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p310 “You go there instead of me,” Adrian had said. And we did not get to Paris. Shall I confess that, privately and apart from the historical point of view, I felt a deep, intimately personal shame? Weeks long we had sent home terse, affectedly laconic dispatches, dressing our triumphs in cold matter-of-fact. Liege had long since fallen, we had won the battle for Lorraine. In accordance with the fixed master-plan we had swung with five armies across the Meuse, had taken Brussels, Namur, Carried the day at Charleroi and Longwy, won a second series of battles at Sedan, Rethel, Saint-Quentin, [all the usual suspects. See Here for my comments on this area in the last blog] and occupied Reims. We advanced as though on wings. It was just as we had dreamed: by the favour of the god of war, at destiny’s nod, we were born as on pinions. To gaze without flinching on the flames we kindled, could not help kindling, was incumbent upon our manhood, it was the supreme challenge to our heroic courage. I can still see vividly the picture of a gaunt Gaulish wife, standing on a height round which our battery was moving; at its foot a village lay shattered and smoking. “I am the last!” she cried, with a gesture of tragic power, such as is given to no German woman to make. “Je suis la derniere!” Raising her fists, she hurled her curses down on our heads, repeating three times: “Mechants! Mechants! Mechants!” [wicked, vicious]
We looked the other way. We had to win, and ours was the hard trade of triumph. That I felt wretched enough myself sitting my horse, plagued with coughing and the racking pain in my limbs due to nights under canvas, actually afforded me a certain consolation.
Yet many more villages we shot up, still borne on victory’s pinions. Then came the incomprehensible, the apparently senseless thing: the order to retreat. How should we have understood it? We belonged to the army group Hausen, south of Chalons-sur-Marne, streaming on to Paris, as the von Kluck group were doing at other points. We were ignorant that somewhere, after a five-day battle, the French [Wow, he really isn’t going to give the “Old Contemptibles” credit for anything. The BEF played a crucial role in this counterattack.] had crushed von Bulow’s right wing -- reason enough for the anxious cautiousness of a supreme commander [Helmuth von Moltke the Younger] who had been elevated to his rank on account of his uncle, to order a general withdrawal. We passed some of the villages that we had left smoking in our rear, and the hill where the tragic woman had stood. She was not there.
As Alfred Graf von Schlieffen had feared, his Schlieffen Plan (Aufmarsch I) for the “rapid” isolation and defeat of France, had been compromised after he left the scene. Here is, possibly, all you really need to know about the Great War on the Western Front:
...A favourite of the Emperor was Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, who became Chief of Staff after Schlieffen retired.
Moltke went on to devise Aufmarsch II Ost, a variant upon Schlieffen's Aufmarsch Ost designed for an isolated Russo-German war. Schlieffen seems to have tried to impress upon Moltke that an offensive strategy against France could only work in the event of an isolated Franco-German war, as German forces would otherwise be too weak to implement it.[12] Knowing this, Moltke still attempted to apply the offensive strategy of Aufmarsch I West to the two-front war Germany faced in 1914 and Schlieffen's defensive plan Aufmarsch II West. With too few troops to cross west of Paris, let alone attempt a crossing of the Seine, Moltke's campaign failed to breach the French 'second defensive sector' and his troops were pushed back in the Battle of the Marne.[13]
-Wiki
So, as with the Japanese in the Pacific War, there was really no viable German plan to win the war against France in 1914. In both cases the military simply implemented the best plan they had, despite their lack of faith in an ability to win. Hitler would do much the same thing when he attacked the Soviet Union, since the one thing he was sure of was that the Soviets would be more difficult to defeat if he delayed. It is amazing how many wars are started by people who don’t even have confidence that they can win.
Being incorrigible, I couldn't help doing a little research on this "army group Hausen" Zeitblom speaks of. Hausen actually commanded the 3rd Army. The Imperial German Army did not group armies into "Army Groups" until 1915. Eventually there would be four Army Groups on both the Western and Eastern fronts. Here's a quote from Wiki about 3rd Army:
Upon the mobilization Max von Hausen (Saxon War Minister) was given command of the 3rd Army which mainly consisted of Saxons. The army participated in the Battle of the Frontiers, mainly in the battles of Dinant and Charleroi and the army were responsible for the destruction of Reims in September 1914. After the Second Army's retreat after the First Battle of the Marne, Von Hausen saw his own flank exposed and ordered a retreat. Upon the stabilization of the front on the river Aisne, Von Hausen was relieved of his command and replaced by General Karl von Einem.
Successfully repulsing the French Champagne-Marne offensive from February–March and September–November 1915 respectively...
So then I looked up 3rd Army and it seems to have consisted of units from the parts of Germany that were last to fall under Prussian control: Bavaria, Westphalia, Hesse, and Thuringia.
p311 The wings were trustless. It should not have been. It had not been a war to be won in one swift onslaught. We did not understand the frantic jubilation of the world over the result of the battle of the Marne; over the fact that the short war on which our salvation hung had turned into a long one, which we could not stand. Our defeat was now only a matter of time, and of cost to the foe. We could have laid our weapons down and forced our leaders to an immediate peace, if only we had understood. But even among them probably only one here and there dared to think of it. After all, they had scarcely realized that the age of localized war had gone by and that every campaign to which we felt ourselves driven must end in a world conflagration. In such a one the advantages of the inner line [and of the Prussian railroad monopoly], the fanatical devotion of the troops, the high state of preparedness, and a firmly based, strong authoritarian state had held out the chance of a lightning triumph. If this failed -- and it stood written that it must fail -- then, whatever we might still for years accomplish, we were lost in principle and before we began: this time, next time, always.
I buy his account of German psychology but not that the German leaders and people could not have know. European history back to the 18th (even the 16th and 17th) centuries had repeatedly demonstrated the impossibility of a continental power, no matter how superior, dominating the whole of Europe for more than an instant. The more successful any such power was, the more enemies they provoked both within their sphere of control and on their ever expanding periphery. Neither the Hapsburg's, Louis XIV, nor Napoleon were ever really on the verge of ultimate victory. They were only more dangerously extended and usually bankrupt as well.
We did not know. Slowly the truth tortured its way into us; while the war, a rotting, decaying, misery-creating war, though from time to time flaring up in flattering, deceiving successes, this war, of which I too had said it must not last long, lasted four years. Shall I here and now go into details of that long-drawn-out giving way and giving up, the wearing out of our powers and our equipment, the shabbiness and shortages of life, the undernourishment, the loss of morale from the deprivations, the lapses into dishonesty and the gross luxury of the profiteer? I might be censured for recklessly overstepping the limits of my purpose, which is personal and biographical... [Zeitblom is sent home after suffering from Typhus. Lice borne typhus was also the scourge of the SS work camps around Munich during the 2nd World War.
Around this time Adrian gains two female fans Meta Nackedey and Kunigunde Rosenstiel, both around 30 years of age. Kunigunde, a Jewess, was also “A capable business woman...” to wit a manufacturer of sausage-cases.]
p315 ...At the time I returned to civil life he was greatly given to the habit [rolling and smoking cigarettes]; and my impression was that he practiced it not so much for the sake of the Gesta, [Gesta means "deeds" and there are dozens of documents that include this word but he's referring to the Gesta Romanorum] though this was ostensibly the case, as it was because he was trying to put the Gesta behind him and be ready for new demands upon his genius. On his horizon, I am sure of it, there was always rising -- probably since the outbreak of war, for a power of divination like his must have recognized therein a deep cleft and discontinuity, the opening of a new period of history, crowded with tumult and disruptions, agonies and wild vicissitudes -- on the horizon of his creative life, I say, there was already rising the “Apocalypsis cum figuris,” the work which was to give this life such a dizzying upward surge. Until then, so at least I see the process, he was employing the waiting-time with the brilliant marionette fantasies.
Adrian had learned through Schildknapp of the old book that passes for the source of most of the romantic myths of the Middle Ages. It is a translation from the Latin of the oldest Christian collection of fairy-tales and legends. I am quite willing to give Adrian’s favourite with the like-coloured eyes due credit for the suggestion. They had read it together in the evenings and it appealed to Adrian’s sense of the ridiculous, his craving to laugh, yes, to laugh until he cried... [Adrian by this point is the focus of attention for two females and two other males (Rudolf (Schwerdtfeger) and Rudiger (Schildknapp). No, that’s not confusing.) ... poor Zeitblom! This is even harder than Hans with Peeperkorn]
I am of opinion that the Gesta -- in their historical uninstructedness, pious Christian didacticism, and moral naivete, with their eccentric casuistry of parricide, adultery, and complicated incest; their undocumented Roman emperors, with daughters whom they fantastically guarded and then offered for sale under the most hair-splitting conditions -- it is not to be denied, I say, that all these fables, presented in a solemn Latinizing and indescribably naive style of translation, concerning knights in pilgrimage to the Promised Land, wanton wives, artful procuresses, clerics given to the black arts, do have an extraordinarily diverting effect. They were in the highest degree calculated to stimulate Adrian’s penchant for parody, and the thought of dramatizing them musically in condensed form for the puppet theatre occupied him from the day he made their acquaintance. [Yet another tale of a virtuous wife tricked into adultery. Followed by a description of one of these puppet theatre creations of Adrian’s “Of the Birth of the Holy Pope Gregory” which outdoes Oedipus in that brother and sister conceive a son who then goes on to, without knowing it, marry his mother (a Queen) before eventually becoming Pope. This all ends when the mother... “departs for Rome to confess to the Holy Father, who, as he receives her confession, recognizes her and says: “O my sweet mother, sister, and wife, O my friend! The Devil thought to lead us to hell, but the greater power of God has prevented him.”].
p320 Those were enjoyable and stimulating evenings when he played for us [from the Gesta] -- that is, to me, Schildknapp, and very likely Rudi Schwerdtfeger [Rudi Sch. and Rudi Sch.], who persisted in being present now and then -- on the old square piano in the deep-windowed room with the Nike, the latest-written parts of his amazing scores, in which the harmonically most dominating, the rhythmically labyrinthine was applied to the simplest material, and again a sort of musical children’s trumpet style to the most extraordinary. The meeting of the Queen with the holy man whom she had borne to her brother, and whom she had embraced as spouse, charmed tears from us such as had never filled our eyes, uniquely mingling of laughter and fantastic sensibility. Schwerdtfeger, in abandoned familiarily, availed himself of the licence of the moment: with a “You’ve done it magnificently!” embraced Adrian and pressed him to his heart. I saw Rudiger’s mouth, always a bitter one, give a wry twist and could not myself resist murmuring: “Enough!” and putting out my hand to quench the unquenchable and restrain the unrestrained. [What German men did in an age before football on TV... or gay porn.]
Rudolf may have had some trouble in following the conversation that ensued after the private performance in the Abbot’s room [the “parlor” of Adrian’s living quarters]. We spoke of the union of the advanced with the popular, the closing of the gulf between art and accessibility, high and low, as once in a certain sense it had been brought together by the romantic movement, literary and musical. But after that had followed a new and deeper cleavage and alienation between the good and the easy, the worth-while and the entertaining, the advanced and the generally enjoyable, which had become the destiny of art. Was it sentimentality to say that music -- and she stood for them all -- demanded with growing consciousness to step out of her dignified isolation, to find common ground without becoming common, and to speak a language which even the musically untaught could understand, as it understood the Wolf’s Glen [surprise, another deal with a devil. Interestingly, this is also what Hitler called two of his headquarters in Belgium and France] and the Jungfernkranz and Wagner? Anyhow, sentimentality was not the means to this end, but instead and much sooner irony, mockery; which, clearing the air, made an opposing party against the romantic, against pathos and prophecy, sound-intoxication and literature and a bond with the objective and elemental -- that is, with the rediscovery of music itself as an organization of time. A most precarious start. For how near did not lie the false primitive, and thus the romantic again! To remain on the height of intellect; to resolve into the matter-of-course the most exclusive production of European musical development, so that everybody could grasp the new; to make themselves its master, applying it unconcernedly as free building material and making tradition felt, recoined into the opposite of the epigonal; to make technique, however high it had climbed, entirely unimportant, and all the arts of counterpoint and instrumentation to disappear and melt together to an effect of simplicity very far from simplicity, an intellectually winged simplicity -- that seemed to be the object and the craving of art.
p321 It was mostly Adrian who talked, only slightly seconded by us. Excited by the playing, he spoke with flushed cheeks and hot eyes, slightly feverish; not in a steady stream but more as just throwing out remarks, yet with so much animation that I felt I had never seen him, either in mine or in Rudiger’s presence, so eloquently taken out of himself. Schildknapp had given expression to his disbelief in the deromanticizing of music. Music was after all too deeply and essentially bound up with the romantic ever to reject it without serious natural damage to itself. To which Adrian:
“I will gladly agree with you, if you mean by romantic a warmth of feeling which music in the service of technical intellectuality today rejects. It is probably self-denial. But what we called the purification of the complicated into the simple is at bottom the same as the winning back of the vital and the power of feeling. If it were possible -- whoever succeeded in -- how would you say it?” he turned to me and then answered himself: “-- the break-through from intellectual coldness into a touch-and-go world of new feeling, him one should call the saviour of art. Redemption,” he went on, with a nervous shoulder-shrug, “a romantic word, and a harmonic writer’s word, shop talk for the cadence-blissfulness of harmonic music. Isn’t it amazing that music for a long time considered herself a means of release, whereas she herself, like all the arts, needed to be redeemed from a pompous isolation, which was the fruit of the culture-emancipation, the elevation of culture as a substitute for religion -- from being alone with an elite of culture, called the public, which soon will no longer be, which even now no longer is, so that soon art will be entirely alone, alone to die, unless she were to find her way to the folk, that is, to say it unromantically, to human beings?”
p322 He said and asked that all in one breath in a lowered, conversational tone, but with a concealed tremor which one understood only when he finished.
“The whole temper of art, believe me, will change, and withal into the blither and more modest; it is inevitable, and it is a good thing. Much melancholy ambition will fall away from her, and a new innocence, yes, harmlessness will be hers. The future will see in her, she herself will once more see in herself, the servant of a community which will comprise far more than ‘education’ and will not have culture but will perhaps be a culture. We can only with difficulty imagine such a thing; and yet it will be, and be the natural thing: an art without anguish, psychologically healthy, not solemn, unsadly confining, an art per du with humanity. . . .”
Pop culture? Or cult music?
He broke off, and we all three sat silent and shaken. [Possibly imagining the Grammys of the future] It is painful and heart-stirring at once to hear talk of isolation from the community, remoteness from trust. With all my emotion I was yet in my deepest soul unsatisfied with his utterance, directly dissatisfied with him. What he had said did not fit with him, his pride, his arrogance if you like, which I loved, and to which art has a right. Art is mind, and mind does not at all need to feel itself obligated to the community, to society -- it may not, in my view, for the sake of its freedom, its nobility. An art that “goes in unto” the folk, which makes her own the needs of the crowd, of the little man, of small minds, arrives at wretchedness, and to make it her duty is the worst small-mindedness, and the murder of mind and spirit. And it is my conviction that mind, in its most audacious, unrestrained advance and researches, can, however unsuited to the masses, be certain in some indirect way to serve man -- in the long run men.
Doubtless that was also the natural opinion of Adrian. But it pleased him to deny it, and I was very much mistaken if I looked at that as a contradiction of his arrogance. More likely it was an effort to condescend, springing from the same arrogance. If only there had not been that trembling in his voice when he spoke of the need of art to be redeemed, of art being per du with humanity! That was feeling: despite everything it tempted me to give his hand a stolen pressure. But I did not do so; instead I kept an eye on Rudi Schwerdtfeger lest he again be moved to embrace him. [Settle down, girls]
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