Jackson’s early 1919 return to the rurals of Mendocino County, after being mustered out of the army, was both a homecoming and a fresh look at each other for the man and the community. That is to say, the locals saw Jackson differently, and he had a new perspective on his old home, too. Old friends and acquaintances viewed Jackson as an exotic creature now that he had been to the outside world and to war. It was true that there were still some veterans of the Spanish-American war around, middle-aged men, and even some Civil War veterans. These last were in their seventies and above. Veterans, though—at least those who had seen battle—usually didn’t talk much about their wartime experiences, and so most locals didn’t have much insight into such experiences from those who had actually been there and done that. Jackson didn’t talk much about his, such as they were, either.
As for Jackson’s worldview and communityview, after having had Ukiah as his mind’s model of a city, and having never before been outside of California—and barely out of Mendocino County—he had now been to San Francisco and Paris.
Jackson was a Calloway, though, so it was not a case of not being able to keep him “down on the farm” after seeing the city. He found those metropolises interesting, but in the same way a person finds a train wreck interesting. They were definitely off-putting, and even macabre, to Jackson. That sort of life did not seem natural. It was not for him, he knew that.
The Great War had differed from previous wars—in scope, at least. Stephen Crane, author of Red Badge of Courage, had written a Civil War-era poem ironically titled War Is Kind which contains the phrase “A field where a thousand corpses lie.” During The Great War/World War 1, though, just one location, the river Somme in France, was a veritable hellscape where hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in the bloody, vermin-infested, stench-filled muddy trenches. By means of comparison, at the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the toll was a relatively minuscule 28,000 souls.
The Battle of the Somme was a demonic standoff. Over 300,000 died, leaving behind millions of bereaved, as well as untold numbers of shell-shocked survivors. And for what? No clear advantage was gained by either side. The results—as far as which side was considered victorious—are regarded as “Indecisive.”
Jackson was by no means ashamed of his service, but he began to doubt the efficacy of working out political and philosophical differences by sending the young men of the various countries to shoot and lob shells at one another, torpedo each other’s ships, and rain down destruction from the sky. War was, he concluded, the result of greed, a lack of imagination, and an abject failure of diplomacy.
Chapter 1 can be read here.
Chapter 2 can be read here.
Chapter 3 can be read here.
Chapter 4 can be read here.
Chapter 5 can be read here.
Chapter 6 can be read here.
Chapter 8 can be read here.