War and Freedom: Centennial and Semicentennial

In 1914, one hundred years ago, World War I began.

This has been noted many times, in many media, over the last several months.  But I wanted to do a signal boost for two particularly noteworthy, and ongoing, radio drama series about World War I, the BBC Radio4's Tommies and Home Front.

Tommies is a weekly dramatization, based on private diaries and other records, of the experiences of British officer Mickey Bliss and his fellow signallers, from the Lahore Division of the British Indian Army, on the battlefields of France.  It gets pretty intense, both from a military-history viewpoint and in the clashes and interactions between the varied characters and personalities who took part. It's messy and chaotic and Things Going Wrong. There's even kind of an SF element to it, with Bliss and his men responsible for one of the first field radio units, an affair with equipment weighing hundreds of pounds, difficult to set up and maintain, and delicate and cranky enough to frequently fail to work without frantic MacGyvering with spit and tin foil.

Home Front is the same war, only, well, back on the Home Front in the British Isles itself.  There's the same messiness and sense of depth, deeper than usually presented in historical dramas in the period. The large cast of characters even includes a German national stranded in Britain at the war's outbreak. The plan for the series is to eventually provide a day-to-day drama covering the entire course of the war.

Both dramas provide a closer, more intimate eye on the issues and lives of participants in World War I, rather than the sweeping, epic, pieces-on-a-gameboard overview more commonly presented.

Episodes of Tommies can be listened to here, available until December 11th. Home Front, which is presented in shorter 15-minute episodes five times a week, can be found here; there are also "Omnibus" editions of Home Front, collecting an entire week's episodes in one bundle for download and podcasts, available here.  The Home Front episodes are available for listening "indefinitely", both directly online and via download; the Tommies episodes are only available until December 11th (no podcasts or downloads, alas).

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The other anniversary of note happened fifty years ago, rather than a century. That was the founding of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB for short) in 1964.

The FSM  gets little note in most histories nowadays. It seems to be remembered more as a "wanting to be able to use dirty words" thing than anything else.  It was quite a bit more than that, and it was the originating point for later, larger, more widespread protests against the Vietnam War.

UCB had been the site for numerous advocacy committees and organizations setting up tables and passing out literature for various causes (anti-death penalty, pro-civil rights, and early anti-Vietnam activity, etc.). In November 1964, the UCB administration attempted to enforce a complete ban on such activity.

Mario Savio speaking
 from the top of the
 police car, Oct 1, 1964.
Credit: Steve Marcus, courtesy
of UC Berekeley,
 The Bancroft Library 

When several groups continued to post tables on UCB property, police attempted to arrest Jack Weinberg, who refused to produce ID. Student reaction was surprisingly strong and quick; the police car the man had been put into was surrounded by a large crowd, preventing the police from leaving with their arrestee. The standoff lasted for 32 hours, and was the beginning of months of confrontation, including a student occupation of a UCB building and an eventual large-scale raid by police that arrested 800 students.

The Free Speech Movement was the progenitor of a lot of later, more widespread social protest, including the anti-war movement protesting America's involvement in Vietnam. It was a strong influence on civil rights and feminist activity as well. Being primarily a reaction against attempts to quell political discussion and activity, it's kind of odd that it seems to be remembered as mostly a "pro-obscenity" movement, when it's remembered at all.  (I was about twelve when things blew up at UCB, not an age when I was paying much attention to current events, but even I remember the FSM's actions got quite a bit of news coverage at the time.)

Berkeley has produced a website about the FSM era that provides a lot of the history and background for those events and the persons involved in them.  A useful timeline can be found here.

Blast From The Past - POINTS OF HONOR by Thomas Boyd

Points of Honor, Thomas Boyd, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925

Points of Honor is a collection of short stories by Thomas Boyd, best known for his novel of World War I soldiers, Through the Wheat.  TTW received a good deal of critical acclaim and support, including from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins.  Boyd was seen, for a while, as one of the leading lights of post-WWI American literature.   But his subsequent books never got the sales or acclaim of that first novel, and his fame faded away.  He died of a stroke at age 37; Boyd's own war-time injuries may have contributed to that early death.

Where Through the Wheat's focus was on actual combat experiences, Points of Honor is mostly set during periods between the actual fighting, or in rear-line settings, or (in "The Long Shot") follows a soldier's return to the US after being injured in a mustard-gas attack.

Here's a telling quote from the Foreword:

"...these stories may serve to correct the impression that I hate war.  That would not be my business.  But it is my business not to glorify it; it is my business to perceive it truthfully and to set down those perceptions in such a way that they may be shared by whoever is kind enough to read them.  Hate war!  Hate the ambitious who casue the wars and the financiers who grow fat on them.  Hate the people who believe sleek lies.  If we must hate let us hate causes; it is futile to hate effects.  If I hated war I should lie about it, thereby saving myself a good deal of sweat, labor, and anxiety occasioned by the endeavor to be honest."

Not all the stories are fully successful.  Several come off as more like extended vignettes.  "The Uninvited", with its Registration of Graves Department investigator tasked with finding poorly documented burial sites, works well as a traditional detective story.  Most end with irony, frequently bleak. 

"The Long Shot" is the story that got turned into the 1930 movie BLAZE O'GLORY, mentioned at the end of this post.  Reading some of the information available about Boyd, it turned out he despised movies for leading people away from reading books.  It must have galled him to the max that the bleak protagonist of this story, a former soldier trying to return to his previous career as a machinist, was turned into a Broadway entertainer for the film version so song and dance numbers could be inserted into the movie.  Considering how dark and bitter the original story is, it's hard to imagine the movie's changes being anything but a travesty.  (I don't know if copies of BLAZE O'GLORY have survived the 80+ years since it was filmed.  At best, I suppose it might have been something like Steve Martin's 1981 PENNIES FROM HEAVEN, a bleak Depression-era story with musical inclusions that left audiences mostly off-balance.)

Duncan Milner, the protagonist of  "The Long Shot", shares a good deal of experiences with Boyd himself.  Gassed in the war, unable to return to his previous machinist career, troubled relationships in his personal life.  Milner, a sniper in the war, ends up murdering the lover of his unfaithful wife.  The final irony is that the judge who vilifies him for taking another man's life and sentences Milner to the scaffold is the same man who, as an officer in the war, spotted targets for Milner to kill.

"The Long Shot" is also noticeable because of its portrayal of a veteran struggling to readjust to civilian life, his struggles with the after-effects of his war injuries, and his difficulty in finding assistance, both from friends and family and from the government, in making that transition.  It's an early portrayal of PTSD and the difficulties faced by returning veterans.  As such, it's still a very pertinent story.

His better-known novel Through The Wheat can still be found in print, but I don't believe this story collection is currently available anywhere.  I read a copy of the original 1925 printing via InterLibrary Loan.