Saturday, March 5, 2011

Violent?

This is coolbert:

From the wiki entry for the Espionage Act of 1917 we find this erroneous entry. Misleading?

"The poet E. E. Cummings, while serving as a volunteer in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France, was arrested on September 21, 1917. Cummings had spoken openly of his lack of hatred for the Germans. He spent three and a half months in a military detention camp and wrote of his experiences in his novel The Enormous Room."

"It was not those dumb, jejune [youthful] letters of mine
that got us into trouble. It was the fact that C. and I
knew all about the violent mutinies in the French Army
a few months before Cummings and I reached the front.
We learned all about them from the poilus. The French did
everything, naturally, to suppress the news."
- - William Slater Brown.


My understanding of the French Army mutiny of 1917 is that it was basically a non-violent rebellion. The French troops, in the aftermath of the Nivelle Offensive refused to go on similar offensive actions, but other than that performed their military duties as ordered and still fought, but ONLY defensively. Refused orders for further offensive combat action - - but there was little, if any, violence directed against superior authority [officers]. The troops if ordered forward merely sat there and did nothing. If attacked by the German, defended themselves, but NO going forward on the offensive.

During the First World War [WW1], it was all the rage for young American writers and poets to enlist as ambulance drivers. E.E. Cummings and Ernest Hemingway both? Seems so. There were others?

coolbert.

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