When I was a child, I remember a large bag filled to the brim with plastic army men figures that was the staple of all my play time. Countless hours were spent meticulously staging fictional battle scenes with these figures, where stories of heroism and tragedy would play out amongst structures made of Lincoln Logs and pieces of furniture. It did not take long for this play to become a fascination with military history as a young boy, which first mainly took the form of staring at battle paintings in history textbooks from older siblings and imagining myself amidst the action. This fascination for history was quickly picked up on and the adults in my life were all too happy to indulge my passion through the purchase of all sorts of books that would go through great lengths to expound upon every detail of past military campaigns: participants, strategies, statistics, and the maps detailing the sweeping movements of armies at the beck and call of generals whose names to me loomed larger than life.
Then one day my mother bought me a book which I still possess, titled: Battle: A Visual History of Over 5,000 Years of Combat by R.G Grant, truly an infographic feast for a ten-year-old boy. Although the book goes through a very general history of combat, I remember very vividly making my way into the section on the First World War, and one of the pages opens up with a large picture in the foreground of Canadian troops going “over the top,” and a quote in bold letters saying:
It was one of our infantrymen and he was sitting on the ground, propped up on his elbow with his tunic open. I nearly vomited. His insides were spilling out of his stomach and he was holding himself and trying to push all this awful stuff back in. When he saw me he said ‘Finish it for me, mate. Put a bullet in me. Go on. I want you to. Finish it!’ He had no gun himself. When I did nothing, he started to swear.
I remember being intensely engrossed by this, routinely returning to the page, the quote struck me as so violent that it seemed almost scandalous to read. It was truly the first time that the battles and campaigns that had so captured my imagination ceased to be paintings or maps but instead became this visceral, violent, terrifying, and deeply human endeavor for me. Through interacting with the Great War, I began to realize that history was not about memorizing past events but was about the people who were part of them.
Of course, it was only natural considering my proclivities growing up that I would pursue a degree in history where, once more, studying the Great War would leave an indelible impact. It was relatively early in my undergraduate studies, fall semester of my sophomore year, when I finally had the opportunity to take a class on the Great War. The classes up to that point had been less about deep study on events during particular time periods and places, but more about covering rather mundane topics such defining history or how to properly cite sources. So when the opportunity finally presented itself to take a class on my personal favorite topic, the First World War, I immediately leapt at the chance to finally study history in the manner which my childhood self would have understood it—through all the intricacies and harrowing details of the famous battles across the various theatres of that conflict. Instead, what I received was poetry, novels, trench newspapers, and Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.
If I am being honest, I likely never really understood what history was, or maybe more accurately, what history could be until I read The Great War and Modern Memory. It was the first time in my life where I experienced someone bothering to ask questions such as, “How does the soldier writer remember this war? Is our language sufficient in expressing our memories? Is there a gap between experiences and the language we have inherited to recount those experiences? How did the Great War shift the language of recall and reflection to better suit the soldiers' experience?” It had never occurred to me that such questions could even be asked by history as a study of the past. Within a moment, the bounds of the field vastly expanded beyond what I thought was possible up to that point. This line of questioning made history into a very harrowing experience of seeking to lay down with the dead in the hopes of understanding them on their terms in their own context. It spoke to a very intentional historical work that sought to guide me, as if by hand, to the very trenches themselves, to listen to the voices of those who suffered through the war in their own struggling words.
Fussell looked primarily at the writings of British soldiers in an attempt to understand how they wrote about the war, and how their language changed due to their experiences of the war. He set apart the works of men such as Sassoon, Graves, and Owens as being particular examples of a marked shift in the literary remembrance of the war. Yet Fussell doesn’t just float through a comparison of Wilfred Owens and John McCrae. Likely because of his own experiences of fighting in World War II, Fussell never pretends to be a detached intellectual observer. Instead he allows a biting tone and sharp criticism to come through as he routinely calls us back to the horrific reality of the kind of warfare these men were faced with. Of course, one could criticize this approach, but it demonstrates a great deal of personal care on Fussell’s part for what these men went through. A quote that gets at what Fussell is attempting to give voice to comes from page 184 where he is responding to this idea that soldiers fall silent because language “falsifies” the entirely physical life of war. Fussell says: “But that can’t be right. The real reason is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn’t have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.”
So, in a word, Fussell taught me empathy. He taught me that history itself can be seen as a great act of empathy for the past and the people who formed it. We dignify the past with difficult questions because we care deeply about understanding it and, in doing so, faithfully seek to honor the memory and experiences of the dead. Although, it should be noted that Fussell has faced a good deal of criticism in recent years. His conclusion that irony was the defining experience and literary impact of the war was perhaps too narrow and was based more upon the specific soldier-writers he chose to study. Still, it is what Fussell sought to achieve in The Great War and Modern Memory that was so formative. The dead are speaking to us and the historian is one who cares to listen well.
Aaron Mejias currently lives in New York and serves in the U.S. Air Force. He still enjoys studying World War I daily and playing with plastic army men.
