La Belleza Y El Dolor De La Batalla (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
Englund, Peter. The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (tr. Peter Graves), Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (540pp.$35)Groom, Winston. Kearny’s March: The Epic Creation of the American West 1846-47, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (310pp.$27.95)Knopf has just published two very different books about two very different wars. Each in its own way is a lasting contribution to history and to the general reader’s understanding of both war itself and the impact conflict has on personages large and small.Peter Englund’s book, “The Beauty and the Sorrow”, is about World War I, though not about what it was (it’s causes, course, conclusion and consequences), but a book about what it was like to be an individual and to live inside it, watch it develop, listen to it roar, feel it come and go, and, ultimately, to go on. Englund, a Swedish historian who has received numerous prizes in his own country and whose works have been translated into fifteen languages, is also a noted war correspondent, reporting on conflicts in such diverse areas as the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. He is also a member of the Swedish Academy. His book chronicles the experiences of 20 more or less unremarkable men and women on both sides of thee war (two of whom did not survive)---a German schoolgirl, a botanist, a mountain climber, an ambulance driver, a doctor and a clerk. They come from Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, New Zealand and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, among others, and they are people like the young man in the British Army who was considering emigrating until the war offered him the “grand promise of change”---or, like the French civil servant and social to whom the war was an ideological disaster. There is an American woman (and former opera star) married to a Polish aristocrat who was living a life of luxury at the outbreak.Englund weaves these varied experiences together by chronologically stitching together memoirs, diaries, and letters into a unified whole, sometimes quoting verbatim, and sometimes through the medium of paraphrase and analysis. It’s a book in which we discover intimate personal feelings, in which we find out that in Germany, during the later years, there were many substitutes: meat made of pressed rice boiled in mutton fat, tobacco made of dried roots and dried potato peel, shoes soled with wood. German law allowed 837 registered meat substitutes. There are stories of heroism and honor, disillusionment and the grotesquerie of prison. But like many of the very best books about this horrific war, it is an oblique, poetic, human and unconventional book. This fine book belongs on the shelf along with another unconventional classic, Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.”Winston Groom’s book about the Mexican War is a conventional one, but still valuable, lively, brave in scope, and fast-paced. Groom, who may be better known for his Forrest Gump books, is a formidable historian, whose previous books are about Vicksburg, World War II and Andrew Jackson at New Orleans. He is a pas finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and given his Southern heritage, his work puts him in a league with Shelby Foote.Many books have been written about the Mexican War and all feature the usual suspects, as does this one---James K. Pol, America’s phlegmatic, devious, ambitious president, hell-bent to present a Texas skirmish during early 1846 as a pretext for a wider war that would eventually attach California to the United States and, some said, expand the reach of slavery to the whole southern tier of the country. Also featured are James C. Fremont, the intrepid, somewhat duplicitous, Western explorer, himself an ambitious self-promoter, and of course, the noble Stephen Watts Kearney, a dutiful, honest, and forceful American general. Also featured in Groom’s book are the battles of Sacramento, Monterrey and San Pasqual, and a vibrant diplomatic and political history of the western expansion of America.Groom’s book is virtuous too in being generously illustrated with maps and diagrams. Its style is flexible, fast-moving and in many places, as dramatic as a stage play, but a stage play in which some of the most famous American “mythic” characters have parts---Kit Carson, Brigham Young, and a host of harried Mexican general and politicians. Despite the fact that the subject is a relatively conventional military history, Groom has done it extravagant justice. Englund treats us to a masterful perspectival account of WW I. The narrative takes the form of a chronologically arranged set of diary entries from 20 different people who experienced the war, whether as soldiers, politicians, mothers, children, nurses etc. Englund offers an account that is thus non-reductive and that avoids cliches and moralizing. There is a kind of sleight of hand in the way Englund summarizes diary entries on the way toward quoting parts of them. This has a tendency to masque Englund's narration since selection, as is will known in historiography, is always value-laden. History is as much the history we tell as what happened and some would argue history is ever only the history we chose. Still, Englund honours an irreducible event by asking us to pause and see events unfold through the eyes of those the diaries represent. This is not a patriot's history. Nor is it an objector's one. It is an account that asks us to take time to ponder a conflict whose aftershocks we still experience in our contemporary global order. It asks us to look down the well of history and see there an entire generation of 20-30 year olds wiped out in four years, a conflict so gruesome and so massive that its conclusion in 1918, as the term "armistice" implies, did not spell the end of the global conflict, only a hiatus while everyone waited for more people to be born, to grow up, and to fight. Anyone who has a romantic view of war should read this book: what would it mean to drown in mud, to use cadavers or bits of them as barricades to hide behind to avoid being gunned down by machine guns, to starve to death at home to support a war no one believed in any more, to fall prey to insane generals and maniacal rulers? Englund does not answer these questions for us, he shows rather than tells, and this is what makes this such a masterful account. He does not wrap himself in the flag, nor does he put daisies in the barrels of guns. He honours history by asking us to take possession of it in these accounts of people whose lives were made and unmade in a terrible conflict. This is a great book.
What do You think about La Belleza Y El Dolor De La Batalla (2011)?
Very interesting history of the First World War told through personal narratives.
—lodoco
I loved it from beginning to end. I aspire to write this kind of history.
—adsk
