On Saturday night, Robert had arranged for us to go with two of his Bloomsbury friends to dinner and a play. He had bought us all tickets to Journey's End, at the Duke of York Theater, a fairly small auditorium with an intimate atmosphere. We had marvelous seats at center stage, only a few rows back, which enhanced our sense of being right there in the middle of the action. The drama is "set in a World War I bunker in St. Quentin, France, as a group of British officers await their day of reckoning and a young Captain Stanhope tries to galvanize his men who are preparing to raid the enemy across No Man's Land." (blurb from Amazon.com) The play is suspenseful, moving, and darkly funny, as it reveals the range of emotions and responses of the soldiers facing their fate, which will be determined by the rigid and inept decisions being made from the command center.
Coincidentally, I had recently read several books set in the era surrounding the Great War that provided a context for the play and heightened its impact for me as a viewer. One was Colonel Roosevelt, the third of Edmund Morris's brilliant trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt. It explores TR's life after the presidency amidst events leading the US into a much debated decision to abandon Wilson's position of neutrality and join the war on the side of England and France, against Germany. TR, who repeatedly denounced Wilson for his refusal to prepare the military for eventual conflict, believed that war was inevitable and necessary. He threw his support behind the war effort and encouraged his sons to enlist in officer training and volunteer to lead in the action.
In Ken Follette's Fall of Giants, a fascinating "epic that traces the lives of 5 interrelated families and the impact of war and its aftermath on their lives," (another blurb from Amazon.com) I got a sense of the gruesome reality of trench warfare and the magnitude of suffering caused by a war that took 15 million lives and imposed 20 million casualties. Follette does a masterful job of conveying the senselessness of brave soldiers marching off to be slaughtered, pawns in a war game controlled by stubborn and inept decision makers using outmoded and faulty war strategy. He personalizes the losses for the reader as he tells of the tiny Welch mining town in the aftermath of a major battle on the Western front, where one of the main character's family trembled at their door as they were passed by and spared from one of the hundreds of dreaded telegrams that were being delivered to their friends and neighbors informing them that a son had been sacrificed in the battle.
Two of the books I read dealt with the decade after the Armistice in 1918, and the disillusionment and trauma and loss experienced by an entire generation impacted by the Great War. In Paris Wife, a novel set in the late 1920's, Paula McLain explores the lingering impact of the war upon the lives of the lost generation of artists and writers living in Paris, told from perspective of Ernest Hemmingway's first wife Hadley Richardson. In Winter Ghosts, Kate Mosse writes about a young man seeking to deal with the loss of the brother he idolized, more than a decade after he went off to war and never returned.
Having so recently read all of these works, I was sensitized to the intricacies of the drama and was profoundly affected by its content. The play ended, predictably, with the officers, fully armed, rushing out of the bunker and onto the battlefield. Darkness and then the terrible sound of explosions and war cries followed. When the noise stopped, the curtain fell, and slowly rose again revealing the muddy boots of the cast, who were lined up across the stage in military formation, still dressed in combat fatigues and helmets. They stood ghostlike and immovable in the smoke and haze, against the backdrop of a printed page, taken from a roster of British troops killed in the war. Thunderous applause from the audience was followed by the shuffling of play goers exiting the theater in complete silence. What a production! The play is moving to Broadway later this year and will be re-cast with Americans. See it if you can. It is well worth the time and money.
After the play, we found a great French restaurant and visited with Katarina and Andrea over dinner. The two sisters had immigrated to the UK from Eastern Europe after their native Czecholslovakia split in 2009 along ethnic lines into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Katarina and Andrea were Slovaks who found themselves in a newly formed country with limited opportunity and promise.
They began sharing a flat in London after Andrea completed her seminary education and was hired at Bloomsbury Church in pastoral counseling and visitation. Andrea, the more reserved of the sisters, had been instrumental in introducing Robert to the Bloomsbury parishioners and in involving him in some of the pastoral duties that he was eager to experience. Katarina, who also worked part time at the church, covering the front desk, entertained us with her back stage impressions of some of the more staid and traditional members of the congregation, as well as her candid views on several aspects of the politics of the church. I learned that some church issues are universal, and that the competing views of the older and younger generations on how the church will remain relevant in today's society is one of them. The conversation was lighthearted and fun, a welcome contrast to the visceral experience of war and conflict that we had just experienced from attending the 3 hour play.
The evening was one of the highlights of our trip. Unfortunately, we forgot to take any pictures and thus this narrative will have to replace the photos.
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