No matter how empathetic a person may be who pauses today to remember the millions of American military forces who served in armed conflict, the experience of war can’t help but remain an abstract one.
Those who’ve known what it’s like to begin a day realizing they may well be killed possess intrinsic bravery not because they fought to defend principals without fear but because they fought with it.
Some of the gap between perceiving and experiencing what war is might best be narrowed not merely by remembering those who fought in one, but by seeing their faces.
The faces they wore before experiencing war, while merely training for what they believed would be a glorious epoch, the heroic promise of legends and propaganda.
And the faces they wore after experiencing war, coming home without legs, arms, eyesight, hearing, sanity and even faces, forced to live with unpleasant but permanent disabilities that society quickly finds too unpleasant to ponder further.
Despite all the progress humanity likes to believe it has made, war has been with us from the beginning of time. Nor has time erased two demonic truths: the pleasure of peacetime is often at risk without the defense of war, and those often most willing to send others to war have never experienced it themselves.
The following photographs show both faces.
The first group is mostly of men in army training camp, “practicing war,” at Fort Meade, Maryland in 1917.
The second group is mostly of men sent from the battlefield to Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C. in 1918.
The locations were only twenty-nine miles apart, and the time between the two sets of most of the pictures being taken was about twenty months.
For these men, however, the larger world they survived to return to had forever changed.
Waiting for mail.
Walter Reed Hospital, 1919.
Located on the outskirts of the nation’s capital city, Walter Reed Hospital became the nation’s leading facility for treating those returning with the wounds of war, wounds that proved to be unlike any war before. The advance in machinery technology, from gunnery to tanks left a far greater number of soldiers with missing arms and legs. Most terrifying of all was the use of mustard gas and other powerful chemicals. These not only left many men with permanent breathing problems and compromised immune systems but severely scarred and burned the skin of their faces. It would prove to be the French who most readily treated the grotesque disfigurement.
Opened in 1909, the facility offered what was then cutting edge care, treating the disabled, wounded, disfigured, shellshocked veterans of World War I the best chance they had of recovering even some semblance of their lives before war.
THE MEN WITH THE BROKEN FACES
Today’s civic holiday, known as Veterans Day since 1954, began in 1919 to mark the one-year anniversary of November 11, 1919.
That day marked the the end of fighting of what was then called “The Great War,” because the world had never experienced fighting and bloodshed on such a massive scale.
It made the end of all fighting, the so-called “armistice” all the more meaningful.
The world had been traumatized by this war like no other, never before having experienced death, disfigurement and destruction of human life on such a dramatic and massive scale.
Wilson wanted the one year anniversary commemoration of “Armistice Day,” to remember “with solemn pride” the “heroism of those who died in the country’s service.”
He made no mention of those who had not died. Yet their suffering was only just beginning.
While his fight for the world to create and maintain a League of Nations as a way to prevent it from ever going through such an experience again, he was also deft in the use of words when it came to war.
In April of 1917, when he committed the United States to join its European allies of England, France and Italy to fight against Germany, and initiated a national draft of young men to be enlisted as soldiers, sailors and marines, he promised that it would be “the war to end all wars.”
Then again, just months earlier, he’d won a second term on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”
In 1938, the intent of Armistice Day was expanded to include “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace.” That intent didn’t last long.
In less than four years, American servicemen would return to Europe and also head into the Pacific to sacrifice their lives in what became known as World War II. Once that war began, the so-named “Great War” lost its momentousness by simply be retroactively downgraded to simply “World War I.”
It took the power of a man who’d actually fought in wars to shift the emphasis of November 11 from a day dedicated to not just those Americans who died but survived and those who fought not just in World War I but all wars.
In 1945, when World War II veteran Raymond Weeks first approached General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Forces, with the idea of a National Veterans Day, he found an ally.
In 1954, one year after becoming President of the United States, Eisenhower signed the law establishing November 11 as Veterans Day.
He was a veteran of World War I.
War. It is perhaps so traumatic that by the time a generation that has carried the brunt of it has begun to fade, a newer generation is always all too eager to take on the challenge.
Not long after the Armistice, an army sergeant returned to the battlefield where he’d experienced the most horrific violence and had been left with the most haunting memories.
The earth was littered with not only broken rifles, but the remains of human beings.
He reflected somberly on it to his wife:
“I could not look upon this devastation without reflecting that man has indeed sunk very low, to use his superior intellect in fashioning means of dealing death and destruction all round. All this in an enlightened age — and to what purpose? Man is indeed a refined savage, and war is a hideous spectre born of the devil. If this war is the last and the world becomes the better for it — well and good. If not, God help the world!’