Heya! I'm finished with Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour. It’s truly fascinating. There’s a lot of great stuff about subjects that I think are often overlooked—poetry, Black and Indigenous soldiers of color, prostitution, class conflict, and the rise of socialism. The chapters are pretty short, ranging from five to twenty pages, so it’s more of an overview and starting point for further research. That being said, Eleventh Month does a good job of giving a summary of events and then elaborating with anecdotes and quotes from those who actually experienced them.
Something that I’ve noticed is that World War I, at least how it’s presented here, is a war of division. It all started with Serbian nationals trying to break away from Austria-Hungary, continued with Germany’s backing of Austria-Hungary’s emperor (and cousin of the Kaiser), Franz Josef, and escalated when France and Russia got involved. So there’s this cultural and geographical division happening, but there’s also the divide between the rulers of these powerful nations. King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Czar Nicholas II were all cousins descended from Queen Victoria. If the Civil War was a war between brothers, World War I was a war between cousins. Sometimes literally, in the case of German American soldiers!
But more than that, World War I, as seen through the lens of Eleventh Month, was heavily influenced by the class divide in Western Europe. Men of genteel, wealthy, noble birth were immediately put into officer positions, regardless of their combat or leadership ability, while men of lesser status were slotted into whatever jobs were needed—often pushed straight to the front line after a few months or weeks of training to outpace the rapidly growing mortality rates in the trenches. This is a war where officers strutted around in stylish uniforms and riding boots, played polo and cards, had hot meals and meat every day, and some—not all and not even the majority—never even saw battle. That’s not to say that every officer was of the upper class nor that every officer sat around all day and played soldier. There were men who had been promoted on merit; there were officers who gave their lives for their men. But something that’s brought up is a sense of comradery, even if it was fleeting, between the “bourgeois” and the “proletariat.”
To quote a letter from Second Lieutenant Stephen Howet who censored letters written by his men, “What a lesson it is to read the thoughts of men, often as refined and sensitive as we have been made by the advantages of birth and education, yet living under conditions much harder and more disgusting than my own.”
Another anonymous diarist wrote, “I shall never think of the lower classes again in quite the same way after the war.”
Sir John Keegan is quoted as writing that the exposure of these two disparate classes “would eventually fuel that transformation of middle-class attitudes to the poor which has been the most important trend in twentieth-century Britain.”
I’m not quite sure if I agree with Keegan’s statement. True, an exposure to people of other classes was likely helpful for instigating social change back home, but I think it ignores the other factors that come into play in classism. At this time, scientific racism and, by extension, scientific classism was still rampant in the Western world. Eugenics was about to emerge in a horrific way on the world stage. While it wasn’t often as extreme as phrenology (a practice which had fallen out of favor within recent memory) and determining “criminality” based off bumps on someone’s skull, there were still the remnants of feudal mindsets—“I’m this person’s social or economic better, so I must also be their physical and psychological better.” It makes sense that the events of World War I would propel communism and socialism—proponents of class and worker equality—to becoming one of the world’s leading ideologies. I find this angle really interesting. There’s a similar topic that comes up in Eleventh Hour—racism in the trenches.
To be fair, the chapter on black soldiers is only eight pages long, but I think it gives a good chunk of background knowledge to delve into later. Black regiments were segregated from white counterparts, a practice that would only end after World War II. They were given inferior and, at times, no equipment or weapons. (“When the New York 15th National Guard Regiment marched through the city’s streets, only men in the front rank and on the flanks were issued rifles to make it less obvious that most lacked weapons.”) They weren’t even given a division of their own until W.E.B. Du Bois and other black leaders pressured the military. “If this is our country, then this is our war.”
Appealing to black men, Du Bois said, “That which the German power represents spells death to the aspirations of the Negroes and all darker races for equality, freedom and democracy. Let us not hesitate. Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens.”
Black soldiers were denigrated at almost every turn, given the filthiest and most backbreaking labor, and often thought of as cowardly and “hopeless inferior” as both soldiers and officers.
As George Bernard Shaw said, America “makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority by the fact that he is a shoeblack.”
That’s not to say that there weren’t black officers—though they were limited in rank and always under the command of white higher-ups—or black heroes who were celebrated for their bravery, if not formerly by their own country. Look up Henry Johnson! He was badass as all hell and was only honored in his lifetime by the French, who are noted for treating black soldiers better than they would be back home.
Indigenous soldiers get less about two pages, but it’s a good contrast to the treatment of black soldiers. There’s often a tendency for white Americans to see indigenous people as “brave warriors” or “noble savages”—at one with nature and supremely deadly in their environment, yet innocent and naïve enough to fall prey to the “superior” white settlers. Indigenous Americans were “seen as a free spirit, swift of foot, keen of scent, stout of heart. [They] were presumed to be natural scouts, snipers, and runners, all high-risk occupations…” The racism they experienced still existed—they were still segregated and kept apart from their white comrades—but was generally born out of “positive” stereotypes and idealized, patronizing views of the culture. Their heroics would be greatly exaggerated and romanticized, turning into full blown caricatures.
“’Red Indians from Wyoming or Colorado were stoics of high explosive shells and poison gas as if the calument went round at the council fire or the drums beat to a dance.’ Indians scenting trouble, ‘ran through the woods like deer.’ Jess Fixon, a Cherokee, reportedly claimed that he had enlisted to ‘bayonet the Kaiser all by himself,’ explaining that Wilhelm II, ‘killum papoose, killum squaw, so Jess Fixon will find this Kaiser and stickum bayonet clear through. Ugh!’”
Fun fact! There were code talkers in World War I too. Choctaw tribal members used their “native dialects” to confuse the Germans and might’ve been confusing even to people who spoke Choctaw because of the “demands of modern warfare.” Machine gun was “rendered by the Choctaws as ‘little gun shoot fast.’ Causalities became ‘scalps,’ and a unit, the 3rd Battalion, for example, was identified as ‘three grains of corn.’”
On that note, I’ll end with a “fun fact” I learned.
· According to “the most conservative estimates, during the last day of the war, principally in the six hours after the armistice was signed, all sides on the western front suffered 10,044 causalities, of which 2,738 were deaths, more than the average daily causalities throughout the war.” This is more than the losses suffered on D-Day by nearly 10%.
I’m glad that I took the time to learn more about this time period. World War I was sorely neglected in my education growing up, and I never rectified that until now. I know there’s stuff I left out that I’m interested in, chiefly the poets and poetry of the war and the contrast between patriotic idealism and fatalism. I think there’s a huge amount of material for both creative and academic writing here. I’m interested in learning more.
I’m thinking of watching 1918 this weekend, but it might be a hard sell for my movie mates. Could anyone recommend any further reading?
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