Let’s Talk! – Leave the Trenches

What a prompt for pondering and discussion from my friend Tyrean Martinson’s book – Pocket Sized Jumble Writing 500 Prompts – this time, right? A lot of us know trenches only from books or from the movies – and thank goodness for that!

My Master’s thesis in Literary Science was about WW I literature by Faulkner, Remarque, Ford, and Barbusse. It was about the end of war and the soldiers’ return home. Faulkner’s novel was the only one that didn’t describe the trench warfare, as his protagonist is a downed pilot. But the others do in brutal detail.

Why did I choose that topic? It was the beginning of the 1990s, and there was a war going on sort of on our German doorstep, in former Yugoslavia. I had friends whose brothers worried they might be drafted to join it. And there was the war in Iraq. I was the co-founder of a “living poets’ society” at my university, and we met every Thursday after classes, to read out our latest work and discuss it. One of our topics was war. We pondered in poetry. Poetry might be the first, the fastest to pour from a writer’s mind, the closest to the experience of any event. Novels not so much. Novels ponder so much more of the long-term circumstances. But I digress.

Trench warfare was a thing much of WW I. It included foxholes and barbed wire for more safety. And we all know by now about the war’s wonderful first Christmas, that of 1914, when enemy soldiers left their trenches and celebrated side by side. It was the only such occasion that seems to have happened during WW I, and any similar situations were interdicted right afterwards.

In his stunning tetralogy Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford titled part 3 A Man Could Stand Up. It refers to soldiers being able to stand up on a hill and survive because nobody will target them in peace time. Standing up on a hill is the opposite of seeking shelter in a foxhole in the trenches.

Leaving the trenches can happen for three reasons. One is to attack the enemy. The second is to run from the enemy. But the best of them is to leave them and leave them behind for good with no more danger to one’s health or life. I can’t even imagine what emotions must swamp a person who has been in the extreme of all-time danger for seemingly endless days and nights and who now may emerge from hell and breathe freely again. People like you and I. And we all have such neighbors in the U.S. They usually don’t talk about any of it. Not even to their wives or children.

Leaving the trenches and standing up on a hill – these are the most powerful images I can imagine for the end of a war. Not the lively street celebrations back home. Just the sudden quiet of the front line, maybe the first audible birdsong after the havoc has ended. The scarred landscape. The destruction of objects and of lives. To have survived. To have a future when so many won’t anymore. To be able to go home.

Wars are fought all over the world, and though hostility is what makes them continue, it is people who are like you and me who fight them. Who just want one thing. That it will end and that they may leave the trenches, metaphorical or real ones, for good.