Smoking in Wartime

I believe I can write about smoking here at my desk, without having to sit and dream in that chair. I can't seem to begin, so I must seek help from my cigarettes, all very like the one I am now holding.

italo svevo, Zeno's Conscience

I am running around hiding outdoors, crouching by walls where it's dark, feeling the damp from the sidewalk rise up my pants leg. I am washing my hands a lot. I am fifteen again, furtive, alert to movement behind me. I learn how to cup the match in cold wind.

Actually, if I were fifteen again, I wouldn't be hiding or perpetually longing half as much. The whole clot of us, a significant chunk of the school, put down dinner forks and simply walked out the dining hall's front door. A reasonably short stroll to the hockey pond and then we sat down in a semicircle on the far side of the water. Under open sky a hundred matches sent their sulfur into the northeastern Ohio dark. With every lawless inhale we sucked in something necessary, bracing and big. The cumulative act of individually breathing in immeasurable happiness knit us close. Short of kissing, we couldn't have shared any deeper communion. All was okay, with each other and the world. In a few years more we would walk down sidewalks openly holding cigarettes, sit smoking in Central Park, in bars all up Avenue A and down Sixth Street, clubs in Tribeca, restaurants and bathrooms. At home I would let the butts collect in the half shell of a giant Atlantic surf clam—the oceans offered a benediction on our pleasure in a great bounty of free ashtrays—before it was safe to dump them in the trashcan of a paper grocery bag. The black granules emitted a dusky perfume that was not entirely pleasant but not a problem unless you were leaning right over it. This was what it would be like, we learned. The unbreathable right next to the point of life, its frosting.

________

Every war picture. Every movie. Cigarettes hang from the lips of every black-and-white face frozen by the shutter in every capture from every war. Cigarettes front every blazing assault. They were as numerous as the killed. How to shoulder arms and go forward to do what we were never meant to do? Understand cigarettes, understand what makes the impossible possible.

They saved, for one, the life of Welsh Guards lieutenant Frank Barlow. A shell burst in his trench, and it was only his silver cigarette case that kept a piece of shrapnel from tearing into his flesh.

The exception to the rule was to see a soldier who did not smoke. The fact is, as a rule we were all pipe-makers, for we would get the root of ivy, saw it into blocks, and each fellow would have something to whittle on as the long days rolled by; and we have seen pipes thus made, with a pocketknife only, that would lay over any of the briarroots we have seen in stores for beauty of design and excellence of finish. And when you meet a rebel soldier to-day that don't smoke and don't like a social glass, you can as a rule put it down that he was not in many hard and "sole" trying campaigns.

—Lt. Robert M. Collins, 6th/15th Texas, Granbury's Brigade

"You ask me what we need to win the war? I answer tobacco as much as bullets," proclaimed General John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing about arming his American Expeditionary forces. The what-for to fire those bullets came from tobacco and, if the worst came to pass, it also became the "last and only solace of the wounded." Nicotine goes deep. It consumes you as you consume it. It calms and energizes; makes you creative and social, impelled and reflective; it is stimulating and endlessly calming. Tobacco is balm and ammunition both in the most extreme situation humans can ever find themselves.

A former paratrooper in the German army and...