If you had asked me a week ago where Waterloo was, I couldn’t have told you. It happened so far in the past that it seems as unreal to me as the Conquest of Gaul does. It was just a story. If I thought about it, which I only ever have in the vaguest of ways, I would have said that the Battle of Waterloo had something vaguely to do with ships and the ocean and Admiral Nelson on top of the column in Trafalgar Square. Napoleon seemed like a fictional character, like Julius Caesar.
Waterloo, it turns out, is a small village just to the east of Brussels. There’s no great body of water near it, just endless, beautiful farmland, and forested areas. Admiral Nelson had nothing to do with the battle. The Duke of Wellington, though, who was about 11 years his junior, did. Nelson and Wellington weren’t connected at all, but the two men did meet once for about an hour. They are now both buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London which may have contributed to why they are mixed up in my head. And, of course, both Napoleon and Julius Caesar were quite real.
This part of the world that Michael and I are driving through has been the site of a remarkable number of bloody battles over the course of time. It seems like every couple of generations there is another one. They are as regular as clockwork, and they are getting worse. In 1815 nearly 50,000 men were killed or wounded during Waterloo. Less than three hours away by car to the southeast in France is Verdun. A hundred years later. Verdun was the site of one of the longest and most brutal engagements of World War I. Over 370,000 men were killed or wounded in that one. Geographically, somewhere between the two, back in Belgium, is Bastogne, considered the center point of the Battle of the Bulge that started less than thirty years after World War I ended in 1944. About 180,000 men lost their lives or went missing or were wounded during that little dust-up. And of course, where was Gaul? It was here, too - Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. In about 50 B.C., Julius Caesar was here conquering the Belgic tribes in a series of bloody little battles of his own. It’s hard to get a body count on that one, but rest assured it was high.
Why is it that during every turn of the great cosmic wheel, some idiot decides that they want to rule the world and they start stealing their neighbors’ land? It never works. Every empire eventually falls. Caesar was going to conquer the world. Napoleon was going to conquer the world. Hitler was going to conquer the world. As far as I can tell, World War I started because everybody was waiting to see who was up next to try to conquer the world. Each player thought it was going to be somebody else. The tension built as each country got more and more paranoid about the people living next door. Then, finally, when the tension reached its peak, a disaffected student killed Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, who nobody gave a shit about, and everybody just started shooting.
What is it about these men, and let’s be clear it’s always men, who have this insatiable need to control everything? All this battling is just a game being played by the chosen few. They use the uncountable young men conscripted as soldiers as expendable pieces on a board. None of these boys has an identity in their leaders’ eyes, they are just part of a battalion, a squad, or even an army. The generals all figure out beforehand what percentage of them they are likely to lose in an engagement and if it seems like an acceptable number, off they go. George R.R. Martin really got it right in Game of Thrones. No matter how many times the attempt fails, someone will always try again. It never ends.
“I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal,” has been sung by kids for over two hundred years. Even back in Caesar’s time, kids sang a song that, translated from Latin, goes, “You’ll be king if you do the right thing and if you don’t, you won’t.” We grow up with this idea that somebody is going to be the king and from the time we can barely walk, we start practicing for it right away. Most of us, however, will never be a player. Most of us just end up as disposable pawns.
After the Battle of Waterloo, once the few high-ranking corpses had been dragged off the field, a great many of the remaining inconsequential dead soldiers were ground up for fertilizer. You don’t get more nameless than that.
To play the game as a top player, you need to be able to convince everyone that you should be followed. You won’t get anywhere if the troops won’t go out there and risk their lives to win for you. A masterful leader must make the masses of men on the ground believe that they are fighting for what is right and just and that they are fighting for themselves and their families.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
When he says, “He that outlives this day,” he is very clearly saying that many won’t. In fact, about 6,000 French soldiers lost their lives that day and 400 Englishmen. That seems like a remarkable victory for Henry. Only 400 guys? Amazing! Four hundred individual men with families and lives were snuffed out. It’s considered one of the great victories in military history.
I am writing this from our hotel room in Bastogne, France, which was the central focal point of the Ardennes Offensive. Agincourt is the battle that took place in 1415 that Henry V is psyching his troops up for in the Shakespearean quote above. I just mapped it on my phone. It is yet another fight on this same beleaguered soil. Agincourt is only about an hour and a half west of here.
Franklin Roosevelt got most of the United States behind him and the second World War by speaking directly to everybody in their homes. For the first time in history, a President’s voice could be heard in every house in America with a radio. FDR’s fireside chats made everyone feel that it was their duty to help their national family. He didn’t need to yell or orate, he just talked because he was right there in the room with you and everybody believed him and signed up.
During the Battle of the Bulge, my father rarely had any concept of what was going on around him. He was given orders, so he knew what he was expected to do at any given moment, and he did it. He wasn’t aware of what the overall objectives were, only that they had to defeat the Germans. He laid telephone and telegraph lines where and when he was told to.
In late winter or early spring of 1945, he caught the flu and was taken off the front line and sent to the 87th division hospital which had been set up in an old brick school building. Because he was infectious, he was kept away from the great majority of wounded men in a semi-private room. Each evening while he was getting better, an officer would show up with maps sprinkled with big colored marks to show how the entire division was arrayed in the area and which units were where. The practical reason for him being shown this was so that when he was finally discharged, he’d know where he had to go. His unit was in constant motion. The officer would also talk about what had happened that day in the area and how things stood on the entire Northern European front. In my father’s words, “It was the only time I was ever in the army that anyone bothered to give us such information.”
Don’t get me wrong, Hitler needed to be stopped. Period. By whatever means. I am sure that most of the rest of the tyrants needed to be stopped, too. The thing is, the wars are never against just one man, they are against the legions of people that the one megalomaniacal person manages to convince to follow him. That Hitler, Caesar, Napoleon, and the rest were allowed to get to the position that they achieved is where I think we fail as creatures. What is it about us as a species, that makes us all want to attach ourselves to these guys like sheep? We keep rising up to stop them with an unimaginable and devastatingly tragic cost, but afterward we just immediately turn around and create the next one.
It hasn’t stopped. As I write this, Putin is still trying to take over his part of the world by laying waste to Ukraine. Towns and cities there are being reduced to rubble. Thousands, if not millions, have been forced to flee their homes. In the US, we are watching our former President sink deeper and deeper into his legal quagmire and there are still millions of people who would readily support him in another bid for the Presidency. His motives should now, after all the January 6th hearings, be crystal clear to any sentient being on this planet. As most of us already suspected, he is not interested in the rule of law any more than these other despotic guys were. He wants to make his own laws and live the way he wants. He thought Hitler was a great guy.
We should want better for ourselves. Why do we so often choose the worst?
This has been quite a week of travel. So far, we’ve spent an afternoon in Waterloo, a morning in Verdun and we are going to spend tomorrow morning in Bastogne. All three places have immersive-experience museums. When we decided to make this trip and follow my father’s wartime path through the Ardennes, I was prepared for Bastogne, but Waterloo and Verdun caught me by surprise. It’s a lot to take in.
War is senseless. That shouldn’t be news to anyone. Just how senseless, however, has been driven home to me over these last few days. The area around Verdun is beautiful with rolling hills and valleys, open meadows filled with flowers, and wooded areas. During the 300 days of the battle, every single tree had been destroyed by shelling. Whole villages were blown off the face of the planet. All there was, was mud. And bodies. What is there now, more than 100 years later, is a 42,000-acre area that has no human inhabitants. It is called Zone Rouge, or The Red Zone. The French government decided that it was far too costly to dig up all the munitions and unexploded shells that had sunk deep into the mud, so they simply abandoned it. To this day, there are occasionally explosions around its periphery when an unlucky farmer happens to hit something.
Some small parts of the vast Verdun acreage have been mostly cleared and that is where the graveyards and monuments are. There were nine towns in the Verdun area that no longer exist. We visited one called Fleury-devant-Douaumont. It has no buildings, only scattered rubble, and deep scars on the earth remain from the intense shelling over that awful year. It is a ghost town but still has a living Mayor. The current Mayor is Jean-Pierre Laparra.
They built an ossuary in the 1930s to hold the unidentified bones of the French and German soldiers who lost their lives there. It is enormous. There are small glass windows through which you can see the piled-up bones of at least 130,000 men.
I am eternally grateful that my father and the millions of other soldiers from the Allied countries fought to stop the armies of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. The atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been what ended war forever. Alas, they only paused our warring for about five years until the conflict in Korea started.
We don’t really seem to ever learn. What keeps us all going, I think, is the hope that someday we will.
Another wonderful post, Richard. Your history lessons are both filled with facts and personal information - that is what makes them so compelling.
Thank you for this wrenching and down-to-earth assessment.