Learning the Hard Way

We’re on the train from Paris to Barcelona, along the path of world wars. Out the window I see the men with bayonets fixed to their rifles charging the barbed wire and the men in the trenches rising up to return fire, and then, looking over time, only a few decades, I see the panzer tanks of the blitzkrieg and the men and women outside the small stone villages like the ones we are passing with their hands held high over their heads as the Nazi soldiers inspect them and decide whether they will live or die, and whether there and then or in a death camp.

For me the fields of France are the eternal fields of war. They don’t look very different now than then, bare and speckeled with snow along the tree lines on this last day of February. I think of how cold the soldiers, the boys, must have been in those trenches, how merciless the tanks of the second German invasion.

I see those boys in the fields and I wonder if others do. It’s a different world now than at the end of World War II. The Germans and the Japanese, so thoroughly defeated in that war, roared back into economic dominance. It remains to be seen what that means. The Germans are setting almost as much economic policy for Europe today as they did when they overran it militarily. Japan isn’t the economic tiger it was in the 1980s, and the country it used to dominate, China, has taken over the title as regional monarch.

When I was growing up in the South, I regularly walked the killing fields of the battle of Nashville and the battle of Franklin of our Civil War. But they weren’t fields of war to me. They were just boring patches of farmland. I had no sense of the Civil War. I could not imagine the boys dying in those fields and in the parlors of their homes where they were sometimes brought home to die. The Civil War meant nothing to me. Less than nothing. I rejected talk of it the way I rejected talk of all things that would never matter in my life.

I wonder if young men and women today see the fields of war of the generations before them with that same lack of interest and curiosity, whether they see the mistakes of those who came before them as unique to the frailties and vanities of those times.

The frailties and vanities of today are manifested by the nuclear saber rattling of the United States and North Korea. By the islands China is building in the open sea to control shipping and military routes. By Russian tanks in Ukraine and its new missiles announced just today.

Perhaps because I dismissed our Civil War as an anachronism, I was unprepared for the resurgence of white male nationalism that was awakened by the racist and misogynist rantings of our current president. I would like to blame him, but he is just one man. It is we who are to blame. Millions of us elected him, apparently without memory of Southern lynch mobs or the time not so long ago when women didn’t have the right to vote.

In Europe, the hard right is building fences to keep out migrants, and the fears they cater to are winning them elections again. I thought fascism had been not just defeated but eradicated. But like polio, it is making a comeback. I thought racism was dead, but it was merely lying dormant in the cold ground of our darkest urges.

The cliche is that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I’m sure I am not the first to suggest a modification to this wisdom: it may not be enough merely to know history to avoid repeating its mistakes, we may have to personally feel the pain of the lives shattered, the children lost, the future lost. To those who come later, the past may seem quaintly antiquated.

“We are not like that,” they will say, the ones who walk the fields and cannot hear the guns and smell the cordite.

But they are, I fear. We all seem to be. Only when the pain of tragedy is seared in personal memory does it seem hold us back from our human need to conquer and dominate. If there were a way to pass that pain along to each new generation, not just the fact of it but the actual night sweats, we might escape the tyranny of our evolutionary imperative. Otherwise, it won’t be long before another generation learns these terrible lessons the hard way.