Tag Archives: Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles

Dreams on Fire: The Burning of Los Angeles

Posted on by
2
Promotional illustration (1913).

“Whatever else California was, good or bad, it was charged with human hope. It was linked imaginatively with the most compelling of American myths, the pursuit of happiness.”

— Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915

“Hell, we threw in the land and sold ‘em the climate.”

— Los Angeles developer, c. 1880

At the end of the nineteenth century, southern California was being sold as an earthly paradise: Mediterranean light, salubrious climate, lush gardens, orange groves beneath snow-capped mountains. An eastern visitor in 1900 wrote home about the idyllic lifestyle of homeowners among the orange groves:

“[T]hey sit on the verandas of their pretty cottages—the refined essences of abstract existences—inhaling the pure air of the equal climate, reading novels or abstruse works of philosophy, according to their mental activity, from day to day, and waiting from year to year for their oranges to grow.” [i]

Promotional illustration (c. 1930).

Who wouldn’t want to live there? My parents left the snows of Minnesota in December, 1937, to pursue their dreams in Los Angeles, landing in an apartment behind Grauman’s Chinese Theater. By the time I was born, they had bought the house I grew up in, on the Valley side of the Hollywood hills, in a new development with more vacant lots than homes. There was an orange tree in the backyard, and a big sycamore to climb in the front. You could enjoy being outside all through the year. Every Fourth of July, six other families who had also moved West from my parents’ home town would come over for the “Red Wing picnic.” No one talked about going back to Minnesota. They were Californians now.

The author in the mountains above Altadena (c. 1979).

Los Angeles was home for my first fifty years. I loved the light, the proximity of mountains and sea, the cultural and artistic energy, the eccentric diversity of architectural styles, and the freedom to explore new ways of being and doing. Where else, with some heroic driving, could you ski, surf, and hear a world-class symphony on the same day?

Orange crate label (1920s).

But the boosters’ dream has been repeatedly contradicted by harsher realities. A sorry legacy of racism, greed, corruption, and violence is also part of the L.A. story. So are the broken dreams of the hopeful seekers who have come from somewhere else to make their mark. And then there are the natural disasters. Those who went there for the climate also got the Santa Ana winds.

Over the past 100 years, at least 150 novels and films have pictured the destruction of Los Angeles by earthquake, fire, flood, tsunami, volcano, nuclear war, and extraterrestrials. In Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, David Fine explains the phenomenon:

“Disaster fiction … established itself in a city that was positioned literally at the edge of the continent, a place where an unstable physical geography collided with an unstable human geography of displaced migrants and inflated expectation … From the late 1920s to the present the dominant theme in Los Angeles fiction has been the betrayal of hope and the collapse of dreams. Writing against the optimistic booster literature produced just before and after the turn of the century, the city’s novelists constructed a counterfable about loss … the city as the place where dreams founder against the edge of the continent.” [ii]

Los Angeles City Hall basking in California’s problematic mythical past (1931).
The destruction of Los Angeles City Hall in War of the Worlds (1953).

I remember a moment during the Los Angeles Film Exposition in the early seventies, when a trailer for their science fiction movie marathon ended with a famous shot from War of the Worlds (1953): a death ray from a flying saucer decimating the Los Angeles City Hall. Watching one of our city’s most famous landmarks crumble into dust prompted an eruption of cheering and applause. On one level we were enjoying the sheer spectacle of the falling tower, but in retrospect I wonder whether we were also feeling a momentary liberation from our illusions about the permanence of things. Perhaps we were, in that brief moment, able to confront not only the fragility of our city, but our own brevity as well—accepting it, embracing it like the saints who know the art of surrender. The awareness of not being in charge, they tell us, is what makes perfect freedom. Resting in God changes everything.

But homilies and metaphors about letting go and moving on seem premature, even heartless, while so many thousands continue to suffer and grieve the burning of Los Angeles. Roger Magoulas, who lost his own house in the Oakland Hills fire of 1991, has written a helpful article about what he wishes he had known at the time, including how to handle the comments of those who haven’t been through an apocalypse.

“While well-meaning and sincere, those not affected by the fire will often say things that you may perceive as offensive, insensitive, or upsetting (such as, ‘I wish my house had burned down so I could start over’). Figure out how you want to deal with these types of comments, as you can expect them for years. If you can, keep in mind that those not affected often cannot grasp the enormity of your experience, and thank them for trying to help and remind them that fire victims are extra sensitive and have a lot to process.” [iii]

Fire ever doth aspire, And makes all like itself, turns all to fire. — John Donne
‘Tis a silent, skeleton world; Dead, and not yet re-born, Made, unmade, and scarcely as yet in the making; Ruin’d, forlorn, and blank. — B. E. Baughan

As I write this, my beloved native city continues to burn. I have friends and family whose cars are packed and ready for evacuation. Everyone’s breathing polluted air. For many people, daily needs like food, water and medicine are hard to come by. And after the flames die, the challenges of recovery will go on for years. In the Los Angeles Times, Anita Chabria has written about the unequal distribution of returning to normal:  

“The Palisades, clearly, is wealthy. But even within its wealth, there are degrees. There are plenty of folks in the area who don’t have to worry about rebuilding costs, or even losing another home to fire in the future. They can afford it. 

“There were also many families living in those glamorous streets who had been in the neighborhood for decades or even generations. Their homes may have been paid off or close to it, their life savings sunk into that plot of ground. And there are many living in Altadena and other affected areas who are just working Angelenos, paying off a mortgage — this was a neighborhood that drew Black and Latino families for its affordability …

“There’s also a trickle-down economic effect, even for those who weren’t displaced. Gone also are thousands of yards that had gardeners. Cleaning ladies, cooks, even nannies are now without work, but still have rent due. How do we include them in recovery?

“And there’s only so long survivors can camp out in hotels and on couches. The housing crunch that is surely coming holds the risk of pushing everyone down a notch, as the most desirable housing is taken up by those with the independent wealth or insurance checks to cover it.” [iv]

Postcard of the Santa Monica Mountains on fire in 1978.

Los Angeles has seen wildfires before. It’s always been part of the life. But climate change—and our culture’s suicidal inability to deal with it—is upping the ante. Atmospheric rivers increase vegetation, then drought turns it into fuel. The whole Los Angeles basin is becoming a fire trap. To make it livable for the long term will require the kind of planning and rebuilding that seems economically and politically daunting, if not impossible.

In his magisterial environmental history of fire in Europe, Stephen J. Pyne notes that civilization may try to tame fire, but can never abolish it:

“Europe sought fire, seized it, remade it, nurtured, feared, distrusted, craved, shackled, and unleashed it. As with the rest of its natural endowment, Europe sought above all to domesticate fire, to subject it to the discipline of the garden, to subordinate it to the order of society. Anthropogenic fire replaced natural fire. Fire became a tool, a tamed beast, a sacred symbol, an obedient servant. It knew its place in the social order and kept to it. In truth, civilization was impossible without fire; and the tended fire became Western civilization’s most elementary image of itself.”

But when the balance is disrupted, by wars, revolution, changing land practices, or climate change, it becomes clear that “fire is a good servant, but a bad master.”

“Then wildfire reappeared like a monstrous birth, and became a feral force that, savage with the memory of its suppression, revolted violently against its warders. Desired fire belonged on hearth and altar; unwanted fire appeared along the rough fringes of an unraveling society, in the cracks of disintegrating cities, amid the rubble of collapsed civilizations. Intellectual Europe saw fire as an atavism, as disorder and destruction, as nature gripped by delirium tremens. But wild or tame, fire persisted. Humans could neither wholly control it nor live without it. Now here, now there, now quiescently, now violently, Europe burned.” [v]

Richard Vogel’s photograph of the smoke in Malibu recalls Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808-10): One tiny figure is dwarfed by greater powers.
Caspar David Friedrich’s painting conveys the vast and terrible beauty of the sublime.

Writing in the 1960s, California native Joan Didion described the wildfires stoked by Santa Ana winds as a formative part of Los Angeles living.

“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself … Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” [vi]

But in a 2005 interview, Didion strikes a typically Californian note of hope: “[M]ixed up with this tolerance for apocalyptic notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is this belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much a part of being in California.” [vii]

The remains of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Altadena.

In the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, where I am canonically (but no longer physically) resident, two parishes have been hit hard by the fires. In the Palisades Fire, 75% of the members of St. Matthew’s have lost their homes. In the Eaton Canyon Fire, the historic church of St. Mark’s, Altadena has been completely destroyed. Although the Body of Christ resides in the people, not the building, every sacred space is soaked with the prayers and praises of generations, and its loss is always deeply felt.

My friend Brad Karelius, a priest in the Diocese of Los Angeles, has written movingly about the ways he was spiritually formed in that vanished place, where so much of its physical structure had been charged with accumulated meaning:  

“[W]hen I would visit St. Mark’s in later years, wherever I looked within the church: the pulpit, the choir stalls, the memorial windows, the Blessed Sacrament, conjured precious memories and deep gratitude for how St. Mark’s drew me into the loving arms of Jesus and sent me forth as a priest into the world.” [viii]

But God’s friends don’t linger long in “bare, ruin’d choirs.” [ix]  There is work to do, people to care for, hope to nurture, hearts to lift, and resurrections to embody. In last Sunday’s Zoom worship with her homeless congregation, St. Mark’s rector, the Rev. Carri Grindon, spoke a word of resurgent life:

 “Whether you’re in hotels or AirBnbs, driving in your car, staying in the homes of family or friends or strangers who aren’t strangers anymore, the bonds among us are bonds that cannot be severed. We are the latest in a long list of God’s people put on the road by disaster and displacement. We are still one in love. We are still one in Christ.” [x]

Sunrise from the burned out site of Mt. Calvary Retreat House, a holy place consumed by the Santa Barbara Tea Fire in 2008. Mzny of us still miss it.

I am grateful to the Rt. Rev. John H. Taylor, Episcopal Bishiop of Los Angeles, for his leadership in this crisis. His daily dispatches have provided some of the links that inform this post.

[i] Claire Perry, Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93.

[ii] David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, David Fine (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), 233, 236-237.

[iii] Roger Magoulas, “What I Wish I Knew After My House Burned Down,” The Bold Italic (Aug. 24, 2020): https://thebolditalic.com/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-my-house-burned-down-c306b1f2382b

[iv] Anita Chabria, “Recovery will be tempered by hard decisions and, if we aren’t careful, inequality,” Los Angeles Times (Jan. 12, 2025): https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-12/column-chabria-palisades-eaton-altadena-fire-rebuild?fbclid=IwY2xjawH0uCdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHU9v4AMpCoGDOhEEMnXqfMroJ4QD8XM6A2nR-89jYrM9jHXqyCjnR7nc8g_aem_pkaB4VMlgFjaqFrCHCB4ZQ

[v] Stephen J. Pyne, Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s Encounter with the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 3-4.

[vi] Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook,” excerpt from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in Didion: The 1960s & 70s (New York: Library of America, 2019), 378.

[vii] Joan Didion, interview with Barbara Isenberg in State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work (2005).

[viii] Fr. Brad Karelius, “Remembering St. Mark’s Church, Altadena, which burned yesterday in Eaton Canyon Fire,” Desert Spirit Press (Jan. 9, 2025): https://desertspiritpress.net/2025/01/09/remembering-st-marks-church-altadena-california-which-burned-yesterday-in-eaton-canyon-fire/?fbclid=IwY2xjawH0_3JleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcWYXCWcuRo12uZXw432filoldgeU2o-ipNHX0uxLwqwz3_UZH14bN1VAA_aem_xPMvFG8gKZVTr45n6bNMrA

[ix] William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73.

[x] The Rev. Carri Grindon, homily for the First Sunday after the Epiphany (Jan. 12, 2025). For information about the St. Mark’s Rebuilding Fund: https://www.saintmarksaltadena.org/?fbclid=IwY2xjawH1AlNleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHfsx01P90-PcycJiWfnx6naHclAnQQVdjaD2YNyHjKzN3NVg584NifKk1Q_aem_Rr8cBCVUJ1VTZPf8Ccdg5w

The Widow’s Mite

Posted on by
2

Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched people as they put money into it. 

–– Mark 12:40

 

How many of you have used a mite box? It’s a little blue cardboard box that’s a sort of Christian piggy bank. You put money into it every day in thanksgiving for the blessings in your life. As you call to mind the gifts you have received, your sense of gratitude is deepened.

When your box is full, you give it to a church mission fund. In the Episcopal Church, this fund is called the United Thank Offering (UTO), an early form of crowdsourcing that turns many small contributions into sums large enough to do something special. The UTO was started by Episcopal women in 1889, and it continues to fund innovative mission and ministry work throughout the Anglican Communion.

When I was growing up in the Diocese of Los Angeles, there was an annual ingathering of our mite boxes. Children from all over the diocese came together in an outdoor amphitheater to sing and pray and listen to a little preaching. And then came the big moment when all us kids got up and carried our mite boxes down a long aisle and up onto a stage, where a large hollow cross stood in the center. Then each of us in turn would place our little blue box inside that cross.

It was something I looked forward to every year. It was exciting to come together with so many other children, to see myself as part of a larger community––the community of Jesus’ youngest friends. Isn’t that one of the reasons we come to church––to see with our own eyes a living image of the communion of saints?

I was a shy child, but the experience of carrying my mite box down the aisle to put it in the cross gave me a sense of agency, a sense that I could make a difference, that my contribution mattered. It was an exercise in self-offering, a tiny imitation of the self-offering performed eternally in the trinitarian heart of God––though I certainly didn’t grasp the depths of that theological mystery at the time! It just felt good to give.

The part of the ingathering I loved best was watching all our little mite boxes, one by one, stack up inside that hollow cross. The stack grew higher and higher, turning the cross bluer and bluer, until it was completely filled in by the color of our collective gratitude.

The term “mite box” isn’t used much anymore. They’re simply called blue boxes now, but the original term is from the King James Version of the gospel story about a widow who puts two “mites”––an old English term for the smallest of coins––into the Temple treasury.

The widow’s action has become a model for sacrificial giving. The text says that the rich put “large sums” into the Temple treasury, but Jesus knows they are just showing off. The wealthy have so much money, their contribution amounts to little more than spare change. The poverty-stricken widow, on the other hand, gives everything she has. Eugene Peterson’s contemporary translation draws this contrast sharply:

“The truth is that this poor widow gave more to the collection than all the others put together. All the others gave what they’ll never miss; she gave extravagantly what she couldn’t afford––she gave her all.” [i]

Those of us who have enough, those of us who do not want––we may feel the sting of this verse. We could all give more. Who does not hold something back when it comes to the collective responsibility of caring for one another, sharing God’s word, serving the needy, and repairing the world? It’s only practical. Times are uncertain, and budgets can be tight. Still, some of us might wonder how our contributions to mission and ministry stack up against our contributions to Starbucks, Comcast, Apple, and Costco.

And so it is that countless preachers have asked: Are we going to be stingy like the scribes or generous like the widow? That’s a very good question, and well worth considering. But many biblical scholars tell us that it is not the question Jesus is asking in this particular story.

There are certainly many places in the gospel when Jesus challenges our priorities, as when he tests the commitment of the rich young man, or warns his friends about the cost of discipleship, demonstrating just how serious he is by giving himself up to death, even death on a cross. The way of Jesus isn’t easy, and when he asks whether we can drink the cup that he must drink, we do tend to stammer.

But this particular moment at the Temple treasury is not a stewardship story. It’s a justice story. You see, the Temple was not just a place of worship in the benign sense we might assume from our own church experience. It was a marketplace, an exploitative economic system which fostered and exacerbated the extreme economic inequality of first-century Palestine. The money collected into its treasury did not go to things like pastoral care or outreach. It funded a bureaucracy of sacrifice which benefitted the few while sucking up the meager portions of the many. As Ched Myers says in his study of Mark’s gospel, “The Temple, like the scribal class, no longer protects the poor, but crushes them.”[ii] Or as Jesus puts it so succinctly, the rich “devour widow’s houses” (Mark 12:40).

Now in Mark’s account, Jesus is teaching in the Temple, saying a lot of critical things about the powers-that-be. The crowd is eating it up. Then Jesus takes a break, and goes to sit down by the treasury, the offering box where people drop off their contributions. And he says to his disciples, “Listen up. I want you just to watch for a while and see what happens.” And so they do. Mostly, it’s one well-dressed person after another strutting up to the treasury, pulling out a handful of money and, with a quick glance to make sure he’s being noticed, dropping it ostentatiously into the box. They didn’t have paper currency back then, so a big offering made a lot of noise as the coins clattered into the box. It was a good way to get everyone’s attention.

But as Jesus points out, all that theatrically lavish giving was not really sacrificial for the rich folks. For them, it was a bit of spare change. I like to think Jesus makes this comment in a stage whisper loud enough to trouble the pride of the prominent givers. And then this widow steps up, very quietly, to drop in her two mites: an insignificant act by an insignificant person, the kind of thing no one usually notices. Such a small, humble gesture by the sort of person who has been virtually invisible in every society––poor, powerless, unimportant, not male.

Look, Jesus says. Look at that woman. See her situation, see who she is. Don’t just see what she is doing; see what is being done to her. She is being exploited by the injustice of an economy which takes everything from her and gives nothing back. But do you notice how, instead of acting like a helpless victim, she is taking as much charge over the situation as she can?

Though the system is corrupt, she will not be deterred from the devotional practice of making a sacrificial offering to God. She has the heart of a giver, and she will not let that be taken from her. Nor will she live in fear. Even though she has little and is living on the edge of survival, she refuses to act out of a grasping sense of scarcity. She trusts that the Lord will provide. And perhaps she is even having some fun at the expense of the preening scribes, making an ironic contrast between their stinginess and the breathtaking costliness of her two little mites.

The text doesn’t say any of this, but when Jesus tells me to look at the widow, that’s what I see. So it’s not a stewardship story in the usual sense. Jesus doesn’t end with “Go and do likewise” the way he does when he’s urging exemplary behavior. No, this is a justice story.

And I think what Jesus is telling us here is this: Look! Look closely at what’s happening around you. Start to notice what is too often invisible: the injustice of the way things are, the people who are left out or left behind, the people who are invisible. Look at the way we ourselves participate in that injustice, consciously or unconsciously. Look at the assumptions and blindnesses which allow us to enable or perpetuate the brokenness and harshness of the world with insufficiently troubled consciences.

Let the widow in the Temple be our teacher, inviting us to wonder about who she is and what she does, and about who we are and what we do. Yes, do have the heart of a giver. Fill up the hollow cross with your blue boxes. Yes, refuse the fearful mentality of scarcity, and trust that the gifts you need will continue to show up in your life. And yes, open your eyes to everything that diminishes human flourishing, and discern the actions you can take––and the actions we can take together––to restore justice, repair the world, and welcome the Kingdom of God.

In that small moment, Jesus invites us to see the wrong in our world. But he also encourages us to see the possibility for a life of gratitude and giving, manifesting itself in even the smallest of gestures.

This gospel reading happens to coincide in the Lectionary with the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, known to us now as the First World War. November 11, Veterans Day, used to be called Armistice Day, to commemorate the moment when the guns ceased their terrible thunder on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the moment when a 4-year nightmare came to an end and peace was declared at last.

At the outset of that conflict in 1914, Europe was almost buoyant with anticipation. The poet/soldier Rupert Brooke spoke for many when he romanticized the clash of armies as a way to arouse western civilization from its slumbering decadence:

Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary. . . [iii]

This kind of romantic nonsense made even news reports start to sound like medieval sagas. “Soldiers” were called “warriors,” the “enemy” was the “foe,” to “die” was to “perish,” the battlefield dead were the “fallen,” and the blood of young men became “the red/Sweet wine of youth.” [iv]

It didn’t take long for the grim futility of trench warfare to dispel such illusions. “Never such innocence again,” wrote Philip Larkin, while Robert Graves spoke of the “Extinction of each happy art and faith /. . . The inward scream, the duty to run mad.” A German soldier called the Great War “the suicide of nations.” [v]

When it was over, the old world was finished, and one could argue that we’ve never quite recovered. Certainly the ideology of history as steady progress has been thoroughly discredited. We worry––a lot––about the future, and about our power to shape it wisely. But let me end by dropping a few mites into our common treasury, in the form of words from someone who lived through the Great War with her hope intact.

Vera Brittain was a brilliant young woman studying at Oxford when the war broke out. She left school to volunteer as a nurse, working near the front lines in France to treat the seriously wounded. The man she was in love with, as well the brother she adored, were both slaughtered in muddy battles. As a woman, and as a young person, Brittain was hardly a major player on the stage of history. She had only a few small mites to give for the repair of a world so wounded and shattered.

But for the rest of her life, she did what she could. Her memoir of the war, Testament of Youth, would inspire many over the years. And what she wrote at the end of that book a century ago still speaks to us today:

It did not seem, perhaps, as though we, the War generation, would be able to do all that we once hoped for the actual rebuilding of civilization. I understood now that the results of the War would last longer than ourselves; it was obvious . . . that its consequences were deeply rooted, and farther reaching, than any of us, with our lack of experience, had believed just after it was over. . .

 If the dead could come back, I wondered, what would they say to me? . . . In spite of the War, which destroyed so much hope, so much beauty, so much promise, life is still here to be lived; so long as I am in the world, how can I ignore the obligation to be part of it, cope with its problems . . . ? The surge and swell of its movements, its changes, its tendencies, still mold me and the surviving remnant of my generation whether we wish it or not, and no one now living will ever understand so clearly as ourselves, whose lives have been darkened by the universal breakdown of reason in 1914, how completely the future of civilized humanity depends upon the success of our present halting endeavors to control our political and social passions, and to substitute for our destructive impulses the vitalizing authority of constructive thought. To rescue [hu]mankind from that domination by the irrational which leads to war could surely be a more exultant fight than war itself . . .[vi]

What Brittain called “our present halting endeavors” to repair the world was too soon interrupted and mocked by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and now, in our own day, is under assault again by the shocking resurgence of authoritarianism and tribal hatred in so many countries, including our own. In the face of such immensely discouraging challenges, we feel the poverty of our own capacities. Can our two mites make any difference at all?

Jesus thinks so. When he asks us to look at that widow, he wants us to see her two mites not as an indicator of poverty, but as a sign of strength.

Weakness shall the strong confound, as an old carol reminds us. That woman wasn’t daunted by  how corrupt the system was, or how uncertain tomorrow felt, or how insignificant her actions seemed. No matter what, she was going to continue being who she was: generous, grateful, and trusting.

And that young rabbi, who paid such homage to her in the Temple? It turns out that he is also the Lord of history, calling to us across the ages:

“Look,” he says. “Look: I am making all things new.
And all it’s going to cost you is two mites.”

 

 

 

This homily will be preached on November 11 at Grace Episcopal Church, Lopez Island, WA.

[i]Mark 12:43-44, trans. Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language(Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), 1836.

[ii]Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989).

[iii]Rupert Brooke, “Peace,” in Max Egremont, Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014), 57.

[iv]Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 21-22.

[v]Philip Larkin, “MCMXIV,” in Fussell, 19; Robert Graves, “Recalling War,” in Egremont, 294; German prisoner interviewed by Philip Gibbs after the battle of the Somme, in Fussell, 72.

[vi]Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth(London and New York: Penguin Books, 1933/2004), 645, 655-56.