An Acceptable Warrior Read online

  Other Books by Earle Looker

  The White House Gang

  This Man Roosevelt

  Colonel Roosevelt, Private Citizen

  The American Way: Franklin Roosevelt in Action

  Government – Not Politics (ghost-written with Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

  Looking Forward (ghost-written with Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

  Revolt (with Antonina Hansell Looker)

  Colonel Roosevelt and the White House Gang (with Arthur Hayne Mitchell)

  Other Books by Arthur Hayne Mitchell

  Ecology of Hose’s Langur (Presbytis hosei) in Logged and

  Unlogged Dipterocarp Forest of Northeast Borneo

  Colonel Roosevelt and the White House Gang (with Earle Looker)

  River Myths and Legends of Bengal

  AN ACCEPTABLE

  WARRIOR

  Earle Looker

  and

  Arthur Hayne Mitchell

  Copyright © 2017 Arthur Hayne Mitchell.

  Cover: Troops on the Western Front, Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Fôret de Boult, Ardennes, 1918.

  Photo source: Alamy, ww1facts.net

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Balboa Press

  A Division of Hay House

  1663 Liberty Drive

  Bloomington, IN 47403

  www.balboapress.com

  1 (877) 407-4847

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

  ISBN: 978-1-5043-6756-1 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5043-6758-5 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5043-6757-8 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016916790

  Balboa Press rev. date: 04/21/2017

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1 THE 11TH HOUR OF THE 11TH DAY OF THE 11TH MONTH

  Chapter 1: Surging Up Out of Pit and Burrow

  Chapter 2: The Mad Frenchman

  Chapter 3: A Chaplain’s Duty

  Chapter 4: Silver Eagles

  Chapter 5: Train to Gare de l’Est

  PART 2 PARIS HIATUS

  Chapter 6: La Ville Lumière

  Chapter 7: Revolt against Reality

  Chapter 8: A Ride in the Bois

  Chapter 9: Suitable Dead Letters

  PART 3 BRUGES FURLOUGH

  Chapter 10: Street of the Virtuous Laughing Girls

  Chapter 11: Vicar of Bermondsey

  Chapter 12: Cakes and Things

  Chapter 13: English Rose

  Chapter 14: Night of the Long Neck

  Chapter 15: Priest of the Street

  PART 4 THE GRATITUDE OF LABOR

  Chapter 16: Wrestling with Proteus

  Chapter 17: Blue Mountains

  Chapter 18: Burdens of Sisyphus

  Chapter 19: In the Beginning

  About the Authors

  To my sons Andrew and Thomas and

  for our grandfathers, Thomas, George, Arthur and Earle.

  We are eternally grateful.

  “Love the earth and sun and animals,

  Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,

  Stand up for the stupid and crazy,

  Devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,

  argue not concerning God, have patience

  and indulgence toward the people …

  And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

  ~ Walt Whitman, Preface to “Leaves of Grass”

  “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

  ~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

  PROLOGUE

  “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

  ~ Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

  Armistice Day, Paris, by Frank Boggs, 1918

  There is an obscure corner of my office where boxes of items no longer needed but impossible to throw out are stored, sharing a cover of dust and neglect. But in July 2015, to my surprise, I unearthed a yellow, stained, ancient typed manuscript in an old wooden box tucked away among the other seemingly irrelevant dust-covered items. Although undated, it must have been more than 75 years old. Throw it out or keep it? I blew off the dust from the yellowed pages and began to read.

  I never knew my grandfather. I met him once at the train station in Alexandria, Virginia, when I was a boy; he died in 1976. But I always admired him, a flawed genius. He clearly excelled as a wordsmith. After having become thoroughly engrossed in his story, I knew what I had to do.

  The story begins in France soon after the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 – Armistice on the Western Front. Signed by the Allies and Germany in a railroad car outside Compiègne, the Armistice thus terminated hostilities within six hours of signature and ended the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Shared by the U.S. forces with the French Fourth Army, Meuse-Argonne was the principal engagement of the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, engaging 1.2 million American soldiers. Its successful objective was to capture the railway hub at Sedan and thus break the railway network essential to supporting the German Army in France and Flanders. It was the largest frontline commitment of troops by the U.S. Army during the war, also its deadliest, resulting in 26,277 American deaths and 95,786 wounded over 47 days of intense, bloody combat.

  The story progresses over four months, following Armistice on the Western Front, through a succession of adventures encountered by a thoughtful young American soldier and journalist from Virginia, David Atwood, and chronicles his mental state from disillusionment, lost love, hopelessness and depression toward the possibility of ultimately coming to terms with himself and acquiring a renewed sense of purpose. Any sensitive war veteran of any age will likely find some aspects of him or herself in these pages – and a hopeful promise of personal transformation.

  Bruges figures heavily in the story. The beauty and dark mystery of this ancient medieval Belgian town is vividly described. It was a town much loved by my grandfather and where, before the war, he had abortively studied art before returning home and subsequently entering the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps to serve in World War I in France. While often visiting Paris, he stayed with his Aunt Suzanne, wife of the Am
erican sculptor, Charles Wayland Bartlett (1865 - 1925), who although living most of his life in France, became best known for his numerous monumental sculptural projects in America in addition to the statue of Lafayette, completed in 1907, placed in front of the Louvre. It was at his aunt’s home in Paris, during the many visits from writers, musicians and painters that my grandfather became aware of and was stimulated and captivated by creative artistic expression.

  An excerpt shows David Atwood’s reaction when allowed to escape the war for furlough in Bruges:

  “To go on leave! All at once David knew how greatly he desired it, how necessary it had become if he were to forget his obsession with these maudlin dead-letters and continual reminders of death, if he were not to turn these accusations, in desperation, into fact. Where to go? If it could not be Paris, David thought, where else was there to go? Where could he regain something of the strength drained from him during the fighting? The moment rest was possible he felt his weakness. Where was there nothing to remind him of war? Now he was more than ever aware there had been swift terrible glimpses and cries that had been frozen within his memory by fear during the action, incidents that only now were beginning to thaw, almost to putrefy. He had not felt the full horror and disgust. He had taken these in his stride, stepped over them, but now the purpose of action had gone from him, and he was thinking more and more of them. Where could he get perspective upon what he had done, upon the effect of the past on the present and imagine what might be the future? It came to him that already he had made such a decision and filed it away, the result of some conversation, some enthusiastic comment he had heard of the quiet and peace, the mellow light and shade of a place.”

  My contribution to this, my grandfather’s, original work was to retype, liberally edit based on my own questionable judgement and grammatical preferences, consolidate and select chapters from two very different versions of the novel, originally drafted as ‘Some Count Twice’, insert chapter heading quotes, with the hope of deriving some pertinent inspiration, add chapter titles, change some names, places, sequence and circumstances. Several significant sections were missing and had to be imagined and reconstructed. Yet, this book is very much a collaboration between myself and my grandfather – in spirit.

  The story remains very true to the original – my grandfather’s story – written by someone who had intimately lived through the mud, blood, disillusionments and horrors of the fields and trenches of World War I on the Western Front and survived. It emerged from the depths of experience and his heart, and I have not altered that intention. I now deeply love and admire the man.

  Another excerpt expresses the horror of David’s best friend being killed next to him:

  “Alan seemed to dissolve in a bloody mist. When the bullet struck him there must have been that same burst of incandescence that made more deeply black and lonely the darkness that followed. That it was when the soul, or something like one, cries out to God for help but knows it cries in vain for in a dream a scream cannot be uttered. At the same instant, and all with it in the brilliance and the darkness, the heart grows huge with a leap as violent as some monster wrenching within the body to force its way out.”

  This is the story of a personal journey – a young soldier’s path up and out of an uncaring universe toward spiritual awakening and individual self-actualization – discovering his promise and tendency to become actually what he is potentially, to become everything he is capable of becoming, to seek the frontiers of his creativity and strive to reach higher levels of consciousness, happiness, awareness and wisdom, to potentially becoming a fully conscious human – a grateful “spiritual warrior” – or will he?

  A.H.M.

  Fairfax, Virginia

  October 2016

  “It is the human habit to think in centuries

  from a grandparent to a grandchild

  because it just does take about a hundred years

  for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,”

  ~ Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein

  PART 1

  THE 11TH HOUR OF THE 11TH DAY

  OF THE 11TH MONTH

  “We have ravaged women, burned houses,

  slain children, exacted ransom from everyone,

  eaten their cows, oxen, sheep,

  stolen their geese, pigs, capons,

  drunk their wines, violated churches …

  For God’s sake, let us march on the pagans!”

  ~ Bertrand du Guesclin,

  Legendary Fourteenth Century Knight

  “It is forbidden to kill;

  therefore all murderers are punished

  unless they kill in large numbers

  and to the sound of trumpets.”

  ~ Voltaire

  “We should feel fed up with the violence and killing going on around us.

  If a human being is killed by an animal, it’s sad,

  but if a human being is killed by another human being it’s unthinkable.

  We have to make a special effort to think of each other as fellow human beings,

  as our brothers and sisters.”

  ~ Dalai Lama

  CHAPTER 1

  Surging Up Out of Pit and Burrow

  “My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.”

  ~ Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Allied Commander during the final year of World War I

  Trenches of the Western Front, 1917 (iowapublicradio.org)

  Western Front, Meuse-Argonne Offensive, somewhere between Vouziers and Fôret de Boult, Ardennes, France, 11:00 a.m., 11.11.1918

  David felt the roughness of his hands, without touching one with the other, smelled his own sweaty uncleanliness, but now there no longer remained trace of that familiar, though indescribable, scent of fear, which men had learned, like animals, to recognize. He felt now what he knew to be his own reviving strength, flowing from some spring tapped by elation. Thus a soul might feel when liberated from its filthy fighting body.

  For the first time in these months he had worn it, he was irked by the heaviness of his flat steel helmet. But when he tipped it forward as if putting his face into a basin, and off, and kneaded his close-clipped scalp, he found himself as buoyant as a soul might be when emancipated from its body. Every sense seemed extraordinarily acute. The responsibilities of his fighting command had dropped away; the fighting was done. There would be no more action; he felt himself in a vacuum. Though now well into the second hour of it, as verified by a glance at the watch upon his wrist, that crack of calm at eleven o’clock still was like the mute pause after life is taken but prolonged, he thought, because so many men had died.

  “I’m alive!” he heard himself say aloud. “I can think!”

  Still he was unprepared wholly to accept reality when it so suddenly presented everything for which he had hoped. Reality seemed deceptive; it was as incredible now as it had been terrible. He wondered if this armistice might be nothing but a projection of his imagination despite its abundance of authentic detail, un settlement at last of reason from sounds and sights and shocks, a tripping of the mind as if from an electrical overload. He was aware that for some time he had been evading the full impact of fact by looking away when he came upon its examples, sprawled so inhumanly without decency or dignity.

  He realized now he had acquired the veteran habit of self-deception even to the point of avoiding those paths that led through the pleasant sheltered copses and sun splashed ravines, so that he might remain in ignorance of what they so frequently contained, stenching to heaven, and still count them islands of peace and beauty in the field. He knew he was becoming more and more of a fatalist, made more reasonable the ghastly details of a battle action. It allowed the feeling he might be fulfilling his own personal part of the inevitable. He had even come to tolerate the growing apathy of hi
s men, for like them he was beginning to prefer to live in periods of blankness divided by eating and excrement.

  ‘But this means peace!’ he thought. The war was over. And it must be the last one. Perhaps for five hundred centuries men had fought throughout Europe, but now the lessons from it seemed too obvious; war could never be remembered without shame, spoken of without disgust. It was unthinkable it could ever be a part of life again. These seemed facts and final.

  But that was finished now. He was one who had finished it. Nothing had been of such supreme importance for centuries. There could hardly have been a greater moment in which to be alive. How many millions of the dead had fought for this? Were they deprived of knowledge of the victory? Could not their souls rush back, whatever the distance, to these bloody ditches to shout and to leap?

  Even now they must have the news at home. Joy would flash across the sea to embrace the survivors – ‘I’m a survivor!’ he cried to himself – with the passion of hope come true. Sorrow would fling itself down in the mud with the abandon of another farewell seen again in memory. David said aloud to himself, “You never thought like this before, did you?” How much of it, he wondered, could be recollection of talks with Alan, his stimulation? How much was his own, stirred by the events of the day? How much might be Alan’s own thought struggling still to express itself? And what would Alan most urgently desire next to do? No doubt: take leave to meet this woman in Paris.

  David paced back and forth across the clearing before the hut as if he had taken the place of a sentry before his command post. Alan’s reticence when he had given him the address had been one which David remembered he had noted and respected, asking no questions. Alan had said only that he had no longer any close next of kin, as the records would show. Could the impulse, David questioned now, have come from some premonition?