Wasted Time
BY THE time we got back stateside, the map of Europe had changed so much from the day my mom and dad died, it would have been unrecognizable to either of them. Austria and Czechoslovakia were now effectively part of Germany, who had also swallowed up the western half of Poland. The eastern half had become Russian, along with most of Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Meanwhile Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium had all surrendered to Germany too, and what was left of the British Army had been evacuated back home from Dunkirk. Winston Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain as the British Prime Minister and created a coalition government, and by the end of June Norway fell too, and soon the Germans had occupied Paris. Sure enough, somewhere along the line Italy also entered the War on the German side. I even heard that on the day Mussolini announced his decision to declare war on Britain, Rome’s rather conservative British Union Club allowed women to drink in its bar for the first time since the place had been opened. Then a week or so later the Battle for Britain began in earnest as Germany started bombing just about every important city she had. I never heard whether the Union Club kept the bar open to women during that too. I hope for their sakes’ it did.
Even when I lived in Rome, I had gone back to the U.S. every summer when university was out, and stayed with my godfather or Jack. So it wasn’t difficult to track the way our country’s mood was changing. There was still a lot of controversy about whether or not to go to war, but at least it was no longer about what side to go to war on. That seems very obvious now doesn’t it, but remember how many Americans there are of German and Italian ancestry, and they didn’t want to see us fighting their forefathers’ country any more than I did. Franklin Roosevelt, who had always seemed to understand far better than the American Public where all this was going to lead, whatever other outcome we hoped for, was now increasingly less obstructed in his path. When Poland fell to Germany in 1939 he had started by slowly moving the United States from neutrality, through non-belligerency, through being the arsenal of democracy, to being ready to join in the War should the moment come. When Paris fell in June 1940, anti-war sentiment amongst ordinary Americans declined rapidly, and Roosevelt found himself with even more freedom of action. But still he was always careful to couch every martial-looking request he made in terms of the need to defend America, rather than going to war in Europe. Better he did too, as many prominent conservatives still saw our whole economic system as being at risk from any war, and quite a few were willing to say it out loud. Charles Lindbergh was their principal flag-waver, and went as far as to predict race riots and revolution on the home front if we entered it. But he wasn’t Roosevelt’s only opposition, for many on the left were opposed to war too, and saw it sending us all back to the bad old days, as they believed it anyway, when big business ran the whole economy. The most extreme of them even painted a future in which the U.S. Government assumed dictatorial powers, and our whole country became as fascist as Germany. And why should America care about Britain anyway both sides agreed, wasn’t she just an old-time colonialist in disguise?
Bit by bit Roosevelt had his way though, first by getting the American arms embargo repealed to allow foreign nations, i.e. Britain, to buy munitions for cash, provided they transported the goods themselves. Then in March 1941 he got the Lend-Lease Act passed which allowed him to lend, lease, sell or more or less give away property of the United States to any nations defending themselves against aggression, i.e. Britain. Then after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, he got even more of the teeth pulled from our 1939 Neutrality Act, allowing American merchantmen to be armed and carry goods of any kind, including military ones, to belligerent ports, i.e. Britain’s.
But even if the American public seemed more and more willing to watch our government risk getting us into the war involuntarily, the nearest most of them were prepared to go in joining it themselves, was watching Charlie Chaplin’s first talkie The Great Dictator. It was an odd film, part drama, part slapstick, but it wasn’t difficult to look through its satire and understand Chaplin’s opinion on Hitler and Mussolini. He saw both of them as grotesque, and if they were unwilling to honor notions of international peace, something had to be done about them. And for the most part the audience agreed, up to a point anyway. But that was the high water mark of Hollywood taking any position on the War. The rest of the time they were far more worried about losing two of their more lucrative foreign markets, Italy and Germany, Their other films I saw, and I went to the movies at least once a week, had nothing whatsoever to say about the War, pro or con. In fact many didn’t even acknowledge there was one going on at all. It was a kind of Jane Austen world we were all in I suppose, me included, as we all ate up The Philadelphia Story with James Stewart and Katherine Hepburn. And when we’d satiated on that we took in Fantasia, Rebecca, My Little Chickadee and of course How Green Was My Valley the tearjerker to end all tearjerkers. Scariest of all though, in retrospect at least, the number one hit of 1941 was still Sergeant York, in which Gary Cooper played a conscientious objector who somehow still managed to become a war hero. He was the most decorated American soldier of World War One, a former Tennessee hillbilly, a master shot, a drinker and trouble-maker. But one day he was struck by lightning riding his mule, converted to Christianity, suspiciously like Constantine I thought when I saw it, gave up alcohol, though I doubt Constantine went quite that far, and got himself drafted. But he only agreed to go to the war in France after reading the bible verse that says - therefore render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. Funny how Caesars keep on popping up in this story isn’t it? And funny how God does too for that matter, and popping up in a way that misuses Him. If my reading of the passage is correct it actually refers to paying your taxes, not killing people.
But hero though he clearly was, the real Alvin York was very much representative of America at the time the film was released. Not only at odds with our possible entry into any new world war, for good measure he still wasn’t keen we’d ever joined in the first one. So he became a member of the Emergency Peace Campaign, one of a number of organizations that lobbied against any war. But soon he had another conversion, presumably on the road back from Damascus, changed his views completely, supported intervention, and lo-and-behold was promptly to be seen criss-crossing the country on bond tours and recruitment drives. What is it Winston Churchill once said to a reporter, who questioned how conveniently the great man had changed political parties while climbing the ladder of Westminster? “Any fool can rat,” he said. “But it takes real talent to re-rat.” Alvin York must have had that talent too, for soon he’d quit the Emergency Peace Campaign and joined the Fight for Freedom Committee, whose goal was to change our isolationist stance completely. Of course by so doing he found himself combating Charles Lindbergh, who still preached just the opposite. So there they were, a pair of Medal of Honor winners, one arguing America should stay completely out the war, and the other arguing that Germany probably saw us as their next target of opportunity, so better to get in it now, at a time of our own choosing.
And me, what was I doing all this time, other than going to the movies? Well I’m not going to go as far as to say you can completely forget the next three years of my life, but let’s say I don’t think you have to remember them all that well. After I came back from Italy, the job openings for experts in Italian architectural antiquities and the history of Rome being a bit thin on the ground, I opened my own photographic studio. Consistent with my patrician upbringings I specialized in taking pictures of well-heeled Washingtonians, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, senators and congressmen, people as they say of my own upper crust.
I’m not absolutely sure exactly when it was that I started to become more and more uncomfortable about what I was doing, or to be more blunt, what I was not doing. Maybe it was the passing of the Burke-Wadsworth Act that was signed into law in late 1940. You may not recognize that name, but it was the first peacetime conscription in the history of the United States, the ‘draft’ as it soon became better known. To be honest though it wasn’t its passing that had any effect on me, it was that soon after it, those photographs I found myself taking became more and more of young American soldiers, the stars and stripes behind them, and their proud relatives by their sides. Mostly they were of officers, as for some reason the sons of upper crust Washingtonians tended not to be enlisted men. Would I have ever changed my tune about the war? Who knows? But then who knows if anyone else would have either. But it didn’t make any difference, as shortly we were attacked by Japan in December 1941, and within a few days Germany and Italy declared war on us too. And the worst I feared had happened, and the country of my birth was at war with the country of my mom’s. It didn’t help either, that soon after this the photographs I was taking were no longer just of our boys who’d joined the U.S. military services. They were now photographs of our boys who were being sent off all round the world to fight.
Of course finally realizing that the war you feared was now one we had no choice but to be in, wasn’t quite the same thing as saying one was going to help fight it. So the feeling that maybe there were things I could do that were a little more relevant to the realities of the times took a while to well up in me. It got stronger one day though, when one of those young officers I photographed was my own brother Jack. Without telling any of us, he’d handed back his schoolteacher’s deferment, volunteered, and got sent to Officers’ Candidate School. But it got even worse a few weeks later, when Margaret arrived in the studio to have her picture taken, and lo-and-behold she was in army uniform too. When she’d found out about Jack she’d quit her job in private law practice, and gone off and joined the Judge Advocate General’s Office, and again without telling me. They said it was a new program they had, to give more non-combatant jobs to women to free the men up for the front. And all that was made far worse by the fact I took both their photos in the kind of dreadful self-delusional, flowery dress debutantes go to Washington garden parties in. Then that evening Margaret made my uselessness completely insufferable by admitting she wouldn’t even be stationed in Washington, but had signed up to go to London to the new JAG offices there.
I went to the movies that evening I remember. Escapism was always an important weapon in my personal storehouse of means for handling problems. It was a drama I’d missed the first time around, and was adapted from a book written by an English woman named Jan Struther, who appeared quite often in a radio show I liked called Information Please. Her book was a compilation of letters written by an English housewife living in the London suburbs about the approach of war and its early months, and its effect on the writer’s household. The letters had been part of a column in the London Times in the late 30’s, and was then published in the States, and was very popular. A lot of the film was a trifle sentimental in the sort of How Green Was My Valley style, but you still couldn’t miss the fact that one by one every member of that housewife’s family found a way to ‘do their bit’ as the Brits call it, and do it regardless of their skills, age, social position or personal preference. The heroine’s husband, an architect, even takes his boat over to help with the Dunkirk evacuation, and their oldest son joins the R.A.F. Even the heroine Mrs. Miniver, whose only observable skill was growing roses, managed to ‘do her bit’ too, by disarming a German pilot whose plane had crashed in their garden. But it was the end of the film that really got me, when the Vicar gave a sermon in the local church already badly damaged by German bombs. I remember his words to this day:
“The homes of many of us have been destroyed, and the lives of young and old have been taken. There’s scarcely a household that hasn’t been struck to the heart. “And why? Surely you must have asked yourselves this question? Why in all conscience should these be the ones to suffer? Children, old people, a young girl at the height of her loveliness? Why these? Are these our soldiers? Are these our fighters? Why should they be sacrificed?
“I shall tell you why. Because this is not only a war of soldiers in uniform, it is the war of the people, of all the people. And it must be fought not only on the battlefield, but in the cities and in the villages, in the factories and on the farms, in the home, and in the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom.
“Well, we have buried our dead, but we shall not forget them. Instead they will inspire us with an unbreakable determination to free ourselves, and those who come after us, from the tyranny and terror that threaten to strike us down. “This is the People’s War! It is our war! We are the fighters! Fight it then! Fight it with all that is in us! And may God defend the right.”
Whereupon to a person, and in the best Hollywood style, the congregation stood, not just the on-screen one, but the one in the movie theater too, and with all pretenses of social class erased in us as well, joined in “Onward, Christian Soldiers” at the top of our voices. And while they did, through the yawning hole in the Vicar’s bomb-damaged church roof above, wing after wing of Royal Air force fighters flew by in a V-for-Victory formation, in even better Hollywood style. Okay it was maudlin and misty-eyed, and okay it smacked a little bit of Constantine the night before the battle of the Milvian Bridge. And okay, maybe it recalled the Romans renting out Cybele to get rid of Hannibal too, but it still lit my fire. And as of then I was ready to mount my white charger, ride through any intervening wall, and lead the attack on all black-shirted fascists of whatever country they came from. And I was in good company too, as Henry Wilcoxon who played that Vicar, had a brother who died assisting in the Dunkirk Evacuation, and Wilcoxon himself had enlisted in the U.S. Army within minutes of America’s declaration of war on Japan. Maybe smart President Roosevelt had predicted that sort of reaction in a lot of us, because John Huston told me later that he made sure the film was rushed to the theaters for propaganda purposes. And it worked, for there were many examples of other audiences throughout the country rising to their feet too. And singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ as well.
But there not being any walls immediately presenting themselves for me to ride through for my new found cause, instead I went back to my studio, opted for the only grand gesture presently available to show those Fascists I for one was not to be messed with, and closed it up… for good.