The View

FROM HEMINGWAYS ATTIC

 

Gods Favor

by William Elliott Hazelgrove

There's a World War I helmet in the attic. Just a steel pot. It is something that ended up here probably from some garage sale. It's not Ernest's helmet as he served with the Italians and this is an American helmet. But my God. All those men who died in that war now eighty years dead. A million men died from the British Commonwealth alone. Half of them rest in unknown grades. Missing presumed dead. They were a generation of young men like Hemingway.Youth and laughter thrown into hell. No wonder Hemingway's prose is so stark and brutal. They were a heroic people then with a heroic idea thrust rudely into the modern era of brutal mechanized war. Dying with God's favor.

We live now without war.We are allowed to ripen and have families and we live fighting the middle class war. Disease, old age, boredom, stolen dreams or lost ideals are our enemy now. But for Hemingways generation it was the ride of the comet. Life was something lived on a small plane. Imagine the telephone had just been invented, cars were suspect, planes were a novelty that daredevils flew. People lived and died in their neighborhoods or on their farms or in their city but their field of existence was small. There was no global anything. Then comes a war in the big world. For a young man it was jumping off a cliff to see if you could fly. See if you could live fighting death. The young men went off thinking that even if they died it would be heroic. They would die young in their prime in all their glory. Manhood tested and won. Something liberating about marching off to certain death. All those complications thrown away. Life more precious than ever at that final moment. Why do we die...So we can burn brightly when we live? Their flame was at it's zenith and they died by the hundreds of thousands. A whole generation of young men obliterated. And a few lived to tell the tale. They came back maimed and scarred. There are grainy films of these men in institutions so shell shocked they cant even walk. Their bodies paralyzed. They came back to places like Oak Park. The poets no longer celebrated war like Kiping or Sassoon....strange new writers came out of that war with respect for nothing. Nihilists. As Fitzgerald summed it up in his first novel..."we were a generation who woke up to find all wars fought all Gods dead..." Literature was sliced in half. There were the writers before and the writers after. Hemingway launched the reformation.

Today writers tackle the problems of the day.We find dissatisfaction in the main. In the norm. But even the counterculture has been dissected and cataloged. Wars do not exist for the next one will be the last. People roll along at breathtaking speed. A writer may get the pulse of his generation for a moment but let go of the wrist and you miss the beat and you are writing about something that doesn't exist. I think of my own little boy and am glad there will be no great war. He will grow up in a vastly different world than those young men who went marching off willing to slaughter.

So the helmet is all that remains of those men. And yet I know them. If you were born in the last century you stand on the earth powdered with their bones. We live by God's favor and die the same. And I can touch the rough steel and feel their hopes and dreams still...when they felt Gods favor fade in the dusk.