Re: Hurtgen forest

    
    Jim,

    When I wrote: 'gloried in war' I was laying myself open
    to the interpretation that I took these great writers to be
    exalting the 'glories' of war - the pro patria mori,
    the crowning with laurels, the exaltation of the charge,
    the triumphs ... & the rest.

    Not really. It derived, rather, from a (possibly) Scots
    usage where 'glorying in' implies an endless, thrilled
    obsession with something. I could simply have said:
    'they loved to talk about it ...' As indeed they did.

    I can only repeat that the veterans I've known personally
    enjoyed a sureness & sense of priorities, an intense
    savouring of life which, in their moments of more intimate
    self-revelation they attributed to having once faced 'real bullets'
    - not just letters from the bank manager; having once shared
    the brotherhood of men who had risked their lives for each
    other - not just tramped the same golf course. They did, indeed,
    like Wendell Holmes, appear to look on the experience as
    something incommunicable & uniquely valuable.

    I envied them & still do. Physical courage has always been,
    for me, the gold standard. Risking unpopularity by standing
    up before the local school board to defend some curricular choice
    or other will never be in the same league as jumping out into
    the darkness with a platoon of airborne. Facing this extremity
    in the context of war is such an ancient, central component
    of a man's experience on this earth that I don't really see how
    a serious writer could allow himself to ignore it.

    I have nothing to add to your own remarks on war as policy.
    It will always be one of the options, depending on the circumstances,
    sometimes taken, sometimes rejected. Pacifism is not a policy.
    It's a posture - to be indulged in a college debate, perhaps,
    but not really available to someone whose land has just been
    invaded or who has watched his parents shipped off to Treblinka.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Mon Aug 12 14:15:24 2002