All Quiet

 From 1914 to 1918, the European world was caught up in a dreadful war. It was the worst war in human history. It was ultimately the stupidest war in human history. . . 

But from our perspective, the armies of the German kaiser had to be defeated, so we Americans sent an Expeditionary Force over there to help the Brits and the French finish off those (at the time) deranged krauts. In my novel, Smoke, the last page (spoiler alert) describes a young American who sees, for the first and only time, the grave of his own father in a grassy field in Belgium.

But I digress, just as the world does from time to time.

I mean, that first world war was a titanic act of stupidity, initially, in its beginning, before it devolved full circle into a challenge of necessarily heroic proportions for the Allies who showed the kaiser who was really in charge in the 20th century!

At least, until the little Austrian colonel with the purloined swastika came along and cranked it all up again. 

But Germans are not like that any more, thank God!

I say that first world war was a titanic stupidity because of the way it started: In 1914, one gunman in Sarajevo, Serbia, assassinated an Austrian archduke;  a few weeks later the German kaiser sent his armies packing into Belgium and France to raise hell for the next four years. It just doesn’t make any sense.

This morning I was reading All Quiet on the Western Front, the classic (anti)war novel about that first world war. Erich Maria Remarque, a soldier in the German army during that war, had published his reflection upon that war in 1928.

I was reading this All Quiet classic this morning, this Saturday morning between Crucifixion Friday and Resurrection Sunday, or as they say in the wide world, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

I was contemplating writing this, because the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was a bloody event, like that war, and because it was a world-changing event, like that war, and because on that Saturday between crucifixion  and Resurrection, the tomb in which Christ’s body had been laid was, no doubt, quiet . . . all quiet, all quiet on the Christian front.

We have come a long time since those days, those days of 37 A.D. and now 2024 A.D. And as the tomb was quiet on that Saturday, my house is quiet on this Saturday morning as I write this in North Carolina, far, far from that garden tomb, far from those European battlefields that Remarque had written about a hundred and ten years ago. 

Here’s one memory that Remarque included in his classic novel: 

“The days go by. On a foggy morning another of the Russians is buried; almost every day one of them dies. I am on guard during the burial, the prisoners saying a chorale, they sing in parts, and it sounds as if there were no voices, but an organ far away on the moor. The burial is quickly over.”

But sad to say, in this present day, now the Russians, fiercely driven by the deranged vladimir putin, have degenerated to cruel aggression; they have reversed themselves and are now doing what the german kaiser had tried to do to Belgium and France in 1914 and then again when the little nazi colonel had tried to do in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, France, and Russia again.

But on this Saturday morning in America, 2024 A.D. I reflect on all of it, pondering the temporary quietness of the war front in that first world world war, and the quietness of that tomb in Jerusalem long ago when Jesus Christ was laid into it—but only for two days.

You believe that? I do. That’s my story and i’m stickin’ to it.

Smoke