November 11: All Quiet on the Western Front
November 11th is widely celebrated as Armistice Day (the end of hostilities in World War I). In the United States, the holiday that began as Armistice Day morphed into Veterans Day and is an observance to honor all veterans of all American wars. In Poland, November 11th is National Independence Day (Narodowe Święto Niepodległości), and commemorates the rebirth of Poland as a sovereign state at the end of World War I.
So, while in much of the world the day is one marked by some level of sad remembrance, in the United States and Poland it is much more of a celebration, although in both these countries the celebration issues from the same Great War (Wielką Wojną). When November 11th rolls around I give a lot of thought to that war and everything that it set in motion in the 20th Century. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the end of that horrific cataclysm. Sadly, that war and its effects has been largely overshadowed by the Second World War. Now, current world events leave me wondering if we've learned anything in the last 100 years.
I've been fortunate in my life to have read hundreds of excellent books. One that relates directly to the Great War that never leaves my top-ten list is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues, Polish: Na Zachodzie bez zmian). This sobering, thin tome, published first as a serial in Germany in November-December of 1928 (ten years after the end of the conflict), is sometimes referred to as an anti-war novel, but Remarque doesn't really politicize the War and it is probably better to think of the book as one soldier's perspective on the effects of war in general. He himself writes in the epigraph:
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."
My own grandfather was a WWI era US Marine, but did not serve in France. My wife's granduncle, Andrew Miller, however, served and died there on 2 November 1918, just days before the armistice. He was first buried at the American Cemetery, Les Islettes, Department of the Meuse, near Verdun, France and later repatriated to his home town. I don't have a picture of that cemetery, but some of you may be familiar with the much larger Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, pictured below.
The end of the First World War and the subsequent return to peace left winners (United States, Poland) and losers (everybody else), but all across Europe and the world the generation that actually fought in that war would be called the Génération perdue (Lost Generation) thanks to Gertrude Stein. Incidentally, the French word perdue is a passive participle that comes from the verb perdre and can mean a range of things: "lost or misplaced", "wasted or squandered", or, interestingly, as a reflexive to "to disappear or die out", as in Cette coutume s'est perdue (This custom has died out). It can also mean--and I think this may have been the original intent of the phrase--to be beyond all hope, as in: Ces enfants sont perdus, ils ne peuvent rien faire de bien (These children are hopeless, they can't do anything right). Of course, all of these meanings can be forced into the English word "lost", but we don't go to these other readings as a first choice!
Incidentally, in Polish the phrase is Stracone pokolenie. The word stracone has more a connotation of "wasted" or "misused", as opposed to "lost", "abandoned" or "forgotten", which are all different words in Polish. In German the phrase is also interesting, as it occurs in two competing forms: verlassene Generation and gottverlassene Generation. The former means "forsaken" and the latter, "God forsaken". There is a serious heaviness and even meanness in "God forsaken", don't you think?
Language is so interesting! What do you imagine as the meaning of "lost" in the phrase Lost Generation? For Americans I rather imagine we think of great literary figures, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, mostly, and perhaps the Great Gatsby comes to mind. We do not, I believe, think of the horrors of that particular war and the traumatic effects left on its front-line participants; nor, I suppose, do we think of the pregnant meaning encoded in the word "lost". Incidentally, just as food for thought among you historian-types, Hitler and Mussolini were members of the Lost Generation; Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were older and...were different. Think about that for a while.
I've just spent the last fortnight in the USA, and will stay just a bit longer to take care of some personal concerns. It is quite a shock to return (home) after three months immersion in a new culture. This is to be expected. Upon my return I kept looking for Polish things. Nothing. The Polish diaspora does not quite extend to the Puget Sound region. I persisted for most of the first week, looking at prices in Złoty, not Dollars. On the first full day I even greeted (in Polish) a man in a parking lot. He thought me rather odd, I suspect. I certainly thought him so for not responding...at least for a second until I regained my wits!
Fortunately, being in the USA will allow me to continue riding, using my old bicycle. My older mount is named "Seven of Nine". The name is not a reference to a particular Star Trek: Voyager character, but is a concatenation of the manufacturer's name (Seven Cycles, Watertown, Massachusetts) and the production year (2009), hence "Seven of Nine". Seven of Nine (or simply "Seven") sports an Axiom frame and boasts the same custom geometry as Kościuszko. Currently she (yes, she) is running a triple crankset with an 11-30 cassette. She does quite well on the local climbs, but at nearly twice the weight of Kościuszko is not nearly as agile and fast. What she lacks in speed and agility, however, she makes up for in extraordinary comfort. There is nothing at all like a good steel frame for absorbing road vibration. After nine years, Seven has nearly 30000 miles (48000 km) to her credit! Seven is the Cadillac, and Kościuszko is the sports car.
The first ride on Seven was wonderful, despite my ongoing health issues. I was a bit worried that after three months of no climbing (Warsaw) I would be in no shape to handle the terrain of the Pacific Northwest, but the concern was unfounded. Let's take a moment, though, to understand the difference between hills and the flats.
In general, to maintain speed, climbing requires additional strength (you're fighting gravity) and the use of different combinations of muscles (particularly glutes and back muscles) depending on the pitch of the slope. You also lose the advantage of forward momentum, compared to riding on the flats and there is certainly less air-cooling with the slower speeds. Too, there is also a little matter called the "crank dead spot" (6 and 12 o'clock in the pedal stroke in which power leverage is low) that is greatly exacerbated on hills. All of that said, climbing isn't really harder, but the task is different: we use our power to push upwards, rather than forwards. This requires different mechanics (a different riding form) and a different set of mental expectations.
In terms of the quantity of climbing, what is the difference between Warsaw and the Pacific Northwest (PNW)? It's in the raw numbers. In my first three months in Warsaw I cycled 570 miles (913 km) and climbed a total of 6755 vertical feet (2059 meters). Now, think about each of those vertical feet as one stair step each, to get the idea of the amount of climbing. This averages out to about 12 vertical feet (12 stairs) per mile. Think about it, that's climbing 12 steps in one mile's time (7.5 steps up per kilometer). That's trivial. Really. You can power up and over just about anything you come up against without any thought to using different mechanics at this ratio of rise over run.
And in the USA? On my first ride in the PNW, my friend Frits and I opted for a "flat route", to make sure my muscles and mechanics were up to the task. We rode 28 miles (45 km) and climbed 1860 vertical feet (567 meters). In this one ride Seven and I had climbed 1/4 of the total that Kościuszko and I had accumulated in three months in Warsaw! This one ride, a relatively flat one for the area, averaged 66 vertical feet (66 steps) per mile (or 41 steps per kilometer). Incidentally, for comparison's sake, my last ride in Warsaw which was comparable in distance and that featured a bit of climbing, clocked in at a bit over 28 miles (46 km) and 377 vertical feet (115m), 13.5 vertical feet per mile!
In the PNW you really do have to learn how to climb. It's a different skill. During a ride your overall speed will necessarily be less, because so much of the time you are propelling upwards, not forwards. Each ride forces you to practice (at least) two different cycling tasks. We measure our success in those tasks on flat terrain by looking at power output as expressed by speed, while in climbing we look at what is called VAM, an acronym for an Italian term, velocità ascensionale media (mean ascent velocity). This function looks at power per kilogram of body weight in relation to the ascent time on a given gradient. This talk of data is of little interest for most of us, I suppose, so let's just ride on!
I've written on numerous other occasions about the alluvial flood plain where Warsaw is located. There are good reasons, motivated by geography, for the flat terrain. What you may not know is that this hilly terrain in the Seattle area was also a plain (a basin, actually), but geologic forces worked its magic here! Let me explain.
Our flat basin was once covered with a large glacier--the Vashon glacier. This ice sheet was nearly 3000 feet thick (914m). To put this into perspective, our tallest building is Columbia Center (Seattle), standing at 997 feet tall (286m), 1/3 the thickness of the glacier. Our unique topography is the result of the melting and receding of this glacier 15,000 years ago. Heavy flowing meltwater underneath the glacier carved out our deep lakes and Puget Sound itself. Lighter flows of this meltwater left north-south valleys while in the meantime, the receding ice deposited sand, till and clay at its margins, called moraines. The gently rolling ridges that form out of these deposits are called drumlins.
The word drumlin comes from the Irish word droimnín, meaning "little ridge". All of those tiny little islands off the western coast of Ireland (think Clew Bay) are actually partially submerged drumlins. Drumlins are everywhere there is glacial action, but are not noticeable to the untrained eye. A particularly striking sample of drumlins can be found in Patagonia in southern Argentina and Chile. See the picture to the right. This photo is the key to understanding the "hills" in Puget Sound. The so-called "hills" are actually drumlins running north and south. A "flat route" in the Puget Sound, then, means running the ridges (or the troughs) and minimizing East-West travel!
Poland has drumlins, too! In fact, Poland has some very impressive drumlins in the central lowlands. This region from the lakes district west to the Oder River is the result of glacial action and drumlin fields are quite common. I made note of some of these drumlins, staring north out the car window on the way to Toruń in September. It turns out that some of the best-studied Polish drumlins are near Zbójno. The moraine that formed these drumlins ends just a few miles south, at Chrostkowo. The picture to the left shows a topographical relief of a small part of the area. Kościuszko and I are ready to ride there! Perhaps one of my Polish readers will join up with me for a weekend trip to "run the ridges"!
So it is not the case that the Puget Sound is mountainous (it is flanked by two mountain ranges which created the initial basin, however). It is not even hilly, actually. Instead, we have endless ridges, stopping and starting, all running the same direction, and all the result of the same type of glacial action that took place in Central Poland. In the case of Warsaw, the glacier responsible for the drumlins just didn't make it that far south.
I will be returning to Poland soon, but this first trip away left me with some interesting feelings about immigration, an issue that is quite divisive in both the USA and Poland right now. If you've never spent a long period of time away from your homeland, you may never come to understand the immigrant experience. The reality (for immigrants) is that they sacrifice all they know for an unknown they cannot and rarely do get to know thoroughly. They uproot themselves and move to a place in which new roots seldom flourish. Once in the new place, the immigrants live daily in Sturm und Drang (to use a bit more German), hoping--I think--for nothing more than to somehow have a better life for at least their children. This hope motivates their actions. Of course, America is a land composed largely of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, and yet we have a long and sordid history of opposing immigrant groups. How quickly people forget! The first wave Polish experience in the 19th Century (the Za Chłebem, "For Bread" immigration) was certainly no different, meeting the same hostility that certain other groups faced and that still others face today.
I started this post writing about a widespread holiday that occurs on November 11th. In both Poland and the United States the roots of this holiday, World War One, have been largely forgotten and replaced with other, perhaps more meaningful, justifications for celebration. Forgotten. Forsaken. Lost. For my part, however, I will think a bit about Andrew Miller, and all those like him, who died and, for what? And just like poor Andy, Remarque's novel does not end well for the narrator-protagonist. In setting the stage to describe the day of his death Remarque writes: "... the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front."
 |
| Polish WWI Recruitment Poster. Source. |
I've been fortunate in my life to have read hundreds of excellent books. One that relates directly to the Great War that never leaves my top-ten list is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues, Polish: Na Zachodzie bez zmian). This sobering, thin tome, published first as a serial in Germany in November-December of 1928 (ten years after the end of the conflict), is sometimes referred to as an anti-war novel, but Remarque doesn't really politicize the War and it is probably better to think of the book as one soldier's perspective on the effects of war in general. He himself writes in the epigraph:
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."
My own grandfather was a WWI era US Marine, but did not serve in France. My wife's granduncle, Andrew Miller, however, served and died there on 2 November 1918, just days before the armistice. He was first buried at the American Cemetery, Les Islettes, Department of the Meuse, near Verdun, France and later repatriated to his home town. I don't have a picture of that cemetery, but some of you may be familiar with the much larger Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, pictured below.
 |
| Cimetière Américain (Meuse-Argonne). Source. |
The end of the First World War and the subsequent return to peace left winners (United States, Poland) and losers (everybody else), but all across Europe and the world the generation that actually fought in that war would be called the Génération perdue (Lost Generation) thanks to Gertrude Stein. Incidentally, the French word perdue is a passive participle that comes from the verb perdre and can mean a range of things: "lost or misplaced", "wasted or squandered", or, interestingly, as a reflexive to "to disappear or die out", as in Cette coutume s'est perdue (This custom has died out). It can also mean--and I think this may have been the original intent of the phrase--to be beyond all hope, as in: Ces enfants sont perdus, ils ne peuvent rien faire de bien (These children are hopeless, they can't do anything right). Of course, all of these meanings can be forced into the English word "lost", but we don't go to these other readings as a first choice!
Incidentally, in Polish the phrase is Stracone pokolenie. The word stracone has more a connotation of "wasted" or "misused", as opposed to "lost", "abandoned" or "forgotten", which are all different words in Polish. In German the phrase is also interesting, as it occurs in two competing forms: verlassene Generation and gottverlassene Generation. The former means "forsaken" and the latter, "God forsaken". There is a serious heaviness and even meanness in "God forsaken", don't you think?
Language is so interesting! What do you imagine as the meaning of "lost" in the phrase Lost Generation? For Americans I rather imagine we think of great literary figures, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, mostly, and perhaps the Great Gatsby comes to mind. We do not, I believe, think of the horrors of that particular war and the traumatic effects left on its front-line participants; nor, I suppose, do we think of the pregnant meaning encoded in the word "lost". Incidentally, just as food for thought among you historian-types, Hitler and Mussolini were members of the Lost Generation; Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were older and...were different. Think about that for a while.
 |
| Source. |
Fortunately, being in the USA will allow me to continue riding, using my old bicycle. My older mount is named "Seven of Nine". The name is not a reference to a particular Star Trek: Voyager character, but is a concatenation of the manufacturer's name (Seven Cycles, Watertown, Massachusetts) and the production year (2009), hence "Seven of Nine". Seven of Nine (or simply "Seven") sports an Axiom frame and boasts the same custom geometry as Kościuszko. Currently she (yes, she) is running a triple crankset with an 11-30 cassette. She does quite well on the local climbs, but at nearly twice the weight of Kościuszko is not nearly as agile and fast. What she lacks in speed and agility, however, she makes up for in extraordinary comfort. There is nothing at all like a good steel frame for absorbing road vibration. After nine years, Seven has nearly 30000 miles (48000 km) to her credit! Seven is the Cadillac, and Kościuszko is the sports car.
The first ride on Seven was wonderful, despite my ongoing health issues. I was a bit worried that after three months of no climbing (Warsaw) I would be in no shape to handle the terrain of the Pacific Northwest, but the concern was unfounded. Let's take a moment, though, to understand the difference between hills and the flats.
 |
| Smiling and climbing go together! |
In terms of the quantity of climbing, what is the difference between Warsaw and the Pacific Northwest (PNW)? It's in the raw numbers. In my first three months in Warsaw I cycled 570 miles (913 km) and climbed a total of 6755 vertical feet (2059 meters). Now, think about each of those vertical feet as one stair step each, to get the idea of the amount of climbing. This averages out to about 12 vertical feet (12 stairs) per mile. Think about it, that's climbing 12 steps in one mile's time (7.5 steps up per kilometer). That's trivial. Really. You can power up and over just about anything you come up against without any thought to using different mechanics at this ratio of rise over run.
And in the USA? On my first ride in the PNW, my friend Frits and I opted for a "flat route", to make sure my muscles and mechanics were up to the task. We rode 28 miles (45 km) and climbed 1860 vertical feet (567 meters). In this one ride Seven and I had climbed 1/4 of the total that Kościuszko and I had accumulated in three months in Warsaw! This one ride, a relatively flat one for the area, averaged 66 vertical feet (66 steps) per mile (or 41 steps per kilometer). Incidentally, for comparison's sake, my last ride in Warsaw which was comparable in distance and that featured a bit of climbing, clocked in at a bit over 28 miles (46 km) and 377 vertical feet (115m), 13.5 vertical feet per mile!
 |
| Not flat, but flat for the Puget Sound region. |
In the PNW you really do have to learn how to climb. It's a different skill. During a ride your overall speed will necessarily be less, because so much of the time you are propelling upwards, not forwards. Each ride forces you to practice (at least) two different cycling tasks. We measure our success in those tasks on flat terrain by looking at power output as expressed by speed, while in climbing we look at what is called VAM, an acronym for an Italian term, velocità ascensionale media (mean ascent velocity). This function looks at power per kilogram of body weight in relation to the ascent time on a given gradient. This talk of data is of little interest for most of us, I suppose, so let's just ride on!
I've written on numerous other occasions about the alluvial flood plain where Warsaw is located. There are good reasons, motivated by geography, for the flat terrain. What you may not know is that this hilly terrain in the Seattle area was also a plain (a basin, actually), but geologic forces worked its magic here! Let me explain.
Our flat basin was once covered with a large glacier--the Vashon glacier. This ice sheet was nearly 3000 feet thick (914m). To put this into perspective, our tallest building is Columbia Center (Seattle), standing at 997 feet tall (286m), 1/3 the thickness of the glacier. Our unique topography is the result of the melting and receding of this glacier 15,000 years ago. Heavy flowing meltwater underneath the glacier carved out our deep lakes and Puget Sound itself. Lighter flows of this meltwater left north-south valleys while in the meantime, the receding ice deposited sand, till and clay at its margins, called moraines. The gently rolling ridges that form out of these deposits are called drumlins.
 |
| Patagonian Drumlins. Source. |
 |
| Zbójno drumlins. Source. |
So it is not the case that the Puget Sound is mountainous (it is flanked by two mountain ranges which created the initial basin, however). It is not even hilly, actually. Instead, we have endless ridges, stopping and starting, all running the same direction, and all the result of the same type of glacial action that took place in Central Poland. In the case of Warsaw, the glacier responsible for the drumlins just didn't make it that far south.
I will be returning to Poland soon, but this first trip away left me with some interesting feelings about immigration, an issue that is quite divisive in both the USA and Poland right now. If you've never spent a long period of time away from your homeland, you may never come to understand the immigrant experience. The reality (for immigrants) is that they sacrifice all they know for an unknown they cannot and rarely do get to know thoroughly. They uproot themselves and move to a place in which new roots seldom flourish. Once in the new place, the immigrants live daily in Sturm und Drang (to use a bit more German), hoping--I think--for nothing more than to somehow have a better life for at least their children. This hope motivates their actions. Of course, America is a land composed largely of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, and yet we have a long and sordid history of opposing immigrant groups. How quickly people forget! The first wave Polish experience in the 19th Century (the Za Chłebem, "For Bread" immigration) was certainly no different, meeting the same hostility that certain other groups faced and that still others face today.
I started this post writing about a widespread holiday that occurs on November 11th. In both Poland and the United States the roots of this holiday, World War One, have been largely forgotten and replaced with other, perhaps more meaningful, justifications for celebration. Forgotten. Forsaken. Lost. For my part, however, I will think a bit about Andrew Miller, and all those like him, who died and, for what? And just like poor Andy, Remarque's novel does not end well for the narrator-protagonist. In setting the stage to describe the day of his death Remarque writes: "... the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front."
Hi Daniel. Are you back in Poland? I am home on a snow day--fortunately the power came back on at my house. This is the most snow I remember ever getting at once in Washington. Anyway, I read your post with interest. It reminded me of the song I used to teach the IB kids--it is one I heard at a theatrical musical performance at the festival in Avignon, France, Chanson de Craonne. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-yRaEYQNQs
ReplyDeleteApparently, the author is anonymous and a reward was put out to find the author. I had a good translation but I can't find it now. I'll keep looking. I always think of how unjustly those soldiers were put into harms way, even when their leaders knew that the battle would be a losing one. And because of this song, I never forget Armistice Day.
http://dutempsdescerisesauxfeuillesmortes.net/paroles/chanson_de_craonne.htm