European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - January 31, 1991, Darmstadt, Hesse                                War has Long inspired artists by charts ghampl1n los Angeles times whenever great and tragic events a overtake the world a and How often it has happened in one lifetime. A keeping an Eye on the frolics of. Entertainment and the Earnest pursuits of Art feels at least Tor a moment. Quite beside the Point a in such circumstances i have turned before and turned again As the first a bombs fell on Baghdad to a passage. By . White in his foreword to the. 1942 edition of one Man s meat a. Collection of columns he was writing on a farm m Maine in the Shadow of another War. Quot one thing about  White said Quot it gives a Man a feeling of guilt every time he finds himself doing some habitual or comfortable thing like eating a Good meal or getting a Book out in springtime. He feels he ought to be discovered in some More pertinent attitude a establishing a beachhead or applying a Tourniquet to a general a  a a. A a a a. A. A the Book s jacket White added ought to carry a Blurb saying Quot there in t time to read this Book. Put it in your pocket and when the moment arrives throw it   a. A yet the Point is that White s essays. Read and loved and almost continuously in print for Early a half Century now have  War and several. A subset uen t conflagrations of various. Sizes and a barring lethal Accident to a a a. Civilization As a whole a should outlive this War As Well. A it struck me at a rec ent awards luncheon even before the bombs fell that from the Dawn of writing and painting Art has outlasted Long wars and Short spacings of peace and Len perspective to both. A particularly at the present moment the specifics of the conflict Are toned. By anger a shared equally i think by those who support the action and those who Don t a an anger born of a presumption that War by common consent had been ruled out As an instrument of International policy. Condemned by its own futility. A for a sobering perspective on that i turn As t also often have in succession to . White to the closing quatrain of a poem called Short ode by. Stephen Vincent Benet written in 1936, when world War i was still a fresh memory and world War ii. Already an inevitability. They were shot and rotted they a a. Fell a a a a a a a burning on Flimsy wings. And yet it was their thought that they did Well and yet there Are still the tyrants and the Kings. A a it was our thongh11hat we had the civil War served As an inspiration for some of Walt Whitman s most powerful poetry. About got the tyrants under control but it was again not so and the millennium has once More had to be postponed for want of a quorum. Wars Are not As Clear Cut As they used to be and it is possible to envy White the serenity of a War whose issues were Nev a in doubt. If our economic status relative to our former enemies is Rich with irony five decades later there is something to be said for enemies having been converted to friends however Edgely. If War creates heroes it also creates artists or identifies them. Matthew Brady has let us All see the civil War As we might not otherwise have been y Able to experience it. Turner gave us powerful impressions of the hazy confusion of sea Battles in an earlier. Time arid courageous television. Cameramen and reporters Are bringing us the Middle East with an immediacy thanks to the satellites that even the a epochal coverage of Vietnam did not have. A. There will in time be the poets. Novelists and historians to see these Days with a soul deep urgency that Only words not electronics can convey and to place them in perspective within the longer arc of All time. A a although the world seems More cynical and sophisticated than once it was the Iraq conflict May find a poet of the patriotic Fervour of Rupert Brooke who fought briefly in 19.1.4, but died a of a fever on a greek Island in 1915 if i should die think Only this of a me y a  a . That there s some Corner of a. Foreign Field that is forever England. Poets above All will speak of Brave men As did the English poets killed in what the British Call the 14-18 War. Isaac Rosenberg Only 28 when he was killed but recognized posthumously As the great poet he was looked at a a gathering station for the English dead and  unforgettable image the grass and coloured Day. Y a More motion have than they. Joined to the great sunk silences. We May find a poet of the compassion of Walt Whitman visiting the a battlegrounds near Washington and like Rosenberg seeing some american a dead. Whitman ended a poem called a sight in Camp in the Daybreak Cray and Dinv a a a. V Young Man t think i know Yeti i think this is the  e of the Christ himself dead and divine and brother  All and Here again he. Lies. The War poem i knew Besl As i took infantry Basic training in 1944 was. Alan Seeger s i have a rendezvous with death a at some disputed barricade. Seeger an american kept his rendezvous killed in France in 1916. But his romantic fatalism was a bit misleading to the Young go. There was t much romantic glory in , but there was a great Deal of personal Pride. And there was then and still is gratitude for the a entertainments and the  both diverted you from the anxieties of the moment and gave you a renewed sense of the civilization and the values for which you were fighting. On line in Germany during the last months of the european War i found a worn armed forces paperback edition of Somerset maugham s of i Lunian Efow a of Vontre i grit into it  out not to Boboul being in the army. At All. No matter it helped me. Understand Why i was i he re and the varieties of human expert eau e that were Worth preserving. January 31, 7991 stripes Magazine 9