Memento mori
I have on my desk this morning two relics of World War I that I brought from home. One is a photograph of my great-great-aunts (is that right? They were my grandmother's aunts) Hilda and Lois Simmons, sisters who were Red Cross volunteers serving near the front in the war. Another is a "Pickelhaube," a spiked leather German helmet they found on the battlefield and brought back.
Reading "All Quiet" has made me think hard about the German soldier upon whose head that helmet sat. Did he lose his helmet on the battlefield, or was he killed in action? The helmet is rather small. Was the soldier exceptionally small, or was he really young? What did he see in battle? What did he think about the war? What was his name? I've had this relic for a long time, but I've only thought of it as an object. It wasn't until I started reading "All Quiet" that it came to life, so to speak.
Lois and Hilda are long dead, but I recall being a very small boy and sitting on their red-leather sofa (they spent their final years living together in a little cabin in the country where I grew up), listening to their stories about the war. Hilda was on the Champs-Elysees when the Armistice was declared. A Frenchman grabbed her and kissed her on the lips in joy, which scandalized the young woman from rural south Louisiana. Once at their Red Cross canteen in Dijon, Gen. Pershing showed up unannounced in the middle of the night. No one could find the keys for the pantries, so Lois had to strain the hot water for the general's tea through her petticoat. I also remember them talking about a riot in the canteen, and the horrible food they had to serve the fightng men (Lois fainted on the serving line when she scooped up a ladleful of stew, and saw a rabbit's head staring back at her).
How I wish they were alive today so I could talk with them about this book, and what the war did to them. They both returned to the States and kept working with the Red Cross for a time, though I think Lois eventually moved on to other charity work. Both of them seem to have been stricken by the war with a strong desire to help people in distress. Hilda was working with the Red Cross during the 1927 flood in Louisiana, and she was told she couldn't go into the disaster zone in the north because she was a woman, and it was too dangerous. So she disguised herself as a man, commandeered a supply boat, and took relief to the stranded people. Reading "All Quiet," and encountering the terror and desperation of these soldiers, makes me wonder what my aunts saw and heard during their time at the front, and how it marked them. I guess there's no real profound point here, other than this work of fiction making objects and memories that had seemed so static to me come to life in a new way. It makes history new, I mean.