Lines To The Raw Recruits – A Poem

[Another poem written by my father. As with most of the other poems he wrote during this period, this one conveys a somewhat dark and fatalistic perspective on the war, and of the soldier’s prospects in it.]

June 18, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Sitting in the “Ship Ahoy” Sunday noon, eating a chicken dinner, and a line came into my head: “Boys, put down your shining toys –“ It was one of those lines that stays around to tempt your imagination, and it was still buzzing my brain when I walked off over to the Presbyterian church. Had the first stanza all done by then, and finished the second by sort of talking it out with Fran. Then I did the last two in a few minutes at code school this morning. It might be called “Lines To The Raw Recruits,” but no one will agree just how much I believe what I’ve written, and least of all, I myself.

Come laughing boys,

Put down your toys,

The time has ceased for play;

Your country’s need,

Yourselves to bleed,

And throw your lives away.

 

Now don’t look sad,

It’s not so bad, –

A year or so to fight,

And then one day

You’ll go the way

Where bullets never bite.

 

Don’t stop to ask, –

The bloody task

Won’t wait upon your fears;

Ten million more

Have gone before,

And no one scorns your tears.

 

Come, laughing boys,

Put down your toys,

And kiss your girls goodbye;

Dead years to wait

Their heavy fate,

While yours’ is but to die.

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Jitterbugging While the World Burns

[My father often wrote of being lonely during his time in the Army, and found occasional solace at USO-sponsored dances. In this stream-of-consciousness entry, he moves from idyllic memories of New England to the scourge of war to the numbing effect of superficial social niceties.]

February 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

To write of the hills of home in such a way that the chance reader, whoever he is, and wherever he may be, will be transported by imagination to a land of verdant green, where the tall pines stand straight on the mountains, whispering the summer breeze through their boughs, and the white clouds billow silently above their tips. There in those hills is such a world as many millions of the world’s orphans have never dreamed of, a world that never heard a shell burst, and knows only the rifle crack of the hunter, a world where men walk upright and unafraid, and where children laugh in the sunshine. On the newsreel screens armies clash amid the fearful hell of war, and this is but the shadow of a far more awful substance which has already scarred and blackened half the world. My star points to those lands, and there in good time I must go, to see boys like myself spill each other’s blood and crunch their bones with the passionless steel weapons of modern civilization. There, in Germany, Burma, China, in the islands of the Pacific, in France and the Low Countries, yard by yard down the bloody boot of Italy, in Sicily, in Africa, and back across hundreds of miles of Russia lie the rotting corpses and bleaching bones of millions of people, soldiers and civilians, men and women and children, and these uncounted wasted lives are the ineradicable monument to a way of life in which human life became a commodity, – something to be traded [not] by the dozen and gross, but the thousand, and by the hundreds of thousands for the ambitions of a new race of mastermen. Mastermen, – can they even be called men? What strange horror has burned out of them that spirit which we had come to believe was the essence of humanity? What mechanic terror made them forget honor and justice and love?

Oh Europe, what monsters are bred in your blood-drenched soil! And now the poison virus of your militarism has infected the sleeping civilizations of the East, and is wakening them to a martial frenzy which may yet rush out of the Asiatic vastnesses to destroy forever the European war breeders.

On the floor the boy and girl dancers cavort and wriggle through their mad routine. The drums beat beat beat, and the saxophone blare splits the air. Shuffle shuffle shuffle, whirl and dip, beat beat beat, trombone moan. This is the dance, while the world is burning up.

If I were completely honest, my dear, I’d tell you that I’d never had a more wretched time in my life, but having somehow been schooled to the habits of social hypocrisy, I will smile at the right time, and try desperately hard to make enough clever remarks to keep the evening from appearing outwardly as sour as we both know it is underneath. Yes, I was lonely, and I hunted you down, and made a date, because I’ve let the dismal common talk of dismal common people blot out my sense.

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Last of the Code-Room Arias

[One more of my father’s youthful poems, which he wrote while attending a 13-week radio course at The Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He called the handful of poems he composed while attending the radio school “code-room arias.”]

December 21, 1944 (Fort Benning, Ga.)

Last of the code-room arias:

I like to think I ride a wave across the years,

I like to think its massive swell will bear me safe

Across the rocks and coral reefs.

But when I stop to think where all waves go,

I wonder whether mine, at last, will roll up some white beach

And spend itself caressing warm white sands,

Or whether it will dash on some black rock crag

And there explode in furious spray.

I don’t know which end I’d prefer.

Sometimes it’s good to dream of sand;

But other days I crave the rock, –

The sudden, scintillating crash

Resolved to chaos,

Bold and final.

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A Poem on Fighting and Dying in War

 [My father enjoyed reading and writing poetry, and his journals contain a number of poems he penned in different periods of his life. I can’t claim much expertise as a poetry critic, but, perhaps, the following poem that my father wrote at the age of 22 isn’t half bad… (Due to the limitations in this blog’s formatting options, I don’t seem able to break the poem into the four-line stanzas of my father’s original.)]

October 23, 1944 (Fort Benning, Ga.)

… This is a poem I wrote several weeks ago in a short space of time, and called it, deceptively, perhaps:

Thoughts of a Soldier Whose Comrade Died Beside Him

                The night flows full of bitter tears

                After a day of darkened sun;

                Tread across our brains the fears

                And hopes of battle, not quite won.

                Why did we come to this dead land

                Which must have lived before we came?

                In holes of stench and blackened sand

                Are we the men new-born to fame?

                Is this our victory, when the earth

                Is deep drenched down with juice and blood

                Of boys who longed for girls and mirth,

                And found instead death in the mud?

                But still, you say, these boys who die,

                And earn a nation’s hero-praise,

                As well, perhaps, that they should lie

                Insensate here, as taste the days

                Of crawling age, and slacking power,

                When, down the dreams of dreaming youth

                Crash victim to the sloth-worm’s hour

                In the last tragic act of truth.

                They didn’t want to die, no more than you

                In the grim years you’re counted sane,

                Except there may have been a few

                Who felt the sharp sweet stab of pain

                Which comes to every earth-bound slave

                That time he hears the rushing feet

                Of heavenly men who come to save,

                When he admits that life’s a cheat.

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Nazi Philosophy of Destruction versus Christian Morality

[The Nazi strategy of destroying towns and villages while retreating has my father contemplating the importance of Christian morality — and its emphasis on creativity — as a countervailing force. Although my father didn’t adhere to some of Christianity’s core faith beliefs and symbols, he recognized the importance to the war effort of the moral system that these beliefs promoted.]

October 8, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

The shape of the Nazi scheme for the great withdrawal to the Fatherland begins to appear in the utter destruction they are leaving behind them in Russia and Italy. They will not return to the places they’re leaving now, and they know it. So they will attempt to stamp death indelibly upon all the places they have occupied, – to drag all of Europe down into hell, as Hitler has already threatened. We have heard for months of the rape of Russia, of the systematic destruction of all that represents civilization. There are no military objectives for the Germans. Just this morning we read that in Naples hundreds of tons of high explosive, planted in the basement of the post office, exploded yesterday, killing hundreds of people.

This is the way it will be all across Europe as the Nazis retreat. Towns will be completely blotted out, and great cities reduced to rubbish. The terror in Europe will grow more intense, as the advances of the Allied armies will come to mean not liberation, but torture and death. People will not dare to stay in their own homes, for fear that they will blow up. Water supplies will be polluted; there will be no food.

From our point of view this is senseless, and utterly criminal, but to the Nazi mind it probably appears as the supreme logic of their philosophy. For it would seem that that inner drive, which in most civilized human beings has been turned to creative ends, has been perverted in the Nazi mentality to a terrible force of destruction. It is possible that a Nazi commander surveys the ruins of a pillaged city with the same triumphant elation that Michelangelo feels as he stands before his completed David.

“Build thee more stately mansions,” someone says in the Bible. And so far as I can remember, the Bible is often stressing creation, even though metaphorically, as of the soul. Creation, and respect for those who create, for God, the supreme creator, are among the teachings of Christianity, and are in the foundation of the general morals of Christianity. If the Nazi terror is indeed the result of the deliberate destruction of Christian morals, that is reason enough for the preservation of these morals.

I have spent much time arguing with myself and with others over the technicalities of the Christian religion, – God, miracles, the true nature of Jesus. To me, these are matters of unimportance, because I believe that the moral system they are employed to inculcate is of major importance. But I guess I was wrong to argue, if for most people the moral system has meaning only through these symbols. And it is also true that a faith in the strength of these symbols is translated into a corresponding moral strength in the believers which otherwise might not be there.

So why continue arguing over nonessentials? The essentials themselves are being brutally challenged today, and my whole fight should be directed against the challengers. That bomb in Naples was not planted to kill men and women, but to kill beliefs and faith and morals and whatever else has been instrumental in the building of Western civilization. 

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To Hell With Eternity

[In this, one of my father’s many entries dealing with his still-gelling thoughts about religion, he rejects the notion — and the appeal — of life after death.]

November 21, 1942 (Middlebury College)

I just killed a tiny spider, – crushed the life out of it with a snap of my finger. The thought came over me: Is there some power in the world greater than I which can as completely snuff out my life? And of course there is. The hand of society can just as unfeelingly snap down on me, and the chances of its doing so are greatly increased in a period of war like the present. I have no recourse; though conscious of my fate, I have not the power to oppose its coming. Nor has society, for that matter, the ultimate power, but serves only as the instrument which may direct my death in advance of the time when it would overtake me naturally.

Certainly it has ever been such a consideration as this which has led men to a belief in a beneficent power that stood on his side beyond death. If he could convince himself that death itself was but a passing mutation in a life that was eternally his, would not he have foiled the fate that otherwise seemed inescapable and all-powerful?

At this stage of the game, such reasoning doesn’t appeal to me. If you insist on calling it faith, I shall just as stoutly insist that I have no faith, at least, of that variety. The idea of life going on eternally is to me a repugnant idea, and one that takes the purpose out of the living that is surely now within my grasp. Today I am a man. I shall never have another chance to be a man. The elements of my body undoubtedly will continue in existence, but I shall cease to exist. This idea pleases me. Fear has no place in my thoughts of death. The only fear that I would keep alive is that I may fail to make as much of life here and now as is within my grasp. If I can do a good job now, according to the strictest measure that the morals of my society provide, I’m willing to say to hell with eternity.

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The Power of War

[In this excerpt, the final entry in my father’s first journal, a letter from a friend (Pablo Vyrros) sparks a reaction in which my father muses about the metamorphosis from “civilized man into a fighting savage.” He also expresses growing doubts about his personal life and his journaling objectives.]

November 18, 1942 (Middlebury College)

This afternoon another of those tremendous letters from Pablo. He’s found a new girl, – “no pledges, no vows, until after the war.” After the war, – we can’t escape it. We are putting by so much of life until after the war. If we postpone enough of it, probably it won’t be so hard to die. Here’s Pablo in the Army now about half a year. A few days ago one-third of his squadron leaves suddenly for the African front. And Pablo? Still in Texas and feeling lousy, cheated, emotionally unstrung, because he can’t be out there in the thick of the fighting, “to kill or be killed.”

That’s the power of war. You don’t go to battle because you’re patriotic, because you believe that you’re fighting for a better world. No! To hell with ideals! Go to war to fight, because the Army has made you a fighting man, and that’s your job. That’s what’s happened to Pablo. That can happen to me, in fact, is happening to me.

What, after all, can prevent the metamorphosis of a civilized man into a fighting savage? Religion, for one thing. But I have only a few ideas, no real emotional convictions. Then there’s love. I have Dottie. There’s my big chance. But even there I can sometimes feel the tie weakening. This week, for instance. I think we’re losing out. What’s the use? I’m asking myself. Even now we have no time for each other. The great work of growing together has come to an end.

I remember my cynicism of last year and am tempted back towards it. [Middlebury professor] Doc Cook’s impassioned talk on ideals and first causes left me cold today. Aimless flitting.

So this is the end of the first chapter of my Journal. I think that there is some development recorded here, but I am more than ever faced with the question, – Development for what? I don’t know the answer. 

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Thoughts on Dying in War

[Although my father’s early journal entries generally depict a young man mature and articulate beyond his age (20 at this writing), they sometimes veer into the over-heated rhetoric of youth. The following excerpt is one such example. This excerpt also touches on the theme of “creative activity,” which is a recurring topic in my father’s writings during this period. He repeatedly identifies the process of ongoing creation as his own personal goal, as well as that of all civilized societies and successful institutions.]

September 27, 1942 (Middlebury College)

A Sunday of much wind and rain, finding me in a state of mild depression. I could go on in this mood long enough, and end up where I was a year ago. What plans do I have? Would I really enjoy being married to Dottie? To any woman? Will I ever have a chance to be married? Or will I be sucked into the monster machine for war to die a glorious death, to have my weak flesh spattered against metal. Is this the purpose and the destiny of all large social groups, or will the idealists some day see their dream of a peaceful world society fulfilled? Certain it is that individual men and women are as greedy and selfish as ever they were, and probably more so, now that they have lost the ability to provide the necessities of life for themselves. Can the pressure of social law and custom as successfully restrain the combative instincts in men as it now successfully goads them into destructive operation? Is it pointless to ask whether it is better to die in peace than in war, since we must die anyway? I don’t think that the question is pointless. It seems to me that most people would willingly sacrifice their lives in an act of creation, where they would balk at being decimated as mere engines of destruction. If a man has complete faith that his death on the battlefield will contribute ultimately to the building of a peaceful, creative world society, then he will presumably die gladly, without complaint. It may be that creative activity can never proceed without conflict in human society. 

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