Dream Log: WW II Soldier in Italy

I dreamed I was an American Army private on a ship just off the coast of south-western Italy in January 1944, part of the force which was going to invade Anzio.

In real life, when the Allies came ashore on Anzio's beach on January 22, under the command of Major General John Lucas,  they spent days building up their position on the beach, unloading men and equipment, instead of taking advantage of weak German defenses and attempting to seize territory and expand their beachhead. The result of this was to allow German troops to rush in and surround the beach from high ground on all sides. The Allies didn't break out from their position on the beach until May, after having suffered tens of thousands of casualties. 

In my dream, Lucas had been replaced by General George Patton, who was popular with his troops because he had a reputation for getting relatively few of them killed. In my dream I was in one of the first waves of troops to hit the beach, and by the time we got there some were already far ahead, marching on the road to Rome, and we were ordered to catch up to them double-quick. A while later American tanks caught up with us, and took on as many of us foot soldiers as they could carry. I was on of the soldiers riding on the outside of a tank.

After less resistance along the way than we had expected, we arrived in great numbers in Rome on the 24th of January, to find that the Germans had evacuated the city and taken up positions to the north and west. While most of the invading force had little time to recuperate before pushing on beyond the city, I was stationed there more permanently. 

I was promoted from private to sergeant first class, and then a while later to second lieutenant. As soon as I became an officer, my lifestyle changed completely. My quarters changed from a warehouse, which I had already considered to be quite nice because it had been dry and clean and even fairly warm, to an upper-middle-class mansion which just a handful of us had all to ourselves. I spent my days in palaces, working mostly as an interpreter and translator, hobnobbing with international aristocracy and famous artists. 

All of this was definitely preferable to slogging through mud for days at a time, beaten eaten alive by fleas and mosquitoes while being shot at.

 

A crooked Major was stealing just as much fine art as was able to load onto trucks, using my name so that he could attempt to frame me if his business went south. It did, I was arrested, but soon exonerated. The Major had picked a fall-guy who was friends with way too many artists.

A beautiful young Italian princess fell head-over-heels in love with me. To my astonishment, her family approved of me. (Speaking privately to me, her father, the Prince, shared some remarkably enlightened concerns about aristocratic inbreeding and a too-narrow gene pool.) After we finished trouncing the Axis -- sooner than irl because Anzio and some other things had gone better than in real life -- I retired from the Army and married her, adding the new title of viscount to my Army rank of captain. In addition to our always being much more than welcome in the family's numerous homes, we were presented with a lovely little (compared to some. Huge compared to most) house of our own near Tivoli as a wedding present. Well, la-dee-da.

Up until then the dream had been fairly realistic apart from telescoping time. Now, however, things took a decidedly abstract-dreamlike turn, as the beautiful Princess and I -- the shimmering luxury of her long black hair! Her dark eyes smoldering with passion! Her ivory skin! Her form like that of a goddess! -- spent time in an activity in which we were ourselves, life-size humans, and simultaneously each of us a polished wooden tile about two inches long by three tall with a portrait of her or me or someone else done somewhat in the manner of the portraits on playing cards, and we would take ourselves and other people -- that is, we would take these little wooden tiles -- and arrange them in patterns which were symbolic and powerful and endlessly fascinating. Somewhat like tarot, somewhat like the Glass Bead Game. Unlike tarot, instead of interpreting the world, this activity shaped it, changed it. This went on for quite a while before I woke up.

My Theory About Why the (Western Part of the) Roman Empire Came to an End in the 5th Century AD

I think it was the Huns, pure and simple. They were the worst, most frightening thing the Germanic peoples had ever seen. The Germanic tribes ran away, as fast and as far as they could, and the only place to run to was over western Europe, all the way to northern Africa. In this view of things, the short-lived empire started by Attila is the main story; the fall of the city of Rome and the western Empire is one of the side effects. The phrase "wrath of God" was originally coined to describe the Huns. The famous line of Conan's, when someone asks him what is best in life -- "To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women." -- was originally attributed to Attila.

For a long time, historians have been pondering the question of why (the western provinces of) Rome fell. Perhaps ever since they fell. Malaria has been mentioned as the culprit. Lead poisoning. Christianity, because it made the Romans stupid and weak. (A theory I like very much for sentimental reasons, strongly advanced by Edward Gibbon,who is still in many respects the last word in the historiography of the Roman empire, and whom you should read now, NOW! if you haven't already, and to which I used to subscribe, but it doesn't seem to hold water.) All of these and other theories posit that the fall happened because of some weakness or decay within Rome. My theory, on the contrary, asserts that Rome was as strong as it ever had been, that the decisive change occurred among the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Lombards and other tribes along the empire's border, or rather, on the other side of those tribes from Rome. I don't deny that the Dark Ages were dark in western Europe, chaotic and impoverished and miserable -- some historians do deny all of that, but that's a notion so thoroughly stupid that I've already wasted too many words on it -- but I don't see it as the culmination of a long and steady decline of the western empire, but rather as the result of a sudden cataclysm: wrath of God spreading out from central Asia, killing and burning all in its path, Germanic tribes running away in sheer terror, coincidentally overrunning the western Roman provinces, flowing over borders which had been more or less stable for centuries. According to this view, the earlier barbarian incursions, the weakening effect on the empire of increasing numbers of soldiers from barbarian backgrounds in the imperial military, corruption, impoverishment of all but a very few super-rich Romans and other symptoms of decadence would all have been greatly exaggerated in retrospect, in the constant effort to explain a weakening of the western empire which, say it with me everybody, didn't actually occur.

I could be wrong. It's just a theory. I want to be very clear about that. I don't think anyone knows for sure. I'm not at all sure why (the western part of) Rome fell. What I'm trying to do here is offer food for thought. Encouragement to examine some assumptions. And I'm certainly not the first person who's said: It was the Huns! It's very hard to know what happened in large part because a large part of the darkness of the Dark Ages consists of the very small amount of writing, historical and otherwise, which has survived, the illiteracy of the new ruling classes and the sudden obscurity of the literate classes.

Stick to Comedy, Terry. Please!

The series Barbariansrecently made the rounds of some dubious places on TV such as History International. It's hosted and written by Terry Jones, the fat one from Monty Python who has directed movies including Monty Python & the Holy Grail and Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and played Brian's mum.

The series isn't quite as bad as the run of the mill History Channel stuff, but it's still pretty bad. Jones' point of departure is that the Romans considered anyone who wasn't a Roman to be a barbarian -- wrong: they didn't consider the Greeks to be barbarians, for example. In fact, the word "barbarian" derives from the Greek, and the Romans were in fact a lot less xenophobic than some of the Greeks. The localism of the Greek city-states persisted to a large degree through the political unification of the Persian wars and the Macedonian domination, and there was a lot of cultural variation from city to city within Greece. The Spartans, for example, showed a disdain and disinterest for the rest of the world far more extreme than Rome ever did. Rome adopted huge chunks of Greek culture, they welcomed the cult of Isis from Egypt, they eventually adopted Christianity from the East.

Not only is Jone's statement about Rome considering all non-Romans to be barbarians wrong, he also doesn't seem to realize that the word "barbarian" was one of the things which they took from the Greeks.

But the Celts, the Germanic tribes, the Huns, these were, in fact, as Jones states, referred to by the Romans as barbarians. And Jones is also right that our concept of these people comes in large part from Roman historians, and that these Roman writers tended to be one-sided and unfair.

Then, however, Jones presents a version of events which is at least as one-sided and unfair in the other direction.

For example: the remains of a broad and solid wooden road pre-dating the time of Roman contact has recently been discovered by archaeologists in Ireland. It crossed a boggy area where otherwise the unwary traveler might have have sunk to his death in the muck.

Jones points to this wooden road, and another similar one in Germany he's apparently only heard of but not seen, as evidence that the maligned Celts were in fact better road-builders than the Romans. Well, bullshit, Terry: you're comparing several miles of structure on one hand to many thousands of miles of Roman stone roads on the other, and although we can be sure that the Romans didn't build these fine broad wooden roads, we don't know it was Celts that built them either. It could have been Phoenicians, it could've been some civilization you and I have not yet heard of.

Over and over again Jones seizes on some artifact like this and hurries to assign the crudest possible Rome-bad, "barbarians"-good interpretation to it. He does nothing more than to replace one set of bigoted prejudices -- which, by the way, has been criticized and revised and corrected by serious historians for a long time already, and was not nearly as extreme in the ancient world as Jones, selectively quoting and spinning everything against Rome, would have you believe. Tacitus, for example, admired the Germanic tribes in many ways and held them up as an example from which Rome ought to learn -- with another. While scrunching up his face and grinning buffoonishly and bugging his eyes and so forth.

History of the World, Condensed Version, Part II, Clearly Hampered By My Having Studied Mostly Just Western Civ.

By the way, that "Clearly Hampered[...]" in the post title is not meant to be flip or sarcastic. The "History of the World" is the sarcastic part. A lot of "Histories of the World" have been written, and a lot of histories of Western civilization which are not much different, or actually more all-encompassing. I'm very ignorant of the majority of the world which lies outside of the scope of Western civilisation, and I'm a pretty typical Westerner in that regard. I've begun to learn a little about the rest of the world but it's just been baby steps.

So if you're understanding me clearly, my referring to these modest posts as a "History of the World" will make you smile wryly. What I'm trying to do here is to make some very general remarks about what I believe I know about certain things I find interesting. This is in part an exercise for me to see how well I can summarize some things. It is one of the quirks of the culture in which I live is that such remarks are sometimes referred to as world history. There is a lot of hubris in our culture.

To back up chronologically from the end of Part I of the Condensed Version: By several tens of thousand of years ago, humans had migrated from Africa into Asia, Europe and Oceania.

If you want to start an argument, bring together several dozen anthropologists and archaeologists selected entirely at random and bring up the question of when humans first migrated to the Western Hemisphere. That should start a nice vigorous argument for you.

Most anthropologists and archaeologists seem to agree that humans crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska 10 or 12 thousand years or so ago. The disagreements begin when the questions are: did humans come to the Western Hemisphere earlier than that? How much earlier? Did they come by other routes in addition to the land bridge? Perhaps by boat across the Pacific from Asia?

Archaeologist A will present an object and say it is an artifact formed by human hands in the Wesern Hemisphere 20, or 30, or 40, or 60 or 60 thousand years ago. Archaeologist B will regard this statement by Archaeologist A and assert that it shows that A is engaged in wishful thinking as opposed to science, and that the object occurred naturally and show no evidence of having been shaped by human hands.

I don't know whom I should believe.

Meanwhile, back in Western Civ.: after the hegemonies of the Sumerians and Egyptians and Babylonians and Hittites and Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians and Persians, Alexander the Great created the Hellenistic world by conquering land as far eastward from Greece as Afghanistan and parts of India. His vast empire fragmented after his death, but in many parts of it the rulers continued to be Greek for a while. Meanwhile, both east and west of Egypt, as far west as Spain certainly, the Phoenicians had an empire as well. They were good sailors, and some people have speculated that in ancient times they sailed to the Western Hemisphere, although that seems extremely far-fetched to me. The Phoenicians had been a major power at least as far back as the eighth century BC, but not long after Alexander, who ruled his empire in the second half of the fourth century BC, the Phoenicians, and the Greeks, had a new rival for control of the Mediterranean: the Romans. In the third and seconds centuries BC Rome, which as late as 500 BC had been not much more than a village which managed to throw off the overlordship of the Etruscans, finished conquering the Italian peninsula, then conquered Phoenicia and Greece. In 30 BC the last bit of Mediterranean coastline not yet in Roman hands passed to them from Egypt, from Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh and a descendant of one of Alexander's generals.

The Israelites had rebelled against the Greek successors of Alexander, and they rebelled against the Romans. In AD 70 the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, and in 73 AD the Jewish revolt came to an end when the Romans took the fortress of Masada. In the next several centuries Christianity, a sect arising from Judaeism, gradually spread throughout the Roman Empire until in the fourth century AD it became the official state religion and all other religions began to be persecuted and stamped out. In the fifth century Germanic tribes overran the western part of the Empire, and from this point on, only the eastern part continuously survived, until AD 1453. In a major example of the Western hubris I referred to above, to this day many otherwise well-educated Weserners continue to refer to the end of the weserrn part of the Roman Empire as the end of the Roman Empire, and refer to the surviving eastern part as Byzantium, as if it were not in fact the Roman Empire.

Things went very poorly in the West for several centuries which we usually, and I think quite rightly, call the Dark Ages. Some people use the terms "Dark Ages" and "Middle Ages" synonymously. I think it makes more sense to use "Dark Ages" for the period between 476, when Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Emperor, surrendered to Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain, and 800, when Charlemagne, in an act by no means free of unrealistic connotations, was crowned Emperor by the Pope, and to use the term "Middle Ages" to describe the entire time between the fal of the western part of the Empire until the Rennaissance: say, 1350 in Italy, and later as you head north.

End of Part II of the Condensed Version