January 2011

Scarcely a man is now alive who has bellied up to the mahogany in an old-fashioned saloon and said to Mike or Otto, “the usual.”

For more than fifty years over half of the states have been without saloons. Indeed, half of the total area of the United States was legally dried up as long as seventy years ago. Since lew women, other than painted Jezebels, ever saw the inside of a pre-World War I saloon, only a handful of grizzled male survivors remain who can remember the gilt beer sign at the corner, the swinging door, the mouth-watering free lunch, the technique for picking up a dime from a wet bar, and the sheer intellectual pleasure of discussing with Gus the barman the progress of union labor, the statistics of baseball, the infinite variety of woman, President Taft’s definition of whiskey, or the finer points of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy.

A though he was the Father of our Country, George Washington begat no children of his own. But he knew what children were made of. He came from a large family— his father had ten children by two wives—and he outlived them all. Near the end of his life, his home at Mount Vernon became the center of a great clan including eighteen nephews and nieces in varying degrees of dependency upon him. In this home he reared two generations of Custis children, beginning with a boy and girl by Martha’s first husband, the dashing, erratic multimillionaire Daniel Parke Custis. Three children of his brother Samuel also knew George Washington as their immediate guardian. And in the supervision of his estates, he witnessed the intimate affairs of many other families, white and black.

The idea of becoming a candidate for President of the United States first came to him in a Dublin jail. (“A jail,” he observed philosophically, “is a good place to meditate and to plan in.’ And he should have known: he was incarcerated fifteen times during his life—always in behalf of some cause, for, in his own words, he“never commited a crime, cheated a human being, or told a lie.”) As the election of 1872 approached, the man’s confidence in himself was subline; the record he offered American voters, unique. Describing his qualifications, he said, “I am that wonderful, eccentric, independent, extraordinary genius and political reformer of America, who is sweeping off all the politicians before him like a hurricane, your modest, diffident, unassuming friend, the future President of America—George Francis Train!”

The Incredible Century To Bleed to Death Offensive on the Somme The French Mutiny

Go back fifty years in time and you are in a world which seems as remote as the age of the dinosaurs, which in some ways it indeed resembles; the age of the imperial dynasties which ruled a great part of Europe, rigid and wholly static anachronisms which had somehow survived into a time whose intense dynamism was altogether too much for them. Confronting the inevitable changes of the modern world, these dynasties could do nothing but try, with desperate incompetence, to repress all change. They thereby brought on, in 1914, an explosion which destroyed them utterly and left the world in a turmoil from which it has not yet emerged.

Yet perhaps it was the way the war was fought that really did the damage, for it inflicted a psychic wound of the kind from which there is no easy recovery. Above everything else, that war was savage, with an insensate sort of savagery for which there is no good rationalization.

We are used to terrible things in our generation—fire raids on great cities, and the unspeakable hideousness of concentration camps dedicated to mass murder—yet the record of the kind of fighting that took place in the First World War remains one of the most appalling chapters in all history. We can hardly understand our own times without knowing something about the things men were forced to endure from 1914 to 1918.

Consider, for example, the great German attack on the French stronghold of Verdun, which took place in 1916 and which is described by Mr. Alistair Home in The Price of Glory .

Before the war ended mankind was at the mercy of its own machines of destruction. It had perfected the techniques of mass slaughter without mastering them, indeed without even thinking about them coherently, and it could do no more than stretch itself on a rack of its own construction. Dreadful as it was, Verdun was not really unique. There was also the Somme.

In a way, this battle at least rested on a brighter base. Sir Douglas Haig, who commanded the British army in France, believed that he could make an outright breakthrough, piercing the German line, rolling up the broken defenses, and going on with a powerful stroke that would win the war then and there. But Marshal Joseph Joffre, the French commander whose troops took a share in this offensive and who exercised a good deal of influence over Haig, saw it from the beginning as an exercise in simple attrition—a notion just about on Falkenhayn’s level—and in the end that is what it became. It may even have destroyed more men than were destroyed at Verdun, but possibly the density of corpses per square yard was somewhat lower.

There is, after all, a limit to what men will put up with, and early in 1917 the French Army reached that limit.

When the year 1917 opened, the French Army had lost—in men killed, dead of wounds, captured, or simply “missing”—some 1,300,000 men. Reflecting on this, the French government at last nerved itself to relieve Marshal Joffre, and it replaced him with General Robert Nivelle, who had done well at Verdun and who believed that he knew how to break the German line. In the spring of 1917 Nivelle was allowed to conduct an all-out offensive along the Chemin des Dames , near Soissons.

The Battle of Brooklyn Heights, in August of 1776, was a near disaster for the half-organized Continental Army, many of whose officers were sadly inexperienced in the art of war. The following verbatim excerpt from the diary of a participant, Colonel Josiah Smith, of East Moriches, Long Island, suggests that some militia officers were also spectacularly unskilled along other lines. ( AMERICAN HERITAGE thanks Rear Admiral Andrew I. McKee, U.S.N., Ret., for discovering the excerpt in an old issue of the long-defunct Magazine of American History .)

August ye 1-1776—I Spente in Veuing a proper place to Erect another gard on grate neck

2—I sot out from Coll Sands to Suffolk County & got as far as Capt Plats

3—I wente from Capt Plats to Capt Strongs and Staid with him all nighte

4—I wente Doune to South to meting and Wente hum.

5—I Staid at hum

6—I Staid at hum