Cosgrave - Afterthoughts of Armageddon

After living through horrible trauma, people sometimes try to forget. But sometimes they try to make sense of it all and, retroactively, give the experience meaning.

Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave fought in the trenches in the Great War with the Canadian Field Artillery of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He won the Distinguished Service Order twice.

After the war, in 1919, he published Afterthoughts of Armageddon: The Gamut of Emotions Produced By the War, Pointing A Moral That is Not Too Obvious. The book ends with this hopeful thought:

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Verily, the world was unmade and made between those epic dates, March 21st and November 11th in that year of our Lord, 1918.

And so came we soldier-men, after four long, soul-searing years, to our great reward that reward which comes of the righting of a great wrong, of the final accomplishment of a God-given task the succouring of the helpless and suffering; and this reward was a tangible one - more tangible than all the material rewards the unthinking ones of this earth could shower upon us.  For in Armageddon we achieved that which we sometimes do not achieve in a lifetime! 

We learned to know ourselves and read our souls to believe in our fellow men to know right from wrong to have sympathy and tolerance for the world's weaknesses and failings and finally, to rise above our environment and see good in all things, and thus, perhaps, supply the foundation of that future brotherhood of man which will make of this crippled old universe that fair, joyous habitation which all the world hungers for, and which if it be born, will deem even this cataclysm, a fair and just remuneration for such a priceless boon.

These, then, are the after-thoughts of one soldier-man who lived through the entire gamut of the emotions of which he has spoken, and which culminated on Christmas Eve in occupied Germany, as he sat in a billet at twilight, five Christmastides from his home in far-off Canada a little weary, a little wistful, wondering if the world would ever be grateful for the sacrifices of the million soldier-men such as he, and the super-sacrifice of those other millions of soldier-men who had passed beyond the wondering stage.

Then, softly, he heard, in a neighboring room, two tiny German babes, the coming generation, sweetly singing "O Heilige Nacht, Stille Nacht" (O Silent Night); and then his wonders ceased, and he knew that all was well; that, at last, the world was safe for all the babes of the world the coming splendid world which, thank God and the men of to-day, would never again undergo the agony, the pain and the heart torture of another such Armageddon; and in the days to come the hate, the loathing, the unutterable contempt, even the after-pity for a diseased band of nations such as Germany and her Allies, would never repeat itself.  

For if, as this soldier-man is convinced, the fighting men of this war have thought and found themselves likewise, then, since they are to be the moulders of the world's thought in the days that are upon us, the world will be as we sometimes picture it in our dreams all happiness, content and joy, and Armageddon may, at long last, be blessed instead of cursed. And the million anxious dead of all the nations will rest tranquil and serene beyond the veil. 

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Unfortunately, it turned out that the Great War would later be renamed the First World War. Canada joined the Second World War in his lifetime, in 1939, twenty years after Cosgrave published his book. New lesson: There is no good in the Germans! The Germans are crazy, inhuman killing machines! Protect me from the Germans!

Or perhaps a more thoughtful revised lesson: Sometimes people make sense of wartime trauma by thinking "God, that was horrible; let's never do that again; we all bleed the same colour." But sometimes people make sense of wartime trauma by thinking that they were stabbed in the back by Socialists, Bolsheviks, and Jews and will one day have their revenge. (I wonder if anyone has done a comparative study of defeated nations and the narratives that they construct for themselves to deal with defeat?)

The thing is, sometimes you are wrong. Life goes on. Cosgrave went on to live a very impressive life. He had children and grandchildren  He also fought in World War Two, and on September 2, 1945 in Tokyo Bay he was the highest ranking Canadian officer on the deck of the HSS Missouri when Japan signed the Terms of Surrender. Two copies were signed - one for Japan and one for America.

Unfortunately, when it came time for Cosgrave to sign on behalf of Canada, he signed on the wrong line. From the CBC's description of the event:

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Colonel Cosgrove wrote his name not on the line above "The Dominion of Canada," as was intended, but on the line below. It was a blunder that set off a chain reaction, forcing the remaining signatories to sign below the place designated for their country. The New Zealand representative, the last to sign, had to affix his signature in the bottom margin of the page. "Col. Cosgrave's botch … will rank high among the historic bobbles of our time." hooted correspondent Turnbull in the Globe.

Several months later, the captain of the USS Missouri recounted what happened when the signing ceremony was over. "The Japanese came forward to pick up the Japanese copy of the surrender papers," Capt. Murray recalled, "and (they) started to question something on it. General (Walter) Sutherland (MacArthur's chief of staff) took a pen and drew a line on the thing and said 'Now that's fine. Now it's all fixed'. So (the Japanese representative) took his copy and folded it up and went on down the gangway."

What the famously abrupt Sutherland had done was amend the august surrender document with a series of cross-outs and scribbles. It is the Japanese copy of the surrender, the botched copy, that now resides in the Edo-Tokyo Museum. On the other copy, the one the Americans took back to Washington, Col Cosgrave got it right.

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You can see the totally screwed up Japanese version of the Terms of Surrender at the Edo-Tokyo museum. You should really fly to Tokyo specifically to examine it in person.

Look, I bring all this up not because I think Colonel Cosgrave was foolish. I am not making fun of him in any way. He was a brave, courageous and hard working Canadian who spent a large part of his life in public service. I just think that these two stories are instructive. Sometimes you live through great tragedy but don't come away with any great wisdom. And sometimes you make a small but embarrassing error at a pivotal, monumental moment in world history.

We are all human and imperfect. We do our best, but we make mistakes. It's okay.