on attack; he believed in victory by attrition; above all he believed in cavalry—he felt that bullets had little stopping power against the horse, and that the role of mounted men would become more and more important in an era of machine guns, repeating rifles, barbed wire, and quick-firing field guns—and, all in all, he was somewhat like a man trying to solve a problem in the new mathematics by diligent use of the abacus.
In Flanders Fields: the 1917 Campaign, by Leon Wolff. The Viking Press. 308 pp. $5.00.
In 1917 Haig planned and conducted the tremendous six-months battle that has come down into history as the Passchendaele offensive. It cost the British armies involved in it 448,000 casualties, including 22,000 junior officers; it gained a few square miles of useless ground; it churned the whole battle area into a hideous swamp in which effective military movement was all but impossible; and it grimly underlines the fact that the First World War marked the dreadful end of an era. It comes up for careful examination in a genuinely first-rate book, In Flanders Fields, by Leon Wolff.
Mr. Wolff’s book makes it very clear that conventional military thinking in that war had collapsed. The western front ran from Switzerland to the English Channel in a continuous chain; nothing that armies had ever done before could be done on this front, but the generals could not realize this fact and they persisted in trying what had been done in the old days. Haig and the men like him grew furious at any suggestion that it might be possible to attack the foe in some place where he was not quite invulnerable. They would hear of nothing but the heavy blow at the strongest spot, and the mere fact that two years of experience underlined the folly of such fighting—after all, the Somme offensive in 1916 had exacted 60,000 British casualties in one day—meant nothing to them. In the spring of 1917 the French General Robert Georges Nivelle confidently promised a sweeping, decisive victory, launched the Champagne offensive, and wrecked the whole French army. Shortly afterward Haig, with equal confidence, attacked in Flanders. He had his cavalry massed in immediate reserve, ready to gallop through and exploit the breakthrough. Somehow, the cavalry never got used.
The recital of all of this makes Haig look like a very stupid man, but he was not. He was a good, solid conventional soldier; his difficulty was that all of the conventions he lived by were no longer good. Like every other professional soldier of his time, he was perfectly prepared to do very well in some previous war. The war in which he was actually engaged was like no war anyone had ever heard of before, and the necessary adjustment just could not be made.
If the generals come off looking badly in Mr. Wolff’s book, the politicians do not look very much better. David Lloyd George was prime minister of England at this time, and from the beginning he was convinced that the Passchendaele offensive would be exactly what it turned out to be—an unendurably expensive blood bath—yet he never could quite muster the hardihood to overrule Haig or to replace him with someone else. You get the impression, following the course of events, that the military command had grown all but wholly independent of civilian control. A Churchill, probably, could have pulled the soldiers back into line, but Lloyd George unfortunately was no Churchill. Like Haig, he was a man who had been brought up in a different world. He was up against something bigger than himself, and the slick politician’s equipment that he brought to the task was inadequate.
The tragedy of all of this is that in 1917 it was, perhaps, not quite too late to keep the war from being all-destructive. As Mr. Wolff remarks: “Early 1917 would have been a splendid time to stop the war. Both sides were exhausted. A military stalemate existed. The causes of the conflict were demonstrably trivial and implausible.” A negotiated peace in place of the Nivelle and Haig offensives might have spared the world much suffering, then and later. But the military commanders, as dedicated men, could see nothing to do but to go on fighting and force a decision. They had their way—Haig, Foch, Ludendorff, and the rest. The fruits of the decision that at last was forced may not have been quite what they expected.
In sober fact, the world as it had existed up to 1914 was in the process of destroying itself between 1914 and 1918. Of the great empires that prosecuted the war, not one survives in recognizable form. Russian tsar and German and Austrian kaisers have vanished forever, and the lands where they once ruled look very different than they looked half a century ago. The European community that once dominated the world drifts, fragmented, between Russia and America. France is still trying to recapture control over at least a part of her own destiny, and the British Empire is much thinner and weaker than it was in 1914. Haig did his best to defend that empire, but along the Somme and around Passchendaele it lost more than any empire can afford to lose.
Nobody meant any of this to happen. The fact that the technical processes of making war had got beyond the comprehension of the generals is merely a surface indicator of the difficulty that afflicted all leaders. The tightly knit, elaborately organized world of 1914 had drifted into an era of change, in which a long all-out war was certain to destroy the very base on which that world rested. Nobody could quite see it.
The Gold Rush
By BRUCE CATTON
War is the great, dramatic explosion which makes change obvious. There are lesser ones, less terrible, less harrowing to read about, which evoke simple nostalgia rather than horror. It is pleasant, for instance, to turn from a consideration of the incomprehensible agony of Europe to the gaudy tale of the great Alaskan gold rush of the late 1890’s. In its own way the big gold rush was something of a milestone, too. Its overtones were not so grim and the literature it has given rise to is less appalling, but it remains a significant experience that is well worth study.
The Klondike Fever, by Pierre Berton. Alfred A. Knopf. 457 pp. $5.75.
Pierre Berton brings to the study of this event a scholar’s passion for accuracy, a light and graceful touch, and a good deal of personal knowledge of the place where the stirring events happened, and his The Klondike Fever offers a delightful way for stay-at-homes to follow the great trail of ’98.
Here was the last great gold rush. In all probability there never will be another stampede like it, simply because the world no longer contains empty places with an undiscovered potential for appealing irresistibly both to innate human greed and to the universal desire for adventure. This was the curtain piece.
The gold rush was largely a nineteenth-century institution. There were California and Australia, and Colorado and the Black Hills, and then there was South Africa; and each time, a floating population, which wanted very much to get rich but which wanted even more to get off behind the ranges and escape entirely from civilization, went on the prowl and swarmed in to the new diggings; and then, at last, there was Alaska, and the Klondike, and the last chance of all to run from a world that was beginning to get just a little bit oversettled.
The world, in other words, had not quite been finished. It still had some vacant lots in it: deep valleys, thousands of miles away from anywhere, in which a spade and a pick and a tin pan might make a man rich, and in which at the very least a man was out of the city crowd, with mountains and cold rivers and trackless woods all around him, pioneering in a world which had outlived pioneers. Dawson City was the last stop. There would not be anything like this again, the trail would not go on any farther, the excitement and wonder were running thin; but here, in the final hour, they were still as fresh as creation’s dawn.
And the important thing about the Klondike trail, as Mr. Berton makes very clear, was not just the gold. It was there, to be sure, and some aspects of the rush up from Skagway are as ugly as anything you could find, with greedy men pushing on at any cost just for a chance at wealth; but very few of the men who made the long push ever got rich, or ever really expected to, and in the end it becomes clear that it was not really riches they were after. About 100,000 people, Mr. Berton estimates, set out to go to the Klondike. About a third of them actually got there; the rest died or turned back, the fires burnt out of them by hardships along the way; and of the ones who made it, about 4,000 actually found gold, and of these only a few hundred found enough to make themselves rich. And of these few, the merest handful managed to keep what they had found.
Yet in the end this mattered very little. Hardly anybody really got any gold; but “it turned out in retrospect to have been a golden period.” For while the gold rush brutalized a great many people, and ennobled just a few, it gave to everyone an emotional experience. Men then were looking for something they never really could find, something that probably did not actually exist; and they learned, as most of us do no matter what it is that we are seeking, that it is the search and not the finding that counts.
They were at the end of the procession. It never could happen again. The world was growing smaller and smaller; and here, just before the walls folded in forever, there was, as Mr. Berton so well puts it, “one of the weirdest and most useless mass movements in history.” Weird and useless, to be sure, and very brutal and sordid in spots; but it was a symbol of a changing world, a fragment left for us to examine from a world that had one more dimension than today’s world.
Lost World
By BRUCE CATTON
We still have fragments of the open, useless, untenanted world, and there is an increasing compulsion upon us to preserve these, to set them apart and go and visit them so that we can at least touch the edges of something that is no longer quite within reach. Yet this very drive to preserve and visit the wild spaces may be self-defeating; the mere act of preservation and use robs the wilderness of its virginity; there are perhaps just too many of us nowadays, and it is a serious question whether we can ever again know the grandeur, the loneliness, and the wild, challenging beauty which our continent and our world offered to the adventurous in its youth.
This question bothers Joseph Wood Krutch, and he broods about it thoughtfully in his fine new book, Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon is one of our most spectacular natural beauties. This enormous gash in the earth exists in one of the desolate corners of the United States, but the nation is beginning to push in on it; more and more people who want nothing so much as to get away from the rush and noise of modern life are going there to find something that cannot be found at home, and the disturbing question, as Mr. Krutch points out, is whether something like this can possibly coexist with energetic exploitation.
It is only the United States which can still, among the highly developed nations, offer its people the chance to visit large areas where nature is still unspoiled. We did start early; we set aside these great empty areas as public lands, and did our best to save them for people who would have to live in a nation where precious little remains unspoiled. But we still have “the power to ravage,” and it is by no means sure that we will always restrain ourselves in the use of that power. These primitive areas have timber, or grazing resources, or water power, or simply unoccupied acres that may be built up in neat real-estate subdivisions. We say, “Human needs come first”—but precisely what human needs are we thinking about? Mr. Krutch feels that we need to be clear about what needs may be most important. Material needs may not be the really valuable ones. As he remarks:
Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays, by Joseph Wood Krutch. William Sloane Associates. 276 pp. $5.00.
If we recognize that there is more than one kind of utility and that the parks are, at the present moment, being put to the best use to be found for them, then they may last a long time—until, perhaps, overpopulation has reached the point where the struggle for mere animal survival is so brutal that no school or theater, or concert hall or church, can be permitted to “waste” the land on which it stands.
This worry is by no means far-fetched. Human times, as we have been saying, do change, and the pressure of a great new nation lies heavily on areas that, until very recently, seemed as remote from human pressures as the far side of the moon. Unless something priceless is to go out of human life, we need to keep such places untarnished, and yet this is not as simple as it sounds because, even if the cattle kings, the timber barons, the water-power enthusiasts, and the others are turned away, the mere act of saving a wilderness area for public enjoyment brings problems of its own.
We want, we say, “recreation areas.” Very well: recreation of what kind? Do we want the recreation that people can get when they can be in and gaze upon vast stretches that are as they came from the Creator’s hands, or are we thinking of primitive rivers dammed up so that there can be speedboats on the water and pretty girls lolling on artificial bathing beaches? The danger, again, lies in the fact that times have changed.
This is so much the age of technology and the machine [warns Mr. Krutch] that machines come to be loved for their own sake rather than used for other ends. Instead, for instance, of valuing the automobile because it may take one to a national park, the park comes to be valued because it is a place the automobile may be used to reach. A considerable number of automobilists would like when they get there to do what they do at home or at the country club. An even greater number prefers to drive straight through so that they can use their machine to get somewhere else. They feel that to stop is simply to waste time, because time spent without the employment of some gadget is time wasted. … Is it for such as these that the parks should be maintained?
This is a question that will be bothering us very seriously in the years just ahead. Meanwhile, Grand Canyon does remain—relatively gadgetless, unspoiled, free for all, a piece of the old America which we Americans, just because we are so numerous, have been crowding out of the picture. If we do not finally have the good sense to preserve at least some of these places, we shall some day—not too far-off a day, either—find ourselves with nothing but “resorts” left. They will probably be very fine places, and they will look well in the color advertisements and will do a good business, but America will have lost something that can never in all time be replaced.
