Watching Peter Jackson’s 90-minute film “They Shall Not Grow Old,” comprising restored footage of British doughboys in World War I, I remembered an experience I had in 2001 or 2002. I was in London, walking near Trafalgar Square, trying to give David Poynter (experienced as a past life) a sense of modern London, knowing that he would recognize the buildings, which are essentially unchanged since his time. I walked down to the Embankment, the north shore of the Thames, reading the monuments, not particularly moved, but interested.
Then I came to one that said only “July 1, 1916,” and although I had no idea what it referred to, I was instantly filled with the most violent rush of emotion I have ever experienced: rage, grief, indignation, despair. I realized, this was David’s reaction I was experiencing, though I was pretty sure he himself had not been in the war. So after I saw the movie, I searched both “the Battle of the Somme” and “July 1, 1916.”
So, David, let’s talk about July 1, 1916. What was the nature and source of that upwelling of anguish that I experienced.
You felt correctly that I was not in the war. I was past the age of enlistment, and perhaps could not have stood the physical toll. But neither was I caught up in war fever. My sympathies were with the poor. The warfare that interested me was an uprising against the forces that were grinding the faces of the people. I don’t mean insurrection – that couldn’t happen – but organized resistance to the overwhelming combinations of force and law and opinion that held society in an unfailing grip.
You were a socialist, I remember thinking.
I was. But my socialism did not have its roots in a belief in materialism, so I was somewhat out of the socialist mainstream in the same way you have always found yourself out of the mainstream of political opinion – and for the same reasons. Any social movement necessarily presumes certain commonly accepted beliefs, and to the extent that you cannot share them, you find yourself having to go along unwillingly, or with mental reservations. This does not tend to make you an effective partisan.
When war broke out in August, 1914, there was a unanimity of emotion, an enthusiastic springing to arms. People didn’t realize it, but they were desperate to destroy the lives they were leading. They wanted to tear down the structure, but they thought they were tearing at something that threatened them from outside.
A socialist could see that, if he could keep his head against the group-think. Was I keen to fight for the King-Emperor and the social system I despised? Only it was not so simple. Is it ever? German autocracy as personified – almost as caricatured – by the Kaiser was clearly worse. Privately I deplored the war and did not believe in it – and yet, at the same time, I deplored Prussian autocracy even more, and certainly could not have rooted for a victory of Germany. I sat on the sideline. I observed, I remained conscious, but this only got more agonizing as time went on.
I got that you were an editor at the London Illustrated News.
We would call it a sub-editor. I was a selector of photographs and illustrations, a glorified caption-writer. It was not a glamorous nor an influential position, but it did keep me somewhat better informed than the average man in the street. I had been there for some three years, maybe four, by the time the war began, and I was there for a decade or so after the war concluded.
Surely you had to do some official drum-banging for the war.
Less than you might think. If I kept to describing specifics, there was no need to hint at the self-destructive futility of it, not that any such hints would have had any result beyond getting me fired. But the anguish cumulated as the months dragged on. You cannot envision the change from 1914, when the war would surely be over by Christmas, to 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, when it clearly was going to go on forever. In 1914, even in 1915, it was possible to imagine that the end of the war would find us unchanged. By 1916, certainly by 1917, it was clear to those with eyes to see that nobody was going to win this war, and it was about who would lose it more thoroughly. The one date that marked that change more than any other was July 1, 1916.
I looked it up yesterday: 57,000 casualties in one day – 19,000 of them killed – the worst day for casualties in British history. The beginning of a 141-day battle that cost more than 400,000 British casualties and resulted in a six-mile advance over a 16-mile front. To my surprise, I saw that it was no longer considered to be useless butchery that accomplished nothing. Some think it led to the beginning of the end for the Germans, for reasons I won’t go into.
But you asked for the source of my reaction, which you felt that day, and my reactions had nothing to do with questions of strategy, nor even with the question of was it worthwhile even in its own military terms. Mine were rooted in something deeper.
I can feel a certain complication here, a reluctance to dip into it.
Yes, it is powerful, isn’t it, still? What you are calling first-tier and second-tier effects. And the third-tier effect went into the making of you, you understand.
In that you are a dominant strand comprising me.
Yes. You might be fascinated reading about military history (that was another strand’s influence, of course) but you could not enter whole-heartedly into such a career even if your health had allowed, because I knew better.
How do you think I felt, watching without being able to do anything, as a generation of young men was ground into the mud in France, and Gallipoli? Futility, official stupidity, dirty motives of politicians, economics behind it all, deliberate whipping-up of public hatred. It stank, and there was no way out except through it, by way of killing, killing, killing. Just as for many people Sept. 11, 2001, marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, so for me July 1, 1916, marks the end of a relatively innocent age. World War I destroyed Edwardian society.
So to focus in specifically on what I felt that day in London –
Imagine concentrating your emotional reaction to all the wrong-turnings you have witnessed in your life, and spraying them out in one burst, like a capacitor discharging. That’s what you were on the receiving end of. You are thinking of it as if I were sending you a message and you were receiving it. That’s the same idea people in my day had about what telepathy was. But, change metaphors and the nature of the event will become clearer. Think of something that equalizes with something else when brought into contact, the way water seeks its own level. Say you were in the Panama Canal and someone opened the gate between your lock and the adjacent one. The water might come in quickly or slowly overall, but it would come from the higher level to the lower as quickly as it could. The higher lock didn’t “send,” exactly, and the lower one didn’t “receive” in the way people think of telepathy as being sent and received. Instead, in the absence of a barrier, the water naturally sought its own level. A lightning bolt may be seen as the equalization of energy too, violently and suddenly.
So you are saying it wasn’t that you were trying to send a message, but that time and place created the spark?
As you intuited, place is an important part of this.
I have always wondered why ghosts haunt specific places, and why they mark anniversaries.
And now perhaps you see the answer. This is one world, not a physical and a separate non-physical world. Therefore place matters; time matters. Only, it is a matter of conceiving of things correctly. One might say the first of July, 1916 was in 3D on that date, and subsequently is in non-3D only. Yet it is not gone, as conventional thinking would have it. The non-3D version of events does not pass away, any more than other time-space combinations pass away when the living present moment passes on beyond them. But if you were to stand on the Marne battlefield today, it would be the same place (to all extents and purposes), which might facilitate your communication with that place-time that is otherwise difficult or impossible to reach.
When you reconceptualize the world to remove certain thought-barriers, sudden inflows of knowledge and being are enabled to occur. Such barriers include:
- I am only a 3D being
- Those in the non-3D are accessible only through effort and practice, and perhaps special talent.
- The past is beyond touching.
- The future is “the” future, and in any case does not yet exist.
- The world is physical and external, rather than mental and internal.
- We are each alone.
- “On the other side there is no time.”
- The 3D and non-3D worlds have little or nothing to do with each other.
- Mental, spiritual, and physical are three realities, rather than merely three words describing reality from different viewpoints.