the great war with depression

I have devoured two books this week (yes, more sleep deprivation and I just can't help it), Maisie Dobbs and Birds of a Feather, by Jaqueline Winspear. Maisie Dobbs is a private investigator in London, 1927, and had been a Red Cross Nurse in the Great War. The first book follows her first case as a p.i., but also gives the account of her strange education and horrifying experiences at a casualty clearing station during the war. Events from her past creep up on her as she helps others deal with their own ghosts, mostly the aftereffects of this war that wiped out an entire generation of men. Birds of a Feather is the next book in the series, about several women whose actions during the War made them live in fear years later. Maisie discovers their secret, and a few other things about her own life.

I love history, especially the events and people of the early decades of the 20th century. The art of the time had exploded into abstraction, cubism, and new experiments with psychology. Technology bounded ahead with motorcars, medical advances and architectural accomplishments. Fashion went completely nuts--the long Edwardian skirts of the 10's were hiked ever higher as flappers became the big racy "it" girls. Women got the vote, and started going to college more than ever.

But with all the new technology came new ways of efficiently killing other people. The Russian revolution, the rise of Communism and the Spanish Influenza wiped out millions. And most of all, the Great War, which unfortunately, was not the war to end all wars it was claimed to be. I've studied a few books about the war, and I don't think anybody clearly knows why it started--sure a guy got assassinated in Bosnia (Franz Ferdinand, not the band...) and Germany invaded neutral Belgium, and it was a hot summer, they say, in 1914. Much like Romeo and Juliet, on a colossal scale, it's something I still don't understand even when I have examined the events.

These books have given me a fresh insight on that time, not necessarily the "why" of the war, but how it affected people in their daily lives, and how they lived with those memories afterwards. Some of the events come from Winspear's own family recollections. The mythology behind my favorite book, Lord of the Rings, was begun in the trenches, and all of Tolkein's friends died there. I can sense the evil he must have felt when I read his passages about battles. I am even drawn to Snoopy's stints as a World War I flying Ace, and vividly recall him weeping at the long rows of headstones in France.

I thought a little last night about why I am so drawn to this time period, to this war, and thought about when my interests perk up again to find out a little bit more. I was obsessed with it in my Junior year of high school, in the summer of 2001, and now. All of those times I felt like things in my life were completely out of control, that foundations were crumbling around me, and that people who could control some things decided not to. A sense of absurdity also, a kind of existential crisis came with those previous times.

I don't know if I feel like my own life is absurd now, though I do feel like many people in power are just as clueless as I am about fixing the trench warfare of drugs, crime, and poverty. But I do feel out of control, and afraid of some pending tragedy either in my own life or on a larger scale. There is a lot of fear and sadness and anger, just beneath the surface of my life, only needing a few bad days or weeks to bring out. At the worst times, an exposed nerve is what I feel like. At the best, the nerve has a thin layer protecting it from the swift poke that inevitably comes.

What to do? Get out of the trench first, then to the casualty clearing station. Then they'll give me some morphine and take out the biggest chunks of shrapnel, and send me on my way to hospital. Will my wounds be big enough to keep me from returning to the war? Only God knows.