Uproot evil in the fields you know

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Alan Jacobs, a scholar and writer I particularly admire, has an interesting post on Tolkien and the possibility—nay, inevitability—of healing in his works. In discussing the way that "all victories over evil are contingent and limited and temporary . . . and the forgetfulness of all the races of Middle Earth tends to reinforce those limits," Jacobs quotes Gandalf from near the end of The Lord of the Rings

 
Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
— Gandalf in The Return of the King
 

This is a frank, humble assessment of what people can do about evil. This has been on my mind a lot recently, both for longstanding reasons of my own and as I've been working over a post on the resilience of Marxism as an ideology despite its body count. Even beyond Marxism or leftism generally, people of all political persuasions tend to take concrete political or legal problems and abstract and universalize them immediately—as step one of the debate. All problems therefore become existential problems. All mistakes or disagreements become signs of fatal bad faith. All problems become problems that threaten the very fabric of the universe. You don't have to look far to find examples.

Gandalf's words here also happen to harmonize with a theme I've been mulling over for a work-in-progress: a novel about guilt and original sin, "a story with no good guy" as I've described it to a friend. What do to about evil—not just "systemic" evil, the activist concern du jour, or evil as it exists in the whole world, but evil in my own life? That's uncomfortably close. But a humble recognition that we can't solve all problems is the first step to solving some of them. Rather than aiming high, at unachievable universalist goals, find an evil in your neighborhood, something you can actually do something about, and face it. Or, as Admiral McRaven and Jordan Peterson have put it recently, "Make your bed" and "Clean your room."

Finally, also harmonizing with Gandalf, is this challenge from St. Paul that has goaded and bothered me since I rediscovered it last fall:

 
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.
— I Thessalonians 4:11-12
 

Jacobs concludes his post by reflecting on how "tricky" Gandalf's vision is: "neither . . . succumb to despair (like Denethor) nor indulge the presumptuous delusion that one’s victories can be everlasting, but rather . . . live, simply, in hope." If there's a more necessary countercultural message today than "lead a quiet life," "mind your own business," "uproot evil in the fields you know," and "live in hope," I don't know what it is.

Confederate heraldry

Turned this up in a bit of late research for a minor part of Griswoldville.

The novel's protagonist, young Georgie Wax, is consumed with knights and medieval stories and takes a keen interest in heraldry as a result. After being called up to the Georgia militia, he passes hours of boredom trying to create a blazon—or official, formulaic description of a coat of arms—for his unit's battle flag

Here's the flag's original designer, William Porcher Miles, in a letter to General Beauregard in 1861, describing the heraldic principles in his new design:

Actual Confederate battle flag, not the ones you see flapping behind pickup trucks.

Actual Confederate battle flag, not the ones you see flapping behind pickup trucks.

This was my favorite. The three colors of red, white, and blue were preserved in it. It avoided the religious objection about the cross (from the Jews and many Protestant sects), because it did not stand out so conspicuously as if the cross had been placed upright . . . 

Besides, in the form I proposed, the cross was more heraldic than ecclesiastical, it being the 'saltire' of heraldry, and significant of strength and progress (from the Latin salto, to leap). The stars ought always to be white, or argent, because they are then blazoned 'proper' (or natural color). Stars, too, show better on an azure field than any other. Blue stars on a white field would not be handsome or appropriate. The 'white edge' (as I term it) to the blue is partly a necessity to prevent what is called 'false blazoning,' or a solecism in heraldry, viz., blazoning color on color, or metal on metal. It would not do to put a blue cross, therefore, on a red field. Hence the white, being metal argent, is put on the red, and the blue put on the white. The introduction of white between the blue and red, adds also much to the brilliancy of the colors, and brings them out in strong relief.

Blazon, saltire, azure, argent—heraldry relies on a vast, arcane vocabulary of largely French origin in a convoluted and rigid syntax meant to preserve the design of a given coat of arms with the permanence of a molecular formula.

Thus, the flag of England is Argent, a cross gules and the flag of Scotland is Azure, a saltire argent. And these are simple blazons. Entertain yourself sometime with more complicated ones.  

So here, as a special first look at Griswoldville, is what Georgie comes up with:

Gules, a saltire azure charged with thirteen mullets argent. I was unsure how to account for the fimbriations, the white borders of the cross, and occupied myself for hours sometimes in shifting this subordinary back and forth through my primitive blazon.

It's worth pointing out that the commonly repeated bit of lore that the flag's design stems from the St. Andrew's Cross of Scotland, because of the vast sea of Scots-Irish farmers who supposedly formed the backbone of the Confederate Army, doesn't enter into it. Just good, sound artistic principles within a body of established tradition here—with a few politico-religious considerations thrown in.

Miles's concluding paragraph to Beauregard begins with my favorite line in the letter: "But I am boring you with my pet hobby in the matter of the flag." What amateur vexillologist hasn't said some version of this?

Polybius on the value of learning history

The Greek historian Polybius (c. 200-c. 118 BC) on a stele of the 2nd century BC.

The Greek historian Polybius (c. 200-c. 118 BC) on a stele of the 2nd century BC.

 
There are two roads to reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through those of others: the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful.
— Polybius
 

The most difficult task I undertake as a history instructor is not preparing tests, lecturing, or even grading essays, but convincing my students that history is worth learning for its own sake—gratuitously, regardless of its "practical value." (There's a sinister phrase we're far too used to.) I don't know how well I have succeeded—the students who come out of my classes loving history usually loved it or were at least interested in it when they arrived—but one "practical" application that persuades at least some of them that history is worth studying is the concept of history as memory. 

I introduce this idea at the beginning of every semester with another quotation from the classics, in this case Cicero:

 
Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the worth of a man’s life, unless it is interwoven with the memory of ancient things from a greater age?
— Cicero, Orator Ad M. Brutum 120
 

To make this more explicit yet, here's the excerpt from Polybius's Histories above in its full context, in which Polybius explains one of his purposes for writing:

I record these things in the hope of benefiting my readers. There are two roads to reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through those of others: the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful. One should never therefore voluntarily choose the former, for it makes reformation a matter of great difficulty and danger; but we should always look out for the latter, for thereby we can without hurt to ourselves gain a clear view of the best course to pursue. It is this which forces us to consider that the knowledge gained from the study of true history is the best of all educations for practical life. For it is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs.

I've been horribly burned and injured by things and, if my daughter and son, who haven't lived through anything like that yet, will listen to my stories, they don't have to. In the same way, if you can't find anything else to "get out of" history, realize that you can at least learn from others' mistakes and, with wisdom and judicious application to your own life and circumstances, avoid them. History, rightly studied, is acquired maturity.

A bit more practical, realistic, and—I think—moral and hopeful than the grim pragmatism of Santayana's axiom, which has become a modern cliche: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Solo

The evening of Memorial Day I had the chance to see Solo with a friend of mine. I wasn't clamoring to see it, especially since I had intermittently kept up with news of its disastrous production history, so I went in primarily hoping for a few hours of entertainment and a chance to hang out with a friend. My expectations were low. 

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The movie surprised me—I actually enjoyed it. It's not a perfect film by any means, but it's not the mess I would have predicted based on the behind-the-scenes stories picked up by the Hollywood press. In fact, it's a mostly fun romp through the margins—the Outer Rim?—of a familiar mythic world. 

Among the things Solo does well is create the illusion of a shopworn reality, the much-discussed "world building" of internet nerds. The locations feel lived-in, established, as if they could carry on just fine without our visit. This worked well even in minor parts: the woman working in customs on Corellia and the Imperial recruiter both felt like real people with desk jobs and other things to do. There was also a grit to some of the locations that felt welcome, especially after the shiny digital sterility of the prequels. (For all its flaws, Solo is still better than any of those.) I especially liked the muddy dreckworld—which Wookieepedia informs me is Mimban—where Han serves in the Imperial Army. That handful of scenes feels like a glimpse from behind the lines of an actual army at work, and Han's desperation to get out is palpable. 

I also liked the western motifs worked into the visuals and the story. The same way Rogue One unpacked and isolated the war movie elements of the original films, Solo pays homage to the western with gambling in dangerous saloons, remote and desolate landscapes, a train-top robbery by a team of bandits, and even the iconic spaghetti western shot of a hand dangling ready by a holster. The film could have done with a little more of this, I think, but I enjoyed it and it meshed surprisingly well with the heist elements of the plot.

The acting is mostly good as well. Woody Harrelson, adding his subtle Texan attitude to the mix, was very good, and Donald Glover's young, pompous Lando was entertaining. Paul Bettany, who was only brought in for the massive reshoots under new director Ron Howard, was good as the villain despite not having much to work with in the way of character. 

Finally, it was nice to see Chewbacca in a pretty prominent role, and his chemistry with Han was the best thing about Han in the film. Chewie even got a bit of a dramatic arc involving the sad fate of his people, who the Empire had relocated from their homes as forced labor—Stalin style. The sight of other Wookiees late in the film was unexpectedly moving.

All of these elements made Solo enjoyable. I was entertained. I liked it. But this was in spite of some evident flaws that I have to point out. I'll just list some:

  • Some of the other performances were just passable. Emilia Clarke's Qi'ra comes to mind. She worked well enough with Han but they didn't have enough chemistry to get me invested in the fate of their relationship. 
  • Related: dramatic irony is a problem—we all know Han is single and on the prowl by the time of the originals.
  • The cinematography, especially through the middle sections of the films, is ugly. Bright, hazy backgrounds leave the foreground actors stranded in murk and shadow, especially in any scene with windows. Strange choices, especially since DP Bradford Young did such good work setting mood and atmosphere in Arrival.
  • L3, the SJD (Social Justice Droid), was intensely annoying. Imagine a woke Jar Jar Binks who is up on his activist hashtags.
  • I couldn't for a moment accept Alden Ehrenreich as a young Harrison Ford. Ehrenreich, who was so good as singing cowboy Hobie Doyle in Hail, Caesar! was miscast here. 

This last point is the wound at the center of the film. Ehrenreich, who supposedly required remedial acting lessons for Howard's reshoots (an exaggeration according to him), is clearly doing his best, but he's just wrong for the part. I didn't believe he was the same Han Solo we've seen before, because I couldn't. I'd be curious to see what another frontrunner for the part, Ansel Elgort, would have done with it.

Those things aside, I still want to emphasize how much I enjoyed Solo. By the end of the first act, as Han and Qi'ra race to escape their home planet, I had bought in. It wasn't without reservation, and the film's flaws still stuck out, but I enjoyed it enough that I was glad to overlook those and take the movie on its own terms. With two "A Star Wars Story" films out now—the first of which I consider a success and this one an interesting if unnecessary and insubstantial bit of backstory—I'm interested to see where future installments go. 

Memorial Day postscript

Thanks to everyone who picked up a discounted Kindle copy of Dark Full of Enemies over the weekend! I appreciate my readers and hope you all enjoy the book!

Memorial Day Kindle Countdown

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For Memorial Day weekend, my World War II adventure Dark Full of Enemies is on Kindle Countdown at Amazon! Today through Monday the Kindle edition is only 99¢. 

Dark Full of Enemies is the story of a team of Allied commandos sent into the Arctic night of Norway in December 1943. Tasked with destroying a Nazi-controlled hydroelectric dam, the team leader, Marine Captain Joe McKay, must confront the Germans, mysteriously uncooperative Resistance contacts, the darkness and unforgiving weather, and his own past as he struggles to complete his mission. 

Readers have praised Dark Full of Enemies as "an awesome read," "a must read for any and all book lovers everywhere," and "an Alistair MacLean-style, World War 2 commando mission story" that "is simple to the point of poetry." 

Read more about the book, more reader praise, and find links to order at the novel's page here, or visit the Kindle edition directly here to order it while it's discounted. 

Hope you all have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Unknown Soldiers

Last week I reviewed the Finnish film Talvisota (The Winter War) for Historical Movie Monday. At the time I had just started reading a novel taking place a year and a half after those events: Väinö Linna's Tuntematon sotilas, or Unknown Soldiers in its most recent English translation. I finished it earlier this week. It's one of the best war novels I've ever read.

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Unknown Soldiers follows a company of Finnish machine gunners through the Continuation War, from the beginning in the summer of 1941 to ceasefire in September 1944. The Finns coordinated their invasion of Soviet Russia with the German invasion, Operation Barbarossa, making the Finns ostensible German allies though they were never fully incorporated into the Axis. The goal was to recapture land taken from Finland by the Russians during the Winter War and occupy other territory to be used for postwar bargaining following German victory. 

None of this matters to the characters in Linna's novel. Not really. They know about most of this political background and occasionally discuss it, but their war is earthy, small-scale, and intensely personal. They are less concerned with Hitler's eventual success against Stalin than with how to handle the weight of a machine gun while marching, how to get enough to eat, how to make some extra cash while the war keeps them from home, how to keep out of the way of officers, and how to stay alive.

The novel begins and ends with the war. After a brief introduction to most of the major characters—there is no single "main" character—the machine gun company assembles and boards trucks for the front. They don't know where they're going or why at first, and a brief passage on God's destruction of a patch of forest through a wildfire is the last bit of omniscience we'll get until the very end. We experience the fog of war with the characters, seldom knowing any more than they do and taken by surprise just as often as they are. 

The characters are wonderfully drawn, and have apparently become bywords for particular kinds of people in Finland. Linna ranges up and down the chain of command, giving us moments with everyone from the company commander to new privates who arrive at the front a few years in. Lieutenant Lammio, a potential martinet but otherwise harmless, becomes company commander after the respected previous commander is killed just a few days into the war; in his new position, his negative traits come to the fore. Ensign Kariluoto, another officer, is naive and detached and has the novel's only real love story, budding from his infatuation with Sirkka, a hometown girl. There's Hietanen, a bluff, good-humored jokester who is nevertheless painfully shy around women, and Vanhala, a giggler, both of whom sober up over the next three years, especially as they rise to positions of leadership and find themselves tested. Lehto is aloof, a gruff, tough fighter, and Määtä, a short, quiet man, never shirks from hauling his squad's machine gun, quietly earning the respect of every man in the company. Lahtinen is a communist sympathizer who, like most Marxists, annoys his friends by interjecting mindless revolutionary formulae into ordinary smalltalk. Honkajoki is an eccentric trying to build a perpetual motion machine and who carries a bow and arrows. Mäkilä, the company quartermaster, is obsessively stingy with the men's gear: "He kept the shelves in impeccable order," Linna tells us, "stocked with all the finest equipment, unmarred by any worn-out items—which he distributed to the company." 

The novel is also, I should point out, wryly funny.

My two favorite characters were Rokka and Koskela. Antero "Antti" Rokka is an older man—in his early- to mid-thirties—a husband and father, a veteran of the Winter War, and a refugee from Kannas, part of the Finnish territory taken by the Russians. He has the most personal stake in the success of the invasion, and only when it becomes clear, in the last quarter of the book, that he'll never see his old farm again is his chipper, folksy demeanor shaken. He has no time for formalities and routinely offends superiors with a knowing "Lissen here." He is also the best soldier in the company, never shrinking from combat, and, in one famous episode, ambushing and wiping out a platoon of more than fifty Russian soldiers with just his submachine gun. (This incident, far from being a proto-Rambo bit of action, is based on an actual incident in which a soldier named Viljam Pylkäs gunned down over eighty Russians.) By the end of the novel, when he's one of the only major characters left, I really dreaded for his safety.

Koskela, on the other hand, is an officer who achieved his rank through merit, during the Winter War. He's strong, silent ("quiet Koski" is a nickname used a few times throughout), courageous, leads by example, loved by his men—all the qualities of a Greek hero without the arrogance or ostentation. As a leader, he also sets himself apart through the crucial ability to know what matters and what doesn't, an ability Lammio, who tries to court martial Rokka at one point, lacks. When leadership of the company finally devolves onto Koskela at the end of the book, as the Finns retreat from Russia and face encirclement, Koskela acts quickly and decisively and his men follow. It's a really stirring portrait of manhood and leadership.

Linna also has a lot to say about courage, but shows what courage really means in modern war. For every death-defying one-man charge on an enemy bunker by Koskela there are two or three small moments borne of split-second decisions by men forced into a corner: Lahtinen staying behind with a machine gun while his buddies evacuate wounded men, or Hietanen finding almost accidental courage in the face of a Russian tank attack: 

It was as if his entire consciousness had been frozen. It refused to consider the significance of these angry blasts, as if shielding itself from the terror such considerations would induce. Hietanen darted quickly behind the upturned roots.
Just then he heard Rokka's voice yelling, "Now shoot like hell!"
Hietanen was panicked and trembling with anxiety. The urgency ringing in Rokka's cry struck his over-excited consciousness as a warning of some new, unknown danger. Then he realized that the call was intended for the others.
It occurred to him he did not know if the mine was functional or not. He didn't know anything about it except that it was supposed to explode under pressure. It was a little late for sapper training, however. The time was now or never.
A vision of the tank tracks rolling beneath their fenders flashed through his mind. Right there ... right there ... And then he threw. The weight of the mine made aiming next to impossible, and a kind of prayer-like wish flickered through Hietanen's consciousness as he hurled it. . . . Only then did the precariousness of his own position suddenly dawn on him. Would the tree base be enough to protect him from the force of the blast? He sank down behind it, opened his mouth and pressed his hands against his ears.
Two seconds later, it was as if the pressure of the whole world suddenly descended upon him. He didn't experience the explosion as a sound, but rather as a numbing, thudding blast
and then his consciousness went dim.
When it returned, he saw that the vehicle was still, titled slightly to one side. . . . He just lay there, looking back and forth at the tank, then at the men, who were yelling at him, "Yes, Hietanen! Woo-hoo! Bravo, Hietanen!" The praise was all wasted, however; Hietanen couldn't hear a thing.

All the danger, brutality, humor, courage, excitement, dread, horror, irony, and businesslike slogging mirror the war and Finland's role in it. It's excellent.

A Finnish machine gun position overlooking no-man's-land, February 1944. Source: SA-kuva, the Finnish Defense Forces Wartime Photograph Archive.

A Finnish machine gun position overlooking no-man's-land, February 1944. Source: SA-kuva, the Finnish Defense Forces Wartime Photograph Archive.

I could say more about the plot, but the plot doesn't really matter. The war is, for the characters, a string of violent incidents that gradually winnows and thins the ranks, and that's what Linna, who lived through the Continuation War himself, shows us. He presents military life and war unromantically, as ceaselessly hard work with limited resources, work that can turn deadly with no warning. By the end of the war, even evacuation by ambulance isn't safe. The much-ballyhooed "random" deaths of George R.R. Martin's characters have nothing on Unknown Soldiers, and these soldiers' deaths are the more pitiful when they come because we care so much about them.

Unknown Soldiers has a well-deserved place in the pantheon of great war literature. It has the grim, clear-eyed detail of All Quiet on the Western Front and the sense of sheer, exhausting labor of The Naked and the Dead. But the novel Unknown Soldiers reminded me of most was Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn. Like Linna, Marlantes was a veteran of the war he wrote about and based his novel on his own experiences. Like Unknown Soldiers, Matterhorn takes a worm's-eye view of the conflict, bringing the reader into close quarters with a large cast of characters for hundreds of pages. And it's worth the trip.

Closing notes

Linna published his novel in 1954. It was first translated into English as The Unknown Soldier in 1957, and again in 2015 by Liesl Yamaguchi, which is the version I read. I neither speak nor read Finnish, but I understand this new translation is more faithful to the original than the first English version. Yamaguchi undertakes the thankless task of communicating the many local dialects and accents of Finnish, and mostly succeeds; Rokka's woodsy twang, to give one example, is instantly recognizable, though some of the others' slangy talk is distracting.

There have been three film adaptations: in 1955, a Finnish classic that airs every December on Finnish Independence Day; in 1985; and again in 2017, a version shot using natural light that looks strikingly beautiful. The 1955 original is available in its entirety on YouTube. The newest version is not apparently available on DVD or Blu-ray anywhere yet, but here's the trailer and a clip of Rokka's one-man massacre of that Russian platoon.

Tom Wolfe, RIP

Tom Wolfe, journalist, novelist, and gadfly of both professions, died yesterday at the age of 88.

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I first discovered Wolfe through his fiction. I have no idea where I heard about it or why I started it, but I read The Bonfire of the Vanities as a freshman or sophomore in college. It was a massive novel in tiny print—even tinier in the mass market paperback I had—that I plowed through an hour or two at a time in the university snack shop. As soon as I was finished, I picked up A Man in Full. I read these just in time for I Am Charlotte Simmons to come out, which was one of the first novels I ever bought in hardback.

But this latter I gave up on about halfway through. I could take Wolfe's minute inspection and heightened dramatization of big city, upper class hypocrisy, manipulative identity politics, art world fraud, and even stud farming, but the underbelly of college education hit too close to home. It depressed me. Some of his essays, especially "Hooking Up," a prophetic look at the emerging sexual ethics of 21st century America, depressed me too. Later, as I finished grad school, I returned to Wolfe and read The Right Stuff, which is still one of my favorite books. But, I'm sorry to say, my foray into Charlotte Simmons in the fall of 2004 is the last of Wolfe's fiction that I read.

I wasn't the only one to be put off by Wolfe's work. I chose the word gadfly above for a reason. Wolfe had the ability to make people uncomfortable, an ability by turns enviable, by turns dubious but, I think, necessary. Each of his books provoked outrage from some quarter, whether the precious heights of the modern art world or apologists for latter day university debauchery. I hesitate to call him a journalistic Socrates—it's the kind of comparison I'm sure he could turn on me and make me sound ridiculous—but there was something of Socrates in his way of life: the suit, the ties and pocket squares, a strange man on a laser-guided search for unquestioned assumptions and hidden foolishness. And, of course, Socrates provoked outrage, too.

Controversy aside, Wolfe was unmatched as a writer. Since discovering Bonfire in college, I've revered him. The tone and sheer volume of his prose mesmerized me, brought me into a dreamlike state in which he seemed to telegraph his story directly into my brain, without intervening paper and ink. There was probably a word per page of that book that I had never seen before, but which I understood intuitively from the way he used it. Any writer who wants to see, know, and understand the power of the precisely chosen word would do well to pick up some Wolfe and read. His style, vocabulary, and command of the language were unmatched and will probably remain so for a very, very long time.

RIP

The Winter War

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Historical Movie Monday returns from an end-of-semester induced hiatus to look at a film little known in the US, about a war little known outside Scandinavia. The film is the 1989 Finnish war movie Talvisota or The Winter War.

They ordered us to drive the Russians away from our positions. I’m going to the headquarters to ask them: with what men?
— Lt. Kantola in The Winter War

The history

In the fall of 1939, flush with success following his invasion of eastern Poland—divvied up with his erstwhile archenemy, now ally and partner, Adolf Hitler—Joseph Stalin planned the next step of Soviet expansion by looking northwest to Karelia and Petsamo, Finnish provinces on the Russian border. He had already managed to bully Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia into "mutual assistance" agreements, which he would shortly exploit to take those countries over, and hoped for similar success in Finland. Stalin pressed Finland to cede these territories to the Soviet Union and provide land for a naval base on the Baltic near Helsinki. The Soviets made these demands for ostensibly defensive reasons—they claimed they wanted a greater zone of security around Leningrad, for instance—but an eventual total takeover of Finland was probably the goal.

The Soviet attacks on Finland, from Wikimedia Commons

The Soviet attacks on Finland, from Wikimedia Commons

The Finns were divided, with even Baron Mannerheim, the retired commander-in-chief of the Finnish military and a fierce opponent of the Bolsheviks, arguing for concessions to the Soviets because of Stalin's perceived invincibility. When negotiations broke down in late November, Stalin had his political pretext, and the Red Army, borrowing a page from their Nazi allies, staged a border incident to provide a military pretext for an invasion of Finland. The war began November 30.

From a purely statistical point of view, Mannerheim had been wise to counsel acquiescence: Finland's population in 1939 was around three million; the Soviet Union's population was 180 million larger. The belligerents' armies were similarly mismatched, with Stalin's Red Army of around 1.6 million men, in almost 100 divisions, outnumbering the 340,000-man Finnish army almost 5-1. The Red Army was also more heavily mechanized, with thousands of up-to-date tanks and trucks available, and had huge advantages in artillery and aircraft. Nevertheless, with Soviet aggression unmasked, the Finnish army mobilized and Mannerheim returned from retirement to lead them.

Since Finland had gained independence in 1917, its military policy had been defined by the proximity of the Soviet Union, an ideologically motivated, aggressive behemoth. With mobilization, Finnish troops moved into a line of defenses across the Karelian Isthmus, the strip of land north of Leningrad between Lake Ladoga and the Baltic. The bulk of Finland's troops deployed to this line of trenchworks, bunkers, wire entanglements, and minefields—later nicknamed the Mannerheim Line—with small forces in the narrow "waist" at the middle of the country and in the far north near Petsamo. 

It was on the Mannerheim Line that the Russians met disaster and the Finns made their reputation. The Red Army, which had lost 40,000 officers in political purges the year before, was poorly and unimaginatively led, ideologically hidebound, and completely unprepared for the Finnish winter. The Finns, on the other hand, were excellent woodsmen and marksmen, were well-prepared for the cold even though a third of them came to the front with civilian clothing or equipment, were capable of lightning-strike movement through the winter landscape on skis, and—a not insignificant factor—they were fighting for their homes.

Despite being undersupplied and grossly outnumbered, the Finns resisted ferociously and bled the Russians in a savage war of attrition. Repeated assaults on the Mannerheim Line resulted in staggering casualties. The difficult, swampy, heavily forested, and lake-pocked terrain ("Finland," a British observer noted, "consists entirely of natural obstacles") channeled Russian attacks into prepared kill zones where they fell to machine guns, artillery, and snipers—a Finnish specialty. Temperatures dropped to -45° F. The Soviets had planned to celebrate victory in Finland with a triumphal parade for Stalin's birthday on December 18. Instead, the war dragged on into January, with a disastrous attempt to cut Finland in half that wasted the lives of nearly 10,000 Russian soldiers against 400 Finnish dead, and into February with renewed assaults on the Mannerheim Line. Attrition ground both sides down. The Soviets learned slowly and at enormous cost in life, but they could afford their losses more than the Finns could.

Finally, with the British, who were already at war with Stalin's ally Hitler, showing interest in intervention, the Soviets ended the war through negotiation. The Finns were forced to cede the disputed territory to Russia, but had given Stalin and his army a black eye. The Winter War looked, to much of the world, like a humiliating defeat for Stalin. To Hitler, observing, watching, plotting, it demonstrated the weakness of the Soviet military.

By the time the ceasefire went into effect the morning of March 13, 1940, the Red Army had lost over 130,000 dead and missing, with over a quarter million wounded and another 130,000 frostbitten due to the Soviet regime's inability to equip its soldiers with proper winter gear. The Finns, by comparison, lost 22,000 dead and missing and 43,000 wounded. The war had lasted 105 days.

Finnish troops under Soviet assault near Taipale in The Winter War.

Finnish troops under Soviet assault near Taipale in The Winter War.

The film

Talvisota or The Winter War is based on the novel of the same name by Antti Tuuri. Tuuri's story follows a small unit of reservists from Ostrobothnia, in western Finland, as they are called up, deployed, and survive the war's 105 days of cold, starvation, and Russian attack. The film was released in 1989 to great acclaim in Finland and was even submitted to the Academy for Best Foreign Language Film, but was not nominated. That's a shame, because The Winter War belongs in the top tier of war films in any language.

Martti (Taneli Mäkelä) aims his rifle during a Russian assault

Martti (Taneli Mäkelä) aims his rifle during a Russian assault

I should point out that there are three versions of The Winter War in circulation. The original release ran over three hours, a cut down international release runs just over two, and an expanded TV mini-series version nearly four and a half. Though I had heard of the film even as a kid, as a faithful reader of World War II magazine, and a college roommate of Finnish ancestry had recommended it, I only got to see it last month thanks to a generous Finnish colleague, who lent me the two-hour version on DVD. I'm very interested in running down the original three-hour version.

While the film has an ensemble cast of colorful war movie types—the lady's man, the earnest officer, the wizened vet—the main character is Martti Hakala, a married farmer who deploys to the front with his dandyish younger brother Paavo. Their mother sends them off with a request that Martti look after Paavo at the front. Martti asks their platoon leader to put them into a squad together, and so the brothers train, march, and dig in along the Mannerheim Line together. There, at the beginning of December, Martti and Paavo's platoon weathers the Russian assaults on Taipale, attempted river crossings near Lake Ladoga that resulted in heavy casualties.

The Finns beat back repeated mass assaults on their trenches despite lack of armored support, little artillery ammunition, and inferior numbers. Several times the Russians infiltrate the Finnish trenches, but Martti's unit counterattacks and retakes their positions. Each attack leaves piles of Russian bodies along the front, but also whittles Martti's platoon down a little at a time. Men die randomly and brutally. One seasoned veteran doesn't even make it to the front; another, in one of the film's goriest and most poignant scenes, is cut in half by Russian artillery but lives long enough for Martti to discover him.

Martti and a wounded Paavo (Konsta Mäkelä) shelter in a trench

Martti and a wounded Paavo (Konsta Mäkelä) shelter in a trench

Martti and Paavo each get leave, and their unit is pulled out of the front line to rest once. The men make trips home, and these trips, especially when following tragedies, underline how much the war is changing the men fighting it. On his last morning at home, Martti's wife, waking early, looks at him like a stranger.

The combat scenes are thrilling and harrowing, as expertly executed as any of the big budget battles of Saving Private Ryan a decade later. The filmmakers dramatize the claustrophobia of trench-clearing, the awkward courage necessary to retake a bunker, and the difficulty of removing the dead and wounded brilliantly. The men themselves look more and more pitiful, as their faces blacken with dirt and powder residue—realistically, over their entire faces, and not in the usual Hollywood manner— and their snowsuits and uniforms shred to rags. Despite the poor video quality of the DVD transfer I was watching, I felt as if I were there—something I haven't felt about a film in a long time.

The film is technically as well as dramatically excellent. The cinematography conveys the severe cold visually, the pyrotechnics are by turns awe-inspiring and terrifying, the stunt work is excellent, and the special effects—primarily makeup and models, especially aircraft—are seamless. The film also benefits from an enviable authenticity, as the filmmakers had access to correct period equipment and gear, including Soviet T-26 tanks captured during the Continuation War fought a few years later.

The film as history

There are a couple of ways filmmakers can dramatize a war. They can take a "God's eye" approach, in which they present numerous perspectives from multiple participants. Think of older war films like The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, which balance generals in conference rooms with ordinary grunts on the front lines. A step down from that godlike point of view might be the "bird's eye" view, which offers groundlevel combat with some officers or leaders with a higher level of awareness to let the audience know what's going on, why, and what's at stake. Some newer films like We Were Soldiers and Black Hawk Down come to mind. 

A Finnish machine gun crew entrenched in the frozen woods during the Winter War

A Finnish machine gun crew entrenched in the frozen woods during the Winter War

The Winter War belongs to a final category, one that has existed since the silent era and 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front but certainly favored since Saving Private Ryan came out twenty years ago, a category that offers the ordinary soldier's view without recourse to larger explanatory structures, map tables, or exposition-reciting general officers. The Winter War offers an excellent "worm's eye" view of an important but often overlooked conflict. 

Understanding that this is the film's approach, The Winter War gets pretty much everything right, small details and large. I've already mentioned the authentic weapons, uniforms, and equipment, but it throws in some other details that help sell its authenticity. The destruction of the distinctive Finnish Lutheran church at Äyräpää makes it into the film, as do the origins of the "Molotov cocktail," an improvised explosive using wine bottles. The Molotov cocktail was not invented in Finland but was named there—after Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov—in a bit of gallows humor.

But where The Winter War really excels is in dramatizing what it was like for the Finns on the Mannerheim Line. The film largely ignores geopolitical speculations. Martti and his comrades discuss the broader significance of the war, how it started, and why, but they do so without full knowledge of their situation—like real soldiers, plunked down into chaos not of their making or choosing, really do. Their behavior and actions are perfect. They don't think of themselves as heroes even while performing herculean feats of bravery. They're scared, tired, and filthy and want to make sure they have enough bread and ammunition to make it through the next day. And what is more, the film makes you feel that. By the end of the film, as both sides stand up in the open to celebrate the ceasefire, all you can do, along with the characters, is stare in disbelief.

A final note: the colleague who lent me the film had several relatives who fought in the Winter War. One was so badly afflicted by PTSD that he killed himself some years later. "That was a whole generation who went to hell," my coworker says. The Winter War, while not downplaying the Finns' incredible bravery, shows you why.

More if you're interested

The Winter War is usually treated as a subset of World War II, often a footnote to Hitler's scheming to invade Russia. The textbook I currently teach from for Western Civ gives the conflict half a paragraph. 

The two most readily available books I've come across are The Winter War: Russia's Invasion of Finland, 1939-40, by British journalist Robert Edwards, and A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40. Both are relatively short and readable. I say "most readily available," because you may have to hunt for them. I found the former in a used book store and snatched it up, and had to order the latter from Amazon. That the copy I received was print-on-demand may indicate its scarcity and lack of demand. Let's fix that.

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If you're looking for an account in a widely available survey, Antony Beevor's Second World War has a good, detailed narrative that fits the Winter War into the broader context of World War II but doesn't shortchange the ferocity of the conflict or Finnish heroism. A pretty good two-page synopsis is in A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War, by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett. There is also detailed treatment of both the Winter War and its sequel, the Continuation War, in A Concise History of Finland, by David Kirby, which I've been browsing preparatory to reading this summer.

A book I did find in Barnes & Noble and would happily recommend is Finnish Soldier vs. Soviet Soldier: Winter War 1939-40, by David Campbell. The book is part of the relatively recent Combat series from Osprey, a well-established and reliable publisher of military history books. I have a small library of Osprey guides. This one gives, in about 80 pages, a capsule summary of the war and its political context but focuses mostly on combat proper and the men involved: uniforms, weapons, equipment, communications, chain of command, food, supply, and how all of these affected the men doing the fighting. The book features three chapter-length case studies of battles along the Mannerheim Line and in the middle of the country and gives the reader a vivid picture of what it was like, which is arguably the most difficult task for historians. It's also lavishly illustrated with photos and maps. 

On the Russian side, the crucial book is The Great Terror: A Reassessment, by Robert Conquest, which covers the purges and show trials of 1938 with excruciating detail. Conquest includes several pages on the effects of the purges on the Red Army, especially its performance in Finland. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War, by Chris Bellamy; Russia's War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945, by Richard Overy; and Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945, by Catherine Merridale all include examinations of the Winter War and its effects.

If I can insert a personal plug, the Winter War figures into the background of my World War II novel Dark Full of Enemies. The sniper character, Ollila, was inspired by Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä. Please do check it out if you're interested.

Finally, the kind Finnish colleague who lent me The Winter War on DVD also recommended The Unknown Soldier, a 1955 film about Finnish troops in the Continuation War. The film was adapted from a novel by Väinö Linna and has been remade twice since, most recently in 2017. This version was shot using natural light and looks beautiful and harrowing. Watch the trailer here. Penguin Modern classics brought out a new English translation of Linna's novel, published in the UK as Unknown Soldiers, in 2015 and which I got in the mail last week. I've been reading it ever since—it's excellent so far.

Coming up

Historical Movie Monday will continue. Coming up this summer, I'll get away from World War II again for a bit to look at a few ancient and medieval films and, perhaps, even my favorite baseball movie. Thanks for reading!

Spring reading 2018

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Ages ago, when the world and the internet were young, I kept track of my reading by blogging seasonal lists. This post is the first in a revival of that tradition. 

A couple of notes: I've hyperlinked any title that I've blogged about previously. You can see my Goodreads annual reading challenge here, where you can click on any book from this list and, more likely than not, see a sentence or two that I've written about it by way of review.

My winter and spring reading, in order by completion, from January 1 to May 11, 2018:

  • Helena, by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh
  • John Ronald's Dragons, by Caroline McAlister, illustrated by Eliza Wheeler
  • The Aeneid, by Virgil, translated by David Ferry
  • The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes, by Carolyne Larrington
  • Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
  • Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Deneen
  • Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
  • No Man's Land, by Simon Tolkien
  • A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
  • Heroides, by Ovid, translated by Harold Isbell
  • Wars of the Roses: Stormbird, by Conn Iggulden
  • Utopia, by St. Thomas More, translated by Paul Turner
  • Fools and Mortals, by Bernard Cornwell
  • Cnut: The North Sea King, by Ryan Lavelle
  • Shakespeare's Spy, by Gary Blackwood
  • Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw
  • Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh
  • Striding Folly, by Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Nobody Comes Back, by Donn Pearce
  • How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life, by Seneca, selected and translated by James Romm
  • The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, by Evelyn Waugh
  • Fallen Land, by Taylor Brown
  • Munich, by Robert Harris
  • Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
  • Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen
  • The Earliest English Poems, edited and translated by Michael Alexander
  • A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
  • Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh
  • Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
  • Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien
  • The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, performed by Joss Ackland
  • The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty
  • The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis, performed by the author (original radio version)
  • Richard I: The Crusader King, by Thomas Asbridge
  • A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, performed by Barrett Whitener
  • Finnish Soldier versus Soviet Soldier: Winter War 1939-40, by David Campbell

A few superlatives, in brief:

Funniest: Three-way tie between The Loved One and Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, and A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole.
Best surprise: The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. Surprising in that it was both scary and profoundly moving, even uplifting.
Worst all-around: Ready Player One, by far. A lazy, narcissistic, masturbatory vomit of pop-culture garbage. It kept me turning pages but I was annoyed all the way through.
Favorite kid's book: John Ronald's Dragons, a delightful, beautifully illustrated picturebook biography of JRR Tolkien.
Scariest: Lord of the Flies barely edges out The Exorcist, because while demonic possession is terrifying, a demon-possessed person doesn't feel as righteous as an anonymous member of the mob does as it metes out violence.
Favorite classic: The Aeneid, with the Seneca anthology How to Die a close second.
Favorite non-fiction: Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. A masterful, well-written introduction to the Commedia.

Stuff I'm currently reading as we head into the summer:

  • The Art of Living, by Dietrich von Hildebrand with Alice von Hildebrand
  • The Cold War: A World History, by Odd Arne Westad
  • The Door in the Wall, by Marguerite de Angeli
  • Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, by Etienne Gilson

Stuff I'm fixing to begin reading:

  • Unknown Soldiers, by Vaino Linna
  • A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, by William R. Trotter
  • The Terminal List, by Jack Carr

And, of course, I'm working on Griswoldville and have some reading to do for a couple of history- and education-related projects I'm pretty excited about. More on all that later. In the meantime, I hope you've had a great spring and have a fun and literary summer!

Chesterton on South Carolina

 
Historians will probably mark the present epoch by the problem of the Traffic. Unless, indeed, the historians, who are an absent-minded race of men, have all been killed by the traffic before they can write any histories of it.
— GK Chesterton, 1936
 

I consider myself warned. 

The opening lines of "About Traffic" from As I Was Saying, a collection of essays published the year of his death.

Leisure, wonder, and Josef Pieper

I turned in final grades last Thursday evening after graduation and, this morning, myself graduated from the college's New Faculty Course, officially ending my first year as a full-time History instructor. Today is also the first day of in-service for the summer session. So work is on my mind, as is leisure. Appropriately, then, I read this nice short piece from ISI on Josef Pieper and his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture. I recommend it—both the article and the book itself.

I first read Leisure in the spring of 2015, as I concluded a semester teaching as an adjunct at two different colleges, tutoring two students—one in German—at my wife's school, and working part time at a sporting goods store. That was also the semester my daughter was born. By the time I picked up Pieper's book, I was exhausted.

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Pieper, a good Thomist, understood. Leisure is in part a critique of modern work, which is really a tyranny of economic activity over the whole person. "The world of work," he wrote, "is becoming our entire world; it threatens to engulf us completely." We all know a workaholic; probably several. Pieper argues that, while work is necessary and good, leisure is crucial to the creation of culture and our flourishing as human beings, both individually and in community. 

The ISI piece does a good job of explaining this. By "leisure," Pieper does not mean mere free time, spent aimlessly or on what he calls elsewhere "the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli" that dope us against boredom and sedate us between shifts at work. Rather, leisure is itself active, something pursued and embraced, something open and reflective and, therefore, basically philosophical. "To perceive all that is unusual and exceptional, all that is wonderful, in the midst of the ordinary things of everyday life, is the beginning of philosophy." And culture grows from this through sharing—stories, poems, art. After all, the great Western epics from the Iliad to Beowulf were composed for leisure time among friends and companions.

Something to think about. As summer approaches, we may have more or less downtime depending on our jobs, but let's use the time we have not simply to laze around or "rest" in a utilitarian way, but for leisure. In that way, both our work and our lives will become more meaningful.

St. Augustine on internet trolls

St. Augustine, weary of dealing with trolls.

St. Augustine, weary of dealing with trolls.

From his great work City of God, II, i: 

 
Will we ever come to an end of discussion and talk if we think we must always reply to replies? For replies come from those who either cannot understand what is said to them, or are so stubborn and contentious that they refuse to give in even if they do understand.
 

Pretty spot on. Here it is in its whole context from another translation

If the feeble mind of man did not presume to resist the clear evidence of truth, but yielded its infirmity to wholesome doctrines, as to a health-giving medicine, until it obtained from God, by its faith and piety, the grace needed to heal it, they who have just ideas, and express them in suitable language, would need to use no long discourse to refute the errors of empty conjecture. But this mental infirmity is now more prevalent and hurtful than ever, to such an extent that even after the truth has been as fully demonstrated as man can prove it to man, they hold for the very truth their own unreasonable fancies, either on account of their great blindness, which prevents them from seeing what is plainly set before them, or on account of their opinionative obstinacy, which prevents them from acknowledging the force of what they do see. There therefore frequently arises a necessity of speaking more fully on those points which are already clear, that we may, as it were, present them not to the eye, but even to the touch, so that they may be felt even by those who close their eyes against them. And yet to what end shall we ever bring our discussions, or what bounds can be set to our discourse, if we proceed on the principle that we must always reply to those who reply to us? For those who are either unable to understand our arguments, or are so hardened by the habit of contradiction, that though they understand they cannot yield to them, reply to us, and, as it is written, "speak hard things," and are incorrigibly vain. Now, if we were to propose to confute their objections as often as they with brazen face chose to disregard our arguments, and as often as they could by any means contradict our statements, you see how endless, and fruitless, and painful a task we should be undertaking. And therefore I do not wish my writings to be judged even by you, my son Marcellinus, nor by any of those others at whose service this work of mine is freely and in all Christian charity put, if at least you intend always to require a reply to every exception which you hear taken to what you read in it; for so you would become like those silly women of whom the apostle says that they are "always learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."