At War: The Army’s message to returning World War I troops? Behave yourselves

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Friday, August 2, 2019

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By C. J. Chivers

Dear reader,

This week At War featured an essay by David Chrisinger about posters circulated by the United States Army after the First World War that urged demobilized soldiers to reintegrate smoothly and politely into civilian life. The posters are on display through Sept. 15 in the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Mo. Some of them are patronizing enough that, were the characters not square-jawed young men, they might be fine illustrations in a children's manners guide.

One striking element of the collection is the Army's implied assumption that it could occupy the position of moral arbiter, especially to a generation that had endured a conflict characterized by appalling official incompetence and slaughter. World War I was fought in abominable conditions, often with outdated tactics and with weapons horrifying in both their concentration and power. The human costs, Chrisinger noted, included "more death than all of the world's wars from 1790 to 1914 combined."

The posters were tacked on bulletin boards on Army bases and at demobilization sites around the country.

The Army's Message to Returning World War I Troops? Behave YourselvesPosters from 1918 reveal ignorance of the toll that the war took on those who fought it.

Now a century on, it is hard not to look at the posters and feel the Army's deep disconnect from a prominent mood of the time. Even a casual survey of postwar art made by veterans of the fronts encounters a collectively bleak and angry aesthetic — a disgust for the institutions and cheery slogans that sent millions to their deaths, and a palpable sorrow over what was lost. These were the veterans of an era, after all, that Paul Bäumer, the German foot soldier and narrator of Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," described experiencing this way, even at the start of their tours: "We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land."

Remarque was a veteran of the war. Under his pen, the disillusionment of Bäumer, his protagonist, took firm root even before his friends began to die. It began with military service itself: "At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe." Of army service, he concluded: "We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies."

After a war that left survivors in a bleak state of mind, a few posters about standing straight, cleaning up rubbish in the neighborhood and avoiding strong drink were unlikely to appeal. Chrisinger called out the genre for what it was: Tone deaf. It would be many years, he wrote, before "policymakers agreed that returning veterans would need more than empty praise and shame-based messaging if they were to lead successful lives as civilians."

Chrisinger's essay is worth reading on merit. But it's also worth reading through the lens of the summer of 2019, after the trial of a SEAL accused of battlefield murder (the defendant was acquitted); after a SEAL platoon has been recalled to the United States under allegations of misconduct and crime, including the alleged rape of a female service member; after 16 Marines were arrested under a cloud of human-smuggling suspicions; and after almost 20 years of what the Pentagon called the war on terror, which has presided over a period of more global terror, not less global terror, and for which neither the country's political nor military leaders have been able to foretell a satisfying end.

The posters, artifacts of another time, are a reminder of just how thoroughly a military service can seem not to know its own members, and how reflexively it might change the subject in the face of years of broken lives and blood.

C.J. Chivers is a long-form writer and reporter for the Investigations Desk and The New York Times Magazine. He won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, and is also the author of "The Gun," a history of automatic weapons.

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