[“Women Pacifists Barred at Church Door While Officer Within Asks Preparedness.” The New York Times, June 1, 1925.]
Or in the words of a twelve-year old Bosnian girl that serve as one of two epigraphs for the final chapter of Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994): “I want that this is the last war in my life.”
The Times goes on to report that Captain Crawford threw the folder away and that “several lads, among them a number that have signed up for this year's citizens’ military training camp at Plattsburg, stood across the street and jeered the women.”
Monday, May 26, 2025
Memorial Day 1925
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comments: 4
Only a dozen, but historic. Thank you for this, Michael.
Everyone counts.
Every one counts.
A lot of such madness after WWI, and more during the post atomic bomb years, as seen in science fiction short stories of the time. The only screen story comparable to print would be the Star Trek one, "A Taste of Armageddon" where they go into elevator-like disintegration chambers.
In the London "Imperial" war museum a man mistook me for staff, asking me—I said, "You mean, why are there no exhibits of empire and heroes in a thin red line?" He was from a city which had a Great Fire. I answered that the museum only started after the Great War when people's minds were baffled at discovering the reason a war starts. The field guns on display had to removed for service in WWII and then returned afterwards. Now the exhibits include UN stuff, and people are not so silly as to scapegoat admirals or bank branch presidents or other, even sillier minorities.
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