Site Ed. Note: “Sing we now of Christmas, Noël sing we here …”

Returning a moment to yesterday’s editorial page and the reference in “Magic Names” to the new carrier set to be launched in early 1943, the Belleau Wood, and its honoring the dead “Devil Dog” Marines, as the Germans dubbed them, standing their ground against German divisions over twice outnumbering in the wheat fields of Belleau Wood in France in June, 1918, we are reminded also of the Wheatfield at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863.

The site of intense fighting, with casualties numbering 1,394 Confederate and 3,215 Union troops in two hours of blistering exchange of cannon shot to the head and minié ball to the back or gut all for the small bit of turf, the Wheatfield was bounded on the east by Houck’s Ridge and Devil’s Den, on the west by Stony Hill and Rose Woods.

Within eyeshot from the high tower, located today at the rear of the position of the Confederate lines overlooking the broad expanse across which, into the jaws of death, went the desperate duel of Pickett’s Charge, as we have before commented, is the Eisenhower Farm, home to the General from 1950, through his presidency and afterward, until his death in 1969.

On the other side of the battlefield lies the cemetery consecrated by President Lincoln, November 19, 1863.

The front page announces the fall to the Allies of the Gona area, southern Japanese stronghold on the Papuan Peninsula of New Guinea; progress was occurring against the other Japanese position concentrated at Buna.

The sight conveyed by the piece describing the continued winter counter-offensive by the Russians against the depleted Nazi forces on the Rzhev front to Velikie Luki reminds of this scene, photographed for Life a year earlier in the same region. If a Nazi cannot learn the lesson once, then it must be taught a second time--at great mutual expense on each occasion.

In acquiescence to the suggestion by the Swiss, the Canadians and British had agreed to unshackle German prisoners, shackled on regular intervals each day since October, retaliatory of the Nazi practice on Canadian and British prisoners, itself initiated on false rumors spread by Herr Doktor Goebbels’s propagandists of Berlin and elsewhere that the Canadians and British were shackling German prisoners of war. The tangled web of deception grows spidery complex in each of its fangled matrices woven anew.

Emblematic of which was the mined dunes of Holland’s coasts to ward against Allied landings. Already these deathtraps for the enemy had proven deadly to the native population’s children, endearing forever to the parents’ and siblings’ hearts the sweet little Nazi swine. No doubt, the Nazi deemed it an unfortunate necessity of war not to warn the surrounding civilian neighborhoods of the danger or to post signs, in fear of alerting enemy intriguants, which included also, after all, the native Dutch population. Parents who allowed their children to play in the sandbox of the beach were being, certainly, quite irresponsible, and thus their obtaining their just deserts was quite well-deserved, according to the manual, that is, of Nazi Swinedom.

In Belgium, for the first time since its occupation by the Nazis in spring, 1940, dozens had been executed for sabotage and possession of arms; eight to ten thousand had been imprisoned. More of the Nazi genius at work, instilling virtue and, by equal measures, pride in the occupation government, engendering for the future a stable atmosphere in which rapprochement between peoples of a different language and culture might be effected surely with such troublemakers removed from the midst of those docile sheep willing to submit and accept the deterministic fate: that Der Fuehrer's genius, his direct pipe to the gods of Teuton, was always to be the rule and the arbiter of what the rules were, once established, to be obeyed, on penalty of death, and, even if in submission, nevertheless not to allow anyone else to stray from the fold lest the submissive also receive the dark night's raid of Storm Troops for being an enabler, a silent bystander of the undermining of the Reich's power illimitable.

The pilots and crew under the command of Maj.-General Jimmy Doolittle, those who had flown in the Tokyo raid of April 18, were now engaged again in North Africa, making their first raid there, successfully bombing targets at the Nazi supply depot in Sfax, 140 miles below Tunis.

The land forces before Bizerte and Tunis remained, however, at rest, the result of heavy rains, while likewise the forces of General Montgomery, confronting Rommel at El Agheila, remained stationary for the nonce before the fogged mirror.

In London, Free French military leader Charles de Gaulle urged that Admiral Darlan be immediately dismissed from his position in command of all French forces in North Africa, that anointing having been by General Eisenhower in exchange for his calling all French forces to belay resistance to the inbound Allied troops of November 9.

General De Gaulle’s call would be met by the French Resistance on Christmas Eve without delay, with due dispatch, calling home the Admiral from his post, he who had so often chosen sides at the whimsy of the wind coursing its struggling way by the breaths of fate, not by principled ideologies.

De Gaulle was not without his point.

An RAF raid, consisting of an estimated 200 to 300 planes, was again launched against Turin on Tuesday night. Mussolini was, no doubt, pacing his digs in Rome wondering where his shelter might obtain from the rain come spring--and why the Luftwaffe, who had promised him protection, were not faithful to that promise in sufficient numbers to ward off the consistent oppression of nearly nightly attacks. The Nazi planes were now occupied elsewhere.

Prime Minister John Curtin of Australia told his people that they were engaged for the present in a defensive battle to save their country from the Japanese claws threatening all about. He had met with Prime Minister Churchill before the fall of Singapore on the Lupercal and ascertained that the first initiative must be the defeat of Germany, to enable the concentration of Allied forces on Japan.

He did not understand, as no one did at the time, just how concentrated those eventuating forces would be on Japan once Germany finally was brought to heel.

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper writes of the division in the ranks among Republicans, between the isolationist and the Willkie wings, the latter favoring an international approach to the post-war world, similar to that enunciated by Administration figures, Vice-President Wallace and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. The Republicans, however, were hedging their bets, not wishing to alienate politically their remaining constituency, always hell-bent on isolationism while feigning highest patriotism, and so were instead in a holding pattern.

Mr. Clapper warns that the pattern had a familiar ring, that of the post-war period in 1919-1921, when the Republicans had offered up in Warren Harding a candidate ready to reverse the Senate’s refusal to ratify joinder with the League of Nations; yet, as soon as the election was over, Harding as President set the pattern in motion, likewise advocating the isolationist stance, that which set on course the United States as enablers of the instability in Europe, eventually leading to Mussolini and his protégé in the wings, Hitler, their gaining favor among the poor and alienated from exploiting the time worn populist expedient, appeal to the heartstrings of those also stripped of their dignity as self-determining human beings, those left to wallow in the mire of psychological as well as actual defeat of arms. It was a sorry sight all round.

But no man, as Florence Harding once supposedly remarked to her loyal snoop, Gaston Means, ever met Warren Harding and forgot the man, his handsome looks being, she asserted, unforgettable to any man.

Sam Grafton counsels against snide sarcasm in expressing the what-me-worry attitude displayed so often by the isolationist American, using the Zulu as their paradigmatic benchmark for extrapolation, at least in the readily seized upon perception of it by the inimical forces to American democracy abroad the world, to the more generalized approach to ostrichism. Such cynicism provided Hitler, opines Mr. Grafton, with the nourishing weapons of propaganda to satiate his bloodlust for rapine by feeding him approbation for his habit of calling the American Ugly for his alleged hidden agenda in carrying out the ostensible ultimate goal of defending against the Nazi totalitarian. In short, Mr. Grafton counsels the isolationists not to be so snide to play to the Goebbels propaganda machine and thereby allow it its grist. It was a vicious cycle on which the axis of that mill wheel turned, to grind the wheat for their daily bread.

"From the Pulpit" in the column offers a balanced approach to the ministerial association in Morganton, which had risen up against the corruption of local law enforcement, claiming that it was permitting lawless discord, the result having been the unseating of several local officeholders in the recent election. The piece suggests that politics do not ordinarily mix well with the pulpit, yet provides that the pulpit also has its part as an institution in the community to mobilize opinion against injustice, and so might be excused, as in this instance, for a foray into politics when an evil predominated.

The logic of the piece would certainly apply to the centrality of the church’s position in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s, providing to that movement the plane of both poetic truth and conscientious appeal to moral rectitude, often previously disorganized and perceived as bootless by white America in its previous incarnations.

But, would this editorial's position excuse the retrograde attempt to use the white church to turn the clock backward, to reinstitute evils in society?--that which surely was begun and, in some limited degree, done, beginning in the mid-1970’s through most of the 1980’s, when the evangelical movement into rightwing politics took root in America, until their welcome was finally so worn out with the American public by their stridency and vociferous virulence, so often displayed even with guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children possessed of bitter seed, that it was shut down permanently in the wake of their own disgrace in the late 1980’s--much to the consternation of the Republicans who had disgracefully used these fools for their own purposes, to act as organizing tools for the disgruntled minions who thought only with their emotions, not their minds--creating thereby a division of Red and Blue in the country, essentially xenophobes recoiling into their downy blankets of security versus those more open to differences in people and their views, even to those who might live ordinarily among the clouds.

"Black & White" in color tells us that Dorothy Thompson, in her column of two days earlier, was high flying to peck the President for his $25,000 limit on income, suggesting it antithetical to democratic weal and not the sort of thing which would inspire post-war cooperation among nations in establishing anew in the world egalitarianism and representative governments responsibly organized along lines to provide and maintain the constitutional will of the people within the framework of that egalitarian opportunity and treatment of its citizens, demanded definitionally by any such form of government.

The editorial presents some difficulty in understanding its point: does it applaud or Pecksniffianly turn a supercilious lip to the whole of Ms. Thompson's pecking? even as it recognizes her eagle's beak in forecasting accurately the danger of Hitler long before most journalists were aware of much besides the personal eccentricities and kooky little symbols abounding in the little Austrian corporal housepainter and his followers, lately established at the Reichstag in Berlin--until they burned it down and used the act as an excuse to establish a dictatorship. Was the war, the piece implicitly suggests as Ms. Thompson’s inquiry, being used by Roosevelt to establish some vague socialist dictatorship in America from which there would be no easy wrenching in the aftermath?

But, did Ms. Thompson really so inquire? Or, isn’t it the conservative side of The News again popping forth its head? The column had, itself, several times recently, denounced the $25,000 limit on after-tax income. So, it would seem that opinion is simpatico with the notions it attributes to Ms. Thompson. Yet, it seems in its language to treat her somewhat fancifully.

Perhaps, we misinterpret its intent.

We do not mean to suggest, in trying to find a cohesive pattern, that The News editorial column need have been monolithic or consistent in its viewpoint. There was more than one hand at work on the column and, regardless, a viewpoint, allowed to remain constrained as monolithic, affords no elasticity for healthy debate. And debate is the essence of vibrant intercourse, in any democratic state, enabling ultimately some approach by which one might estimate the truth more refinedly each day on each issue and regarding each event, forming premises upon which to base a more articulate and reasoned view of the world about.

That way, we do not believe that Africa is a country, merely divided into tribes, rather than a continent of many, many countries, some at war with another, some at peace, just as has been the case on occasion with North America and South America and Europe and Asia and even the sub-continent of India. It is of paramount importance to understand that the world is round and not flat. And, that the polar ice is melting apace, making Santa very angry with us all, such that his sleigh has no means by which to ride its rails, increasingly so. We must learn to study very, very hard to realize some of these things, or else we may all, in due course, as the planet gets very, very mad at us, be by it flushed away to another place where it is very, very hot. That would not be good.

Finally, a piece culled from Coronet, by Murray Teigh Bloom, provides a snapshot of Africa in 1942, somewhat inconsistent with that perceived to be the American stereotype of the continent of mystery. He stresses that, especially in West Africa, there were many well-educated people, that colonization through the previous centuries had brought with it colors of the West, literally offering its higher-priced dyes to infuse the weave of the traditional Abyssinian native baskets, as well providing the colorful funny papers in which to wrap them, introducing so thoroughly to the native subconscious Western symbols that the norm now was, even among those natives who loaned their hands to decorate the drinking gourds, to place automobiles and airplanes, either seen percipiently or through the advertisements in the local newspaper edited by American-educated native population, in the spaces where snakes and antelope once roamed free. Emblematic of the shift from nineteenth century Western perceptions of primitive tribesmen to twentieth century limited progress was that, he cites, exemplar of the paradigmatic process: a tombstone in Nigeria to one Adjikidji, "agent for the renowned Singer Sewing Machine Co."

Whether Adjikidji was partial also to Ludwig Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" from his Ninth Symphony or Wagner’s Lohengrin, Act III, is not imparted by Mr. Bloom's report on his odyssey in and around the Dark Continent.

And "Visitin’ Round" tells us that, while Mattie told Hattie, the folks at Union Grove were able in the shade of the old oak tree to get together and sing out their differences, as two boys near Sapphire fought two bears toe-to-toe to a Mexican standstill. Whether the bears were hare-lipped on Bear Creek is not either imparted to us by "Visitin’ Round".

"Sing we now of Christmas, sing we here Noël …"

We read, incidentally, that, a few years back, Garth Brooks released a song called "Belleau Wood", regarding the Christmas truce of World War I--that which was depicted very nicely, as we suggested three years ago after we had come upon it previously one midnight clear, in the film, "Joyeaux Noël". We had never heard this particular song before, and so we listened to it once last night. It is not exactly our cup of tea and the Battle of Belleau Wood, having occurred in June, 1918, had nothing much to do with that Christmas truce around Ypres in 1914, at least insofar as we have been able to determine. The battles did, however, take place in the same war. The lyrics would have rung truer had they related to the "Devil Dogs" of Belleau Wood's wheat fields, rather than the Christmas truce, which occurred elsewhere at another, earlier time in that particular war. But, the books could all be wrong, and, so, regardless, it is the thought which counts; and singing is good for the soul, especially at Christmas.

"Sing we now of Christmas, Noël sing we here…"

Earlier today, we watched this short video. Man, they have that thing going right. We never got ours going that good. That's one reason, shortly thereafter, in the spring of 1964, we started listening more to music. You could watch the record without the music and it would sort of be as that racetrack, except the track would be turning and there would be no cars or little steering wheels by which to guide them in their courses, just a big floating arm moving slowly across the tracks as they rotate about their axis pacifically underneath. But, we never watched the record much go round and round like that. We just listen.