mdlake.net

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work –

I am the grass.
Let me work.
--Carl Sandburg, “Grass”

I liked Sandburg’s poem the moment I read it. It was powerful enough to reach a self-absorbed twelve-year-old, and has only gotten better as I learned more about the battles. Sandburg, of course, did not choose them for their recognition value, but for their awful, bloody stupidity, the ruinous tactics by which they were fought or the pointless purposes they sought to serve, with each battle in the poem worse than the previous.

Austerlitz was a brilliant victory, although it could not be sustained in the long run, a victim of Napoleon’s determination to continue his perpetual conquest. Waterloo was lost before it began, fought only for Napoleon’s vanity, an attempt to rebuild his empire from a citizenry whose skilled veterans were dead from earlier battles, against opponents who had finally learned to defeat him. Gettysburg had strategic wisdom, but its purpose was lost and the army destroyed in the rank obstinacy of Pickett’s Charge at its close. Ypres was the opening of a war nobody wanted, ending in the trench stalemate after horrific casualties. Verdun was the worst of all, combining strategic and tactical stupidity, German soldiers marching in slow ranks into unrelenting machine gun fire long after earlier battles had proved the attempt suicide, an attempt justified as war by attrition—that is, by killing as many soldiers as possible, as long as one’s own supply outlasts the enemy’s. 400,000 Germans died in a month, along with a comparable number of Allied soldiers. The Allies, blind to the lesson, would duplicate Germany’s folly at the Somme even before Verdun was wholly finished.

Knowing the details of these battles, and especially of Verdun and the Somme, makes Sandburg’s bitterness toward war obvious. But I have never satisfied in my mind just how Sandburg felt about the grass of his poem, representative of time and the larger, natural world. There is much ambiguity in the poem.

The grass eases our pain, hiding the dead from sight, returning them to the fertile earth, transforming twisted bodies into greenery. This is not wholly a blessing. As the grass works, as time passes, it eases our pain by making us forget. “What place is this? Where are we now?” And once we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat it. Sandburg could not predict the specifics, but he anticipated the casualties of Stalingrad and the eastern front of the next war. We did not learn from Waterloo, or from Gettysburg; we would not learn from Verdun. The grass works. It heals our collective wound, yes, but it could fairly be said to hide the evidence, as well.

Grass survives. No matter how horrible the human carnage, grass, and by extension, the world around us, continues on. Sandburg did not know of nuclear weapons when he wrote in 1918, since which time the extinction of humanity, and the grass with it, has become a distinct possibility. In 1918, it seemed reasonable that grass should live on, no matter how brutal our own carnage. Churn the fields of France into an ocean of mud and unexploded shells, and the grass will return. Even if the earth becomes a radioactive lump, the planets will continue in their orbits; the stars will continue to shine. There is a sort of hope in this, if a rather bleak sort. Grass survives us. It doesn’t care. And if it doesn’t care, it cannot be said to seek to comfort us at all as it works. It merely feeds on our corpses; the comfort is incidental. The last two lines can be read as the stern demand of a contractor employed to do the dirty job of fixing up our mess, and probably should be read that way. But there is a whisper, too, of the old gods behind it: “Step aside, mortal. I will do as I will. These dead are no longer yours, but mine. Your sacrifice is accepted.”

Naturally, the ambiguities of the poem are part of its genius, because the situation itself is ambiguous. We do forget the horrors of war, for good or ill. Our affairs are insignificant to a vast, uncaring universe, which comfort or disturb you. But, like it or not, that’s how things are. Some day, the current war will end, even as shapeless and ill-defined as it is. We will bury our dead. We will let the grass work. And we will forget.