Vera Brittain had seen many soldiers, but there was something
about these troops that made her stare.
They marched with a “bold vigor in their stride,” the
24-year-old British nurse observed, “with such rhythm, such
dignity, such serene consciousness of self-respect.”
Who could they be?
It was April 1918. The war had already killed Brittain’s fiance,
the poet Roland Leighton. Now, she worked in hospital wards
overcrowded with men wounded in the German offensive that had come
crashing through the Western Front three weeks earlier. The
situation seemed hopeless, and Allied commanders desperately urged
their troops to hold on despite staggering losses. “There is no
course open to us but to fight it out,” Sir Douglas Haig grimly
told his battered British army.
After more than three years of war, England and France were
scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel. Yet here were these
obviously first-rate troops marching past the hospital in Etaples,
France, as Vera Brittain stood staring in wonder. Perhaps they were
Australians or New Zealanders? No: “I knew the colonial troops, and
these were different,” she realized.
“They looked larger than ordinary men,” Brittain wrote. “Their
tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the undersized
armies of pale recruits to which we were grown accustomed.”
The mystery was solved when she heard the shout from a group of
nurses standing behind her: “Look! Look! Here are the
Americans!”
AMERICANS TODAY SELDOM RECALL the history of World War I, but it
was in that conflict that U.S. “doughboys” proved themselves equal
to any soldiers in the world — and established an enduring
reputation for toughness.
Today, many Americans agree with Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid that the war in Iraq is already lost, and that U.S. troops are
“accomplishing nothing” by their presence there. As conclusive
proof of the war’s hopelessness, they cite the more than 3,600 U.S.
combat deaths over the past four years. It isn’t hard to imagine
what the American troops who brought victory to the Allies in 1918
would think of such defeatism.
By June 1918, the powerful German offensive had pushed to within
50 miles of Paris, and many believed that the Americans had arrived
too late to save the day. As U.S. troops moved into action near the
Marne River, they were met by retreating French soldiers. The
demoralized French called out, “La guerre finie” — the
war was over. No, the Americans reassured them: “We’re here.”
On June 3, 1918, a brigade of U.S. Marines was sent in against
the Germans who were attacking west of Chateau-Thierry. Sgt. Dan
Daly yelled to his men, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want
to live forever?” The Marine brigade had 1,087 men killed in action
that day at Belleau Wood. But when it was suggested that their
decimated unit be withdrawn from the front line, an American
officer replied furiously, “Retreat, hell! We just got here!”
THAT INDOMITABLE SPIRIT SOON turned the tide, and the Allies
emerged victorious just seven months after Vera Brittain had first
seen those tall, vigorous American troops marching toward the
front. By the time peace came, the war had claimed the lives of
48,000 U.S. troops.
Our contemporary “get out now” crowd would no doubt protest this
comparison of World War I to the war in Iraq. Latter-day defeatists
angrily charge that the Bush administration launched this war under
false pretenses, and declare that the continuing carnage in Iraq is
futile.
Sic semper hoc.
During and after World War I, critics insisted that President
Woodrow Wilson had deceived the American people, winning
re-election on a peace platform in 1916, only to push America into
the war a few months later. Today’s conspiracy theorists on the
left — who claim our troops are dying in Iraq because of some
sinister plot between Zionists and Halliburton — are mostly
reiterating and elaborating the old “merchants of death” thesis
that portrayed World War I as the secret scheme of a cabal of
international bankers and armament manufacturers.
Critics claim that the war in Iraq is pointless, that U.S.
military involvement there can neither discourage terrorism nor
promote democracy. Yet was America ever involved in any conflict
more pointless than World War I? Though the Allies won the war,
they botched the peace, and the “war to end all wars” proved merely
a prelude to (indeed, some would say, the essential cause of) the
horrors of World War II.
“The causes of war are always falsely represented, its honour
dishonest and its glory meretricious,” wrote Vera Brittain, who
lost not only her fiancé but two close friends and her
only brother in World War I, a war in which nearly 750,000 British
troops were killed.
Whatever false representations preceded the war in Iraq, and
whether or not the U.S. presence there can bring lasting peace to
that volatile region, our troops now fighting terrorist insurgents
still possess the same “bold vigor” that so impressed Vera
Brittain. For such incomparable warriors, the suggestion of
American withdrawal still deserves the same response it got in
1918: “Retreat, hell!”
