Redemption

I WAS born in 1917. Throughout my childhood in the 1930s and early ’40s, I was haunted by images of World War i—the awful life in the trenches, the rats, the dismembered bodies, the horror. These images have recently been recalled by my reading of Adam Hochschild’s brilliant and disturbing book, To End All Wars; but back then they were ill-informed and existed in an historical context virtually inseparable from horror fiction. I remember vividly a well-thumbed book full of pictures that I had discovered in the branch library near my home in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was a shameless piece of propaganda (though I didn’t know it then) showing German soldiers with spiked helmets bayoneting babies and burying Belgian families alive. I would check it out and pass it around, enjoying the frisson of horror like some secret knowledge, like some piece of pornography—which, in fact, it was. With more maturity and reading of history I could qualify such images, but the horror remained. It was part of my inheritance—and that of my generation’s—for just over the edge of a very near horizon lay that no-man’s-land and the realization that that awfulness actually happened and was just as real as that safe little New England city in which I lived.

It was easy to become a pacifist back then, and by the time I’d reached high school I was one, or claimed to be, along with most everyone in my circle of friends. What began in my early years as a visceral revulsion to battlefield horrors became, with more reading and knowledge, a conviction—that not just that war but all wars were evil. I’d read Ray Stannard Baker’s two-volume life of Woodrow Wilson and was moved to believe that his “war to end all wars” was a prophetic hope we had to cling to and work for. Of course there were other things besides pacifism on our minds in those depression years, but the memory of that war, however subliminal, was ever present. Nearly all of my friends, I think, would, if pressed, admit to being conscientious objectors of one stripe or another, or inclined to be, and many in that circle were strongly influenced by the charismatic minister at Springfield’s Old First Church (Congregational) who, handsome and eloquent, was an ardent pacifist—and, for me, a powerful role model. Through him I became convinced that to be a Christian was to be a pacifist, echoing the argument that Jesus could have led a violent uprising against Rome if he’d wished, but chose instead to take the peaceful course. That minister, the Reverend David Nelson Beach, made us aware of the many other antiwar organizations and movements at home and abroad that we had at our backs, such as the Oxford Movement, the War Resisters’ League, and religious groups like the Quakers and Mennonites. With such worldwide backing, pacifism seemed almost a common cause, which helped support the notion that we were not radical nonconformists but were patriotic citizens.

That there was a heavy admixture of naïveté in all this goes without saying. I still honor our idealism, but in retrospect I see our high-school gang—of which I was always a fringe member—mixing moral one-upmanship and pacifism in fairly even quantities. It was almost popular to be a pacifist in those early ’30s—if you went to the right high school or liberal church—and we wore that identity with some of the quiet confidence of the elect, as bolder others wore trophy sweatshirts. But, for the most part, we kept our pacifism low-key and out of sight. It was one thing to hate war (who didn’t?) but quite another to declare out loud that you would not die for your country. But, on one occasion, our easy pieties were rudely confronted. One member of our class, Howard Kraft by name, was a nonconformist who put all our nonconformity to shame. We had long since accepted Howard as a benign presence—a kind of ornamental weirdo savant...