Greenmantle: The Great War as Adventure

The Christmas Day release of the film 1917 comes a few weeks after I finished reading a book written during World War I, Greenmantle, by John Buchan. I found it in a giveaway stack after a local library sale. Something about it sounded familiar (Buchan also write The Thirty-Nine Steps, made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock), so I gave it a go.

I liked the book both for its fast-paced writing and also the context. Buchan published it in 1916, the middle of the War to End All Wars, with an action-infused plot involving British efforts to uncover German machinations to stir up troubles in the Middle East. In true James Bond fashion, the hardy band of spy-adventurers encounters a beautiful but evil woman pulling a lot of the strings in the German plot.

In contrast to recent takes on the war, such as 1917 and Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, Greenmantle offers a rather bloodless view of the war as it was happening. Official Britain wouldn't want anything overly explicit written about the slaughter on the Western Front, although heaping helpings of anti-German sentiment were, obviously, welcome.

Some passages especially struck me as a sign of the times, or for a prophetic quality given the next world war still to come.

The lead character of Greenmantle and other Buchan novels is Richard Hannay, a South African mining engineer and British soldier leading a team pursuing vague clues about the German plan. Hannay fought in 1915's Battle of Loos, where the British suffered 58,000 casualties, including 8,000 in just four hours. While wounded in the battle Hannay says little about the horrors of trench warfare. The very first page of the book sets the laconic tone toward combat:

For more than a year I had been a busy battalion officer, with no other thought that to hammer a lot of raw stuff into good soldiers. I had succeeded pretty well, and there was no prouder man on earth than Richard Hannay when he took his Lennox Highlanders over the parapets on that glorious and bloody 25th day of September. Loos was no picnic, and we had had some ugly bits of scrapping before that, but the worst bit of the campaign I had seen was a tea-party to the show I had been in with  Bullivant before the war started. [The Thirty-Nine Steps gives the back story on this episode.]

In one scene, where he's given shelter by a German farm woman with three children and a husband in the German army, he reflects,

Her man had gone to the wars on the Eastern front, and the last she had heard from him he was in a  Polish bog longing for his dry native woodlands. The struggle meant little to her. It was an act of God, a thunderbolt out of the sky, which had taken a husband from her, and might soon make her a widow and her children fatherless. She knew nothing of its causes and purposes, and thought of the Russians as a gigantic nation of savages, heathens who had never been converted, and who would eat German homes if the good Lord and the brave German soldiers did not stop them. I tried hard to find out if she had any notion of the affairs in the West, but she hadn't, beyond that fact that there was trouble with the French. She was a decent soul, with no bitterness against anybody, not even the Russians if they would spare her man.

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard the hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But the woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

At one point Hannay says,

Germany's simplicity is that of a neurotic, not the primitive. It is megalomania and egotism and the pride of the man in the Bible that waxed fat and kicked. But the results are the same. She wants to destroy and simplify; but that isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilization to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the souls of his people; Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the world.

But wait, there's more about the German character! Hannay muses, "Then I realized something of the might of Germany. She produced good and bad, cads and gentlemen, but she could put a bit of the fanatic into them all." For good measure, Hannay mixes in several references to the Jews, angled to give ammunition to the conspiracy-minded:

This is the weakness of the German. He has no gift for laying himself alongside different types of men. He is such a hard-shell being that he cannot put out feelers to his kind. He may have plenty of brains, as Stumm had he has the poorest notion of psychology of any of God's creatures. In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises.

(And if you liked that passage, Buchan writes other tart observations about Africans and Muslims that are outside the scope of this post.)

Later, he gives a manly view of mechanized slaughter:

I judged they must be bombarding the outer forts, and once there came a loud explosion and a red glare as if a magazine had suffered.

It was a sound I had not heard for five months, and it fairly crazed me. I remembered how I had first heard it on the ridge before Laventie. Then I had been half afraid, half solemnized, but every nerve had been quickened. Then it had been the new thing in my life that held me breathless with anticipation; now it was the old thing, the thing I had shared with so many good fellows, my proper work, and the only task for a man. At the sound of the guns I felt that I was moving in natural air once more. I felt that I was coming home. 

Buchan has more in this vein, talking up the bracing, clarifying nature of war as cleansing the effete posture of peaceful times; he was in tune with the pre-1914 mentality but absurdly delusional in the gore-infused light of what happened during World War I, and then the war it spawned 21 years after the Armistice. Whether Buchan moderated his views in other books after Greenmantle, especially after 1918, is something I'd like to learn more about.

"As I Walk Through the Valley" and My Walk Back in Time

The new documentary As I Walk Through the Valley (AIWTTV) struck some deep chords in me—so deep, in fact, I watched most of it twice. I watched once for the pleasure of the music and stories, the second time taking notes on what people were saying, since they so perfectly captured the experience of growing up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas in the 1960s and 1970s.

Just added to Amazon Prime, AIWTTV comes from first-time directors Charlie Vela and Ronnie Garza. They set out to depict the underground music scene in the Valley. The first third of the film covers the rock and Tejano sounds that I grew up with, then shifts to the punk/hardcore scene that emerged after I left for college and career in the Northeast. The film's website features an invaluable selection of group biographies and links to their songs.

Mission, June 2011

The music provides the thematic structure upon which Vela and Garza build a heartfelt and ruthlessly revealing look at the area I called home during my formative years in Mission, Texas. In less than two hours, AIWTTV touches on the social dynamics of the Valley, down at the pointy end of Texas and the United States, hemmed in by the Gulf of Mexico to the east, Mexico to the south, and a lot of brush country and farms to the north and west. Interviewees, mostly musicians, capture both the pride in being in and from the Valley—and the restless urge to get the hell out and see the rest of the world. After all, said one musician, "If you could make it in McAllen all the way to the McAllen Civic Center, you were topped out." There was no place to go but north, to San Antonio and beyond.

The Whitewing Band, Mission's Chimney Park, 4th of July weekend 1977

One speaker said, "There's this general attitude, I don't really like being here. I want to be those kids from California. I want to be like somebody else, you know? " I felt exactly like that in elementary school, when I obsessively drew pictures of snow-capped mountain ranges, which in my mind represented the "real America," not the flat, hot, windy, palm tree-studded Valley.

AIWTTV early on acknowledges the parts of the Valley as much of the world sees it, with drugs, poverty and political corruption, now further inflamed with the border immigration crisis. That's one reality, but the film makes the point that the Valley has a lot more going for it. One observer says, "It's very ripe for international art, cooking and culture, so there are beautiful things about the place." The film looks through the lens of the music scene to show those "beautiful things" as part of the Valley's reality.

KRIO Top 40 list, 1974

The film brought back long-forgotten memories from growing up in Mission. It touches on groups like the Innkeepers and the Playboys of Edinburg, Freddy Fender (a/k/a Baldemar Huerta of San Benito), dances at the Mission Civic Center and the McAllen Civic Center, the illicit thrills across the Rio Grande in Reynosa, Mexico (quote: "Mexico was really taboo—our parents didn't like us going over there," very much my mother's attitude), and the huge popularity and impact of McAllen's Top 40 station KRIO. I was one of those teens packed into the Mission Civic Center, for example, for those dances held after the Friday Night Lights football games of the Mission Eagles. And if I slow-danced with a lissome classmate or two while listening to dreamy songs like Chicago's "Color My World," I considered the night a blazing success.

AIWTTV deservedly discussed the career and impact of Arnaldo Ramirez, Sr., who founded Falcon Records in McAllen after World War II and built it into a powerhouse of conjunto/Tex-Mex music recording. Ramirez was as influential in his musical niche as, say, Owen Bradley was as a producer of country music in Nashville. I remember Ramirez from his years as the Mayor of Mission, when I covered City Council meetings as a teenage reporter for the Upper Valley Progress newspaper.

 Beyond the music, Vela and Garza give viewers a sense of the Valley as a specific place with its own history on the edge of Texas and Mexico. The next time somebody asks me about growing up in the Valley, I'll tell them, "This documentary hits all the high points." Woven into the musical parts are segments on the difficult lives of migrant farm workers, historical revolts like the La Casita Farms strike in Starr County in 1966, and student protests decrying police brutality and school education policies.

The directors look at the sharp social divisions based on the Anglo "redneck" ruling class on the north side of the railroad tracks and the Mexican-American population on the south side of the tracks. The political tensions find their way into the music, as one man mused, "Since we couldn't take up arms, we did rock and roll."

Mission, looking north across the tracks, 1977

AIWTTV touches on the interchange between the Valley and Mexico, which back then was more benign and visitor-friendly than the hyper-violent drug cartel-dominated Mexico of the last decade. The bars and music scene of Reynosa and Matamoros earn a respectful discussion, along with details about something I'd never heard of: The "Mexican Woodstock" called Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro in 1971.

If anything in AIWTTV moved me the most, it would be the insights into the Mexican-American population, a large majority of the Valley population. Growing up Anglo, I didn't think much about their experiences and attitudes, given I had my own identity issues to thrash out (as in, coming to grips with my Jewish heritage in high school). Everybody got along as far as I could tell and people were friendly with each other. Mostly I knew about a lot of broken teenage hearts caused by parents who wouldn't let their kids date outside their own ethnic group.

Still, as with the history and culture, a lot went down in the Valley I couldn't or wouldn't notice; I've always said the Valley has a secret history you never heard about in school or through the chamber of commerce. Fortunately, the Internet and films like AIWTTV drag more of that history into the light.

Roy Treviño, guitarist with the group Kingpin, especially made me think when he said, "This speaks to the state that the Chicano people find themselves in. We're not Mexican enough for the Mexicans and we're not American enough for Americans. We're in this strange place."

That strange place should brace itself for more investigations by Vela and Garza. Their production company, One Scene Studios, is working on two more documentaries. One is a five-part history of the Valley. The other is Pansy Pachanga, which "explores the roots of the LGBTQ+ community of the Rio Grande Valley and the unique social, historical, religious, political, and cultural forces that led to the repression of many of these identities." I can't think of a more blazingly transgressive topic than gay life in the Valley.

Based on the raw content of AIWTTV, I expect both of these projects will hit with the force of a punk band blowing the doors off the McAllen Civic Center.

 Mission, South Conway Avenue