‘The Middle Children of History’ Part 1 of 3.
A reflection on masculinity through three examples.
Continuing my examples in ‘threes’; here is the first of a triumvirate of observations and encounters that I have experienced, directly or indirectly.
The title quote comes from ‘Fight Club’, a movie by David Fincher, but originally a book by Chuck Palahniuk.1
Martial arts maintain and subconsciously present an aura, a mystique of edgy roughness that panders to a particular type of masculine fantasy; one that belays a fault line in male identity, a feeling of unfulfilled meaning, a vacuum whose origin exists in culture that goes back through millennia and perhaps needs unpacking – but not in a short blog post.
So here I introduce to you the first of three models of maleness that track back into previous generations. Two of them are true representations of individuals who I have witnessed, spoken to and experienced, and the other one is a composite of more than one person.
No individuals will be named, mostly because I really don’t know who they were, but that doesn’t matter, it’s the testimony that counts.
Royal Army Medical Corp 1914-1918.
I was a teenager when I worked on my grandfather’s farm and was given the mind-numbing job of rotavating the fourteen acres or so of the top field, the furthest flung of my grandfather’s rented property.
It was cold and sometimes the sleet and hail were horizontal in the wind. The tractor had no cab and was therefore open to the elements and trundled round noisily at about five miles an hour, it was so bitterly cold and completely monotonous.
I had hessian sacks wrapped round my legs with bale twine to keep out the chill and an old RAF uniform jacket to keep me warm. It was pure torture; my hands felt frozen to the steering wheel.
The field backed on to a line of non-descript old folk’s bungalows; flat, in drab brick, the equivalent at that time of what we now call ‘sheltered accommodation’.
One day, at about 11am I spotted a distant figure waving at me from the back gardens of the bungalows. Curious, I killed the engine and trudged across the field to see who it was gesturing to me.
At the edge of the property, I was met by a little old chap, wizened and quite frail. He had a tea tray with two mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits. I got the impression he was happy to see me and was pleased to offer comfort and refreshment – he said he had been watching me from his kitchen window.
I was so grateful to be able to warm my hands on the mug of tea and quite content to eat his biscuits.
From then on, each day at 11am he would appear (It was a real pleasure to see his distant figure beckoning to me).
Over time he told me little bits of his life. I knew that his wife had died ten years previous, he was very much on his own and that he had spent the majority of his working career as head gardener at the hall attached to my grandfather’s farm (which had, by then been turned into a recovery hospital). The two current gardeners remembered him as their boss and that he was known as a bit of a taskmaster and a disciplinarian.
Over time he became more forthcoming about his past.
He mentioned the Great War (never WW1, just ‘the Great War’). He said that he was a medical orderly at a field hospital, somewhere in France or Belgium, in the Royal Army Medical Corps. The hospital was described by him as a large tent close to the front line.
One day, his normally friendly and jovial nature turned serious. He clearly had something he wanted to share, something confidential, that maybe he needed to get off his chest.
He mentioned that one night, all those years ago, the medical officer in charge, a doctor, took him to one side and gave him specific instructions; he pointed out a number of camp beds, each one occupied with British soldiers in various states of serious injury, these were men who the doctor had deemed were unlikely to survive.
His instructions were simple… when everything goes quiet; as quiet as it was ever going to get, ‘to drop a pillow over that man’s head, and hold it there until he stops breathing’. He said that this went on night after night.
Clearly, this form of killing had stayed with him and must have been haunting him and playing on his conscience. Perhaps, in telling me he was unburdening himself, as much as he was able to. How that worked out for him, I have no idea.
Later on, I spoke to the gardeners about him. They said that, in a joking way, he would often try and gross them out with graphic encounters of treating young fellows for venereal disease during the war; with their genitals ravaged by gonorrhoea or syphilis and the mercury ‘cure’ that existed before penicillin. Not that it made any difference; within weeks or months they were cut down by machinegun fire or blown to bits in the carnage of the western front. The end of a generation.
This man’s experience was clearly so far removed from the world of the modern male; he was almost like a creature from a distant planet.
I am reminded that working on a farm, I was not a stranger to the concept of ‘putting something out of its misery’ an act of responsibility and mercy, something I had seen and done, but obviously never at a human level. I won’t even allow my mind to go there; this is the place of what Jung called, ‘the shadow self’.
Not so long ago I found myself in a classroom full of teenagers, bright kids whose regular teacher had set them the poems of Wilfred Owen and had supplied a very general and simplified PowerPoint that I had to go through with them to explain something of the experiences of the average soldier during WW1. I found myself frustrated with the narrative and so decided to swerve the lesson and recount this particular story… you could have heard a pin drop. I wondered and waited for their parents to complain; but fortunately, nothing happened. (I left out the part about venereal disease).
It would be a fair guess that he didn’t know what he was letting himself in for when he signed up, neither did his pals. I am pretty sure that in their heads they thought it was going to be cavalry charges and open-ground heroics, and, maybe, that it would be all over by Christmas. This new form of warfare was uncharted and beyond human comprehension, and then they had to come back to some form of ‘normality’. How was that even possible?
When I hear people talking about ‘Warrior Quotes’ on-line and in social media, particularly martial artists (remember it’s supposed to be ‘The Art of War’), I wonder if this was what they were thinking of? I somehow doubt it.
Part 2 ‘Adrenalin Junky’, coming soon.
Photo credit: Dressing station, Ypres, Belgium 1917. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
Quote ‘Fight Club’, spoken by Tyler Durden: “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”