Spiritual Quote of the Day (J.R.R. Tolkien, on the Value of ‘Small Acts of Kindness and Love’)

“I have found that it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”—English novelist, artist, scholar, and linguist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Hobbit (1937)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Two Towers,’ With a Line Made for Use Tomorrow Night)

Gandalf [played by Ian McKellen] [to Grima Wormtongue]: “Be silent. Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I did not pass through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a witless worm.”—The Two Towers [Part Two of The Lord of the Rings] (2002), screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, and Peter Jackson, adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, directed by Peter Jackson 

This, folks, is an insult worthy of Shakespeare—eminently worthy of being unleased at a shameless name-caller in debate.

Quote of the Day (Elijah Wood, on the Courage of Frodo in ‘Lord of the Rings’)

“One of the great messages of the [“The Lord of the Ring”] books as it pertains to Frodo and the hobbits in general is a sense that even the smallest person, not just in stature but in terms of what one feels they’re capable of doing, is capable of greatness, of affecting real change, of having real impact. What Frodo was up against seemed insurmountable, and yet he was able to accomplish it largely because of goodness, kindness, a purity of heart and perhaps innocence. Those are the things that hobbits embody, and inherently why they’re able to withstand the corruption of the Ring for longer than humans. But what makes Frodo unique is a way of seeing the world without any kind of cynicism. There’s also courage, maybe even a blind courage, of not necessarily knowing what’s ahead and therefore not allowing himself to be afraid. If I’m to learn one thing from all of that, it’s that there’s fortitude in his outlook that makes it all possible.”—Actor Elijah Wood, on what he learned playing Frodo in the film adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, quoted by Carlos Aguilar, “Frodo Still Lives In One Actor’s Heart,” The New York Times, Dec. 22, 2021

Spiritual Quote of the Day (J.R.R. Tolkien, on ‘An Eden on This Very Unhappy Earth’)

“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.”— English novelist and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter (1981)

Quote of the Day (J.R.R. Tolkien, on How Evil Labors in Vain)

“Evil labors with vast powers and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives.”—English scholar/Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), letter of April 30, 1944, to son Christopher, in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (1981)

The image accompanying this post is the reflecting pool at the World Trade Center Memorial in Lower Manhattan—another example of how, despite the “vast powers” unleashed by evil that day, the power of courage and love asserted itself—as it does in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Flashback, July 1916: Somme Stalemate Saps War Spirit

As it completed its second full year, World War I bore all the marks of an unprecedented gash across the landscape of civilization. The Battle of the Somme, the Allied campaign to change the grim arithmetic of casualties and futility, only worsened matters. With 1.5 million shells fired, the biggest artillery bombardment the world had ever seen (even heard in the South of England) as a week-long rologue, British and French soldiers rushed forth into battle on July 1, 1916, only to be cut down by the waiting German guns—60,000 British casualties in those 24 hours alone, including 20,000 dead, the greatest loss of life in the nation’s military history.

Could it get any worse? No, but it could remain remarkably bad throughout the month and well into autumn, as the Somme would soon feature commanders who used Napoleonic tactics rendered obsolete by modern weaponry; common soldiers left physically and psychically wounded in ways little understood at the time; and writers who sought to make sense of it all. When the fight ended four months later, the British incurred more than 400,000 casualties, while their French allies lost 200,000 and the Germans half a million. Together with the Battle of Verdun (discussed in this prior post of mine), the Somme came to symbolize the horror of trench warfare.

(Believe it or not, the image accompanying this post comes from a British propaganda film meant to drum up homefront spirit during the fight, The Battle of the Somme. Well, I guess this image of a badly wounded soldier could have been worse—if it showed the rats that the soldiers had to contend with, not to mention the gas masks frequently worn there.)

Oh, yes—and the futility and basic absurdity of such warfare, for the battle was waged not on as site of military significance, but at the spot on the map where British forces adjoined their French allies.

Reading these last two paragraphs reminds me of nothing so much as America’s Civil War. But Britain’s leaders, let alone those of the other nations in this conflict across the Atlantic, seemed to have learned nothing from the conflict that had occurred across the Atlantic a half-century before, and so they were doomed to suffer similar outward convulsions and internal divisions.

That enormous single-day loss of life, for instance, will remind Americans of the bloodiest 24 hours in their own history, the Battle of Antietam—except that the Somme was even worse. The number of British dead, wounded and missing in action for this one day was more than double the combined Union-Confederate toll for the legendary Civil War battle.

Although the depth of the carnage is reminiscent of Antietam, the manner in which the first day of the Somme unfolded resembles nothing so much as the third day of Gettysburg. An offensive-minded commander (for the British, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig; for the Confederates, Robert E. Lee) preceded an order to attack with an unprecedented artillery barrage—in the case of Gettysburg, a morning shelling that was the greatest seen in the Western Hemisphere to that point; at the Somme, a week-long bombardment. Far from softening the defender up as intended, the bombardment was largely ineffective (e.g., British medium-range fire fell consistently short of its target, and 30% of the shells were duds). 

And so, khaki-clad British troops—many the product of the “New Army” swelled by recruitment posters featuring military hero Lord Kitchener, sunk by a submarine only the month before—marched into sunlight in perfect order along a 15-mile front, across open fields, like so many sitting ducks, under the watchful gaze of three ranks of Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops safely entrenched, on higher ground, in dugouts. 

Only minutes before the fateful assault, an operation to disrupt the German defenses occurred in the form of two huge mines, containing more than 100,000 pounds of explosives. The advancing “Tommies” could then, the thinking went, exploit the resulting confusion around the two craters to avoid the enfilade fire that would surely come from the Germans.

Civil War buffs will recall a similar plan involving Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces in the summer 1864 Petersburg campaign. The resulting “Battle of the Crater” resulted in 4,000 Union casualties. On the other hand, the mining operation meant to ease the capture of La Boiselle Salient led to nearly 12,000 combined casualties in Britain’s 8^th and 34^th Divisions. British planners had not reckoned with the possibility that German intelligence, piecing together newspaper articles, soldiers’ indiscreet talk and reports from spies, would figure out that the twin explosions would in effect provide advance warning of the follow-up assault by the Tommies.

Over the years, Haig has been excoriated so soundly and repeatedly that in some quarters, a reaction has even occurred in his favor. A number of his partisans say he learned from his mistakes, with some claiming that he came around to see the value of new weaponry. One historian, William Philpott, even nominated him as Britain’s greatest general.

But Haig’s lack of imagination—his inability to grasp how tactics had to evolve in the face of new technology—is nowhere better illustrated than this passage from a 1926 when he still saw a future for horses in combat:

“I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.”

Even a relatively sympathetic historian such as Peter Hart—who argued, in The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front, that “Haig’s way was excruciatingly painful but it was the only realistic way at the time”—ends up acknowledging the myopia of the general and his subordinates:

“There seemed to be no limit to the number of times that it had to be demonstrated to them that isolated attacks on a narrow front would not succeed without overpowering artillery to devastate everything in both that and the adjoining sectors. The British rarely seemed to realise that an attack to 'improve' a tactical position did not do so unless it succeeded. Too often there was no proper analysis of how many guns and shells needed to be fired to subdue a given frontage and depth of trench lines. And there seemed to be no limit to their optimism that the German Army and the entire German Empire stood ready to collapse if there was just one more push towards Bapaume.”

The Somme was also remarkable for the authors who lived long enough to recapture the experience of the campaign, in one fashion or another, in their writing, including:

*Alan Seeger, an American who, before being killed on July 4, 1916, wrote “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” a poem taken to heart by the young John F. Kennedy;

*J.R.R. Tolkien, whose grittily realistic battle scenes from his Lord of the Rings trilogy reflect his service in the Somme;

*Robert Graves, whose bitter 1929 antiwar memoir Goodbye to All That narrated his participation in the attack on the High Wood three weeks into the campaign, where he suffered a wound so grievous that his parents were mistakenly informed of his death;

*Wilfred Owen, trapped underground at the Somme, was transferred for treatment of his shell shock to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he began to write the verses that made him the most acclaimed British poet of the Great War;

*Siegfried Sassoon, Owen’s fellow shell shock victim at Craiglockhart—and who, unlike his friend, survived the war;

* Ford Maddox Ford, who translated his experience with shell shock into the novel sequence Parade’s End.

In this small sample of soldiers, the number of shell-shock victims from the Somme looms large. But they were only a handful compared with the total number of those afflicted with this disease, later called combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress syndrome. A 2011 article on the BBC Web site by Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, estimates that by the end of WWI, the British Army had dealt with 80,000 cases of this. Altogether, war neuroses represented one-seventh of all personnel discharged for disabilities from the British Army.

An article by neuropathologist Daniel Perl in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, then summarized in a New York Times Magazine article last month by Robert F. Worth, offers the hypothesis that blasts in modern warfare can leave scars on the brain. TNT, first used by the German Army in 1902, was employed on a far greater scale in WWI, leading to development of shell shock.

The Allies learned hard lessons about fighting at the Somme, lessons they were able to apply in outlasting the Kaiser’s military machine (with American help) over the next two years of the war. But it came too late for the men who fought at the Somme in July 1916. Peter Simkins, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, noted, in an interview for the Great War documentary on PBS, that veterans of the Somme were primed to go “over the top” in taking enemy positions, but it was all for nought then:

"But it's sustaining the impetus of the advance once they've gone over the top that's important. If they've got the wrong weapons with which to fight, if they're carrying rifles and bayonets and they're up against machine guns, the formula is wrong.”

Photo of the Day: At Home Among Trees, Ridgewood, NJ

“I am at home among trees,” wrote J.R.R. Tolkien in his 1954 novel, The Fellowship of the Ring. Ridgewood is a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, but I certainly felt drawn to the beauty of trees when I walked in this sylvan setting at the edge of town, in Saddle River County Park, the site of this prior blog post of mine.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“Lord of the Rings,” on the Wound That “Will Never Fully Heal”)

Elrond (played by Hugo Weaving) (on Frodo): “His strength returns.”
Gandalf (played by Ian McKellan): “That wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life.”
Elrond: “And yet, to have come so far, still bearing the Ring, the Hobbit has shown extraordinary resilience to its evil.”
Gandalf: “It is a burden he should never have had to bear. We can ask no more of Frodo.”
Elrond: “Gandalf, the enemy is moving. Sauron's forces are massing in the East; his eye is fixed on Rivendell. And Saruman, you tell me, has betrayed us. Our list of allies grows thin.”
Gandalf: “His treachery runs deeper than you know. By foul craft, Saruman has crossed Orcs with goblin men. He's breeding an army in the caverns of Isengard. An army that can move in sunlight and cover great distance at speed. Saruman is coming for the Ring.”
Elrond: “This evil cannot be concealed by the power of the Elves. We do not have the strength to withstand both Mordor and Isengard. Gandalf, the Ring cannot stay here. This evil belongs to all of Middle-Earth. They must decide now how to end it. The time of the Elves is over, my people are leaving these shores. Who will you look to when we've gone? The Dwarves? They toil away in caverns, seeking riches. They care nothing for the troubles of others.”
Gandalf: “It is in Men that we must place our hope.”
Elrond: “Men? Men are weak. The Blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten. It is because of Men the Ring survives. I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago. I was there the day the strength of Men failed.”—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, directed by Peter Jackson

The Lord of the Rings trilogy may well be the film project that defines the post-9/11 era. No other spells out so vividly the monstrous terror unleashed by evil, the frailty of the human beings summoned to confront it, or the courage necessary ultimately to surmount it. The first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, opened the week before Christmas 2001. On the day I saw it, news had just broken of the shoe-bomber incident--a catastrophe that, unlike the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings three months earlier, was narrowly averted.

The adaptation of the Tolkien novels retains his tragic awareness of the persistence of evil, the way it returns because “the strength of Men failed.” Like the United States after it was plunged into the War on Terror, Frodo is left to carry his burden with an almost existential dread, as allies abandon the cause and he himself almost falls victim to the temptation of power symbolized by the ring.

I wish I could cheer louder over the death of Osama Bin Laden, but after nearly a decade, as Gandalf notes, “that wound will never fully heal.” It's personal.

I still recall the bewilderment in my office as we peered downtown after the first tower was struck, then the terror when the second plane delivered unmistakeable proof that this was no accident. I remember the chaos of trying to get back home to New Jersey for hours. I remember the flyers with pictures of the missing everywhere I turned for the next week or so; the desolate feeling in my heart hearing "Danny Boy" played in memory of the victims as I walked through the Port Authority Building on 42nd Street; and the clanging fire department bells whose sound made me pray for the next year that more lives were not about to be sacrificed.

Like many in the New York area, I knew personally (or knew of) people who were connected to Ground Zero, either working in the World Trade Center at the time or acting as first responders. One cousin escaped; a brother of a work colleague died; two other people, rushing to the scene, themselves absorbed gases let loose in the air.

It wasn’t so evident in 2001, but there was also a wound to the American body politic that gradually festered. Members of both political parties sought to diminish their respective roles in the train of events that culminated in 9/11 and, to their shame, concentrated more on pointing fingers and posturing than on uniting behind the effort to take out terror, root and branch. In the years since, we often lost our way. The damage to our psyches, our institutions and our way of life was severe, and, we can only hope, not lasting.

And yet…The United States has shown “extraordinary resilience” in the face of evil. The greatest mass murderer in American history will never mastermind another crime, nor enlist others in his twisted enterprise. (And let us hope, if there is a hell, that he was dispatched there immediately, haunted by the cries of those whose lives he was responsible for ending prematurely.)

In the end, there is a value in not giving up. To the many who wish America ill in the world, they surely now know we have more patience in pursuit of justice than they ever gave us credit for.

It is true, as I heard an eloquent priest say on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, that hate started the fires on that awful day, but love put them out.

Yet it is also true that courage--from the first responders who rushed to the scene that nightmarish Tuesday morning a decade ago, to the Navy Seals who dispatched bin Laden to his richly deserved fate this weekend--undergirds love, giving us hope that, though the wound that opened a decade ago might leave a scar, it will, at some point we can't see now, close.