The Human Face of War

It is past midnight in my Santa Monica study, and on the Internet, where it is no time and no place, I am searching for a soldier’s grave in France. My mother had a brother, you see.

* Her brother’s name was Bill. He was killed at Dunkirk in 1940 as the German army pushed the British into the sea. His widow killed herself. They left a child.

* For 60 years, that was the sum of it. There was no body to bury, no story to tell, just a photograph of a second lieutenant in the upstairs hall. When you are young, there are questions you don’t know enough to ask. When you are old enough to understand, you discover the answers are beyond your reach.

The questions, when they finally did come, were not my own--not at first. They were my mother’s. Turning 80, she had so little time to seek an answer.

Seated at my computer, I look for answers in the most urgent way I know, by searching through the 1 billion pages of the World Wide Web. It can answer in seconds the questions that took decades to form.

But the Web, like memory, is oblique, triggered by chance associations. Like memory, there are gaps. Like memory, the Web rings true and false. So many of its answers are themselves questions.

Even so, I find something unexpected of bravery and shame. I find kinship with a man I can never know. I find too much about a man I wish I could forget.

It began with a message on my answering machine, the fall of France and a forgotten war crime at a place called Paradise.

*

CALL ME, MY MOTHER SAID.

Sixty years of silence had ended with a sentence in a secondhand history book on Dunkirk. My mother discovered it by chance, browsing the back shelves of a bookstore in Maryland: More than “90 men of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment were machine-gunned by an execution party led by Oberslieutenant Fritz Knoechlein.” The historian wrote that as an aside in his narrative, then changed the subject.

That was Bill’s regiment, she said on the telephone when I returned her call. That was his battalion. What happened to Bill? she asked. Is that how he died? There was an echo of anguish in her voice.

I asked her to repeat the sentence for me. I wrote it down.

I looked at my computer. Maybe I could find a veterans group, a regimental historian, or a telephone number of someone who knows something. But I needed search terms and keywords.

I was embarrassed that I knew so little of my family. Tell me what you remember, I asked her.

What was his full name?

William Archibald Willison. He was 23 years old.

His rank?

Second lieutenant. In the Royal Norfolks. Second Battalion.

Here is what I heard: He was the only son of a Canadian family, Commonwealth to the bone, who grew up in Toronto, where in time of war, the women gave white feathers to the men who stayed behind. The family tithed to the cause of empire, in taxes, public service and its men. They were among the city’s founding families, now in arrears and rich in pride. With little at hand to inherit and no ready skills to employ, Bill was born for a uniform.

By all accounts, he looked fine in one, my mother recalled, first in the scarlet tunic of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, then in the kilt and fur busby of the Governor’s Guard.

Cannon fodder, his father said, when he saw Bill in full dress uniform.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the army mobilized and he volunteered as an officer in the Norfolks. They landed in France, took up positions in Belgium at Christmas, facing the German army across the fields that their parents had fought over in the First World War.

Where did he die? When?

I don’t know, she said. He went missing at Dunkirk.

For those of a certain age, Dunkirk is a word that conjures more than the name of a small port city on the French coast. It beats in the heart.

There, over nine days in May and June 1940, 338,226 British soldiers, cut off from land retreat by German tanks and infantry, were evacuated from the beaches by a makeshift armada of 693 British destroyers, pleasure steamers, coasters, fishing boats, lifeboats, yachts and motorboats.

Isolated British army units sacrificed themselves to hold the German panzers back from the beaches long enough for others to escape. About 68,000 men were killed, captured, wounded or missing in action. A third of the ships were sunk.

A battle was lost, yet an army was saved and, in that moment, the fate of the war decided. It was the worst retreat and greatest triumph in British military history, ignoble and inspiring in equal measure.

My mother last saw Bill on her wedding day. He had three months to live.

When war was declared, she was in London and had joined the Royal Air Force. She married a pilot. She was 18 and already an officer. And, on a sidewalk in London after the wedding ceremony, the three of them in uniform teased each other over who outranked whom.

Within a year, Bill had vanished in France. Her husband had vanished in combat over the North Sea. London was in ruins. And she had been evacuated to Scotland, to await the birth of her first son, not knowing then or since what happened when either of them died.

How could you not know? I asked.

It was the war, she said. People vanished.

In a way that only later I came to recognize, something of her had vanished, too. Now, while there was time, she reached to reclaim it.

At my computer, I typed his name and hit return.

*

MEMORY IS A SEARCH ENGINE.

Only the inexplicable mechanisms of memory can sort and retrieve human experience secreted in the chemical code of neurotransmitters. As it fails, we lose ourselves and our place in time. In the same way, only a search engine can make sense of the community memory of the Web.

There are no fewer than 3,491 search engines, deploying computerized search spiders, Web crawlers, data miners and directories of directories. Each one employs a different formula to create an organized index from the chaos of the Internet. Some search services--such as Vet’s Search or Find a Grave--are so specialized that they only answer a single sort of query.

Even so, the Internet is an unknowable hypertangle. Hundreds of millions of intangible Web pages are interconnected by billions of haphazard electronic links that mimic neural cells and synapses. The digital chaos, routed through 2.8 million public computer servers, exists nowhere and everywhere, expanding at the rate of a million new electronic Web pages every day.

It is so hard to find anything on the Web that IBM researchers recently concluded that anyone trying to reach a specific destination would fail three-quarters of the time. Archivists at Ohio State University found that even the best search engine made an accurate match only 27% of the time. At least 64% of the time, they found that the Web pages indexed either contained no answer at all or were out of service.

In the old way, a family memory would grow around word of mouth, like moss around a stone, from events transformed through generations of dinner-table tales, distilled, and then decanted. But the Internet is instant, immediate, misinformed, unstable. This is memory that cannot wait long enough to gel.

I have no search strategy save serendipity.

To cast the widest net, I employ a search engine called Google, which encompasses a swath of cyberspace totaling 560 million Web pages, with links to 500 million more Web addresses.

Next to pornography and business, the most prevalent topic on the Web could easily be family--sites that document family trees, boast of roots, or plaintively seek them. Amid the war buffs, orphans, neo-Nazis and historians, I seek some trace of Bill.

There are 240 responses to my Web query about his name.

The search takes 0.38 seconds.

None of the responses touch on Bill.

I type in the name of his regiment.

There are 2,784 responses. It takes 0.54 seconds.

After 300 years of continuous service, the regiment no longer exists, the Web tells me. Still, there is a regimental museum in England.

With gathering speed, I spiral in electronic free fall, following links that thread through millions of online voices. They all clamor for attention in the same silent, insistent text. It is a well of souls.

I try another link and I land by chance on a page dedicated to someone named Corp. Stanley Atkin. He was wounded at Dunkirk, then died as a prisoner of war. His grandson has posted the corporal’s photograph, excerpts from his letters and a poem he wrote. Their last word from him was a letter from a prison camp in Rouen, France, scribbled on a piece of torn cardboard; then nothing except notification of his death in captivity. From his grandson, there is a polite plea for information.

A third link opens into the middle of a soldier’s diary, with an account of the evacuation from the beach on Dunkirk and his struggle to escape a sinking boat. He cannot swim. He dives for a floating rope and is hauled to safety.

The diary is on a Web site erected in memory of a truck driver named Edwin Richard George Quittenton, who fought in northern France. “If anyone can give me any information, please let me know,” says the message posted by the grandson, offering an e-mail address.

There is the man looking for any trace of the flier who fathered him: an Army aviator who may have been killed in a 1940 plane crash. His first name may have been James, the son posted. Another seeks news of a grandfather taken prisoner of war at the fall of Singapore.

There is a Web site for the 8,939 British and American pilots kept as prisoners of war in Stalag Luft 1 in Barth, Germany. A family in Alabama created it in the hope that someone could explain their father to them--a waist-gunner on a B-17 bomber who had spent his war years behind German barbed wire. He would not speak of it.

“Dad died suddenly 21 years ago, taking his memories with him,” they write on their site. “Our minds were full of questions we could no longer ask.” Can anyone answer them now?

My search continues. I check the Imperial War Museum in London, then look for official records at the British Ministry of Defence, the Public Record Office and the National Archives. There are millions of files all meticulously indexed, with tens of thousands of photographs. Bill may be among them, but I cannot access these records from my computer.

I type in “veterans organizations.” There are 167,000 responses. The search takes 0.25 seconds.

I comb through a list of 937 British groups. There is the Imperial Camel Corps Old Comrades Assn. and the Indian Ocean Flying Boat Assn., the Royal Fusiliers Aid Society, the Not Forgotten Assn. and the Spitfire Society. I discover an organization of Dunkirk veterans.

I link to the Dunkirk group only to see that it disbanded June 30, after 50 survivors held a final reunion at the French harbor. They had made the journey every year since 1957. Now the youngest--a 14-year-old stowaway in a tug at the time of the evacuation--is 74 and failing. It is time for an end to anniversaries.

I move on, back up, lose my place and, inexplicably, find myself at the home of the Daily International Vessel Casualties & Pirates Database. I cannot find my way back.

*

STARTING AGAIN, I HAZARD A GUESS AND TYPE IN “WAR CRIMES.” I HIT RETURN. There are 346,999 responses. The search takes 0.07 seconds.

I slip-slide from atrocity to atrocity. Nuremberg. Tokyo. Korea. Vietnam. Bosnia. Kosovo. United Nations War Crimes Commission. Tribunals. Archives of case files. I am dizzy with the vertigo of history. I back out into a Web site devoted to atrocities of World War II.

There, second on the list, I find a terse paragraph about the massacre of Bill’s battalion.

It occurred on May 27, 1940, as the main body of the British Army fell back to Dunkirk. For 13 days, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolks fought to slow the German advance, allowing others the time to evacuate. Decimated finally, out of ammunition, cut off by a canal and overrun by German tanks, the battalion surrendered under white flag to a company of Waffen SS storm troopers at a farm outside a small village called Le Paradis.

Taken as prisoners of war, the 97 men were disarmed, beaten with rifle butts and marched into the barnyard. As the last of the column passed through the gate, two heavy machine guns systematically opened fire. “Men fell like grass before a scythe,” one private would later say of this moment. “The invisible blade came nearer and then swept through me.” He was shot four times.

The SS men moved among the bodies, to bayonet the wounded. Then they shot them each in the head. One German eyewitness later said he saw a wounded British officer raise himself on one arm and point to his heart, as a plea that he should be dispatched.

But, yes, two men did survive. They made it a life’s work to track down the officer who had ordered these executions, to testify at trial against him.

When I was a child, my mother was full of Victorian aphorisms about manners and behavior. Wake up and die right, I would echo to make fun of her sentiments. I am sobered now by how little I understand of the values that I mocked, of what it is to be schooled to such determination.

I type the words “Le Paradis,” and there are 78,800 responses. The search takes 0.78 seconds. I add the word “massacre” and it narrows to 1,317. Only three are meaningful. I link, then link again.

As I start to read the text on the computer screen, the digital images on the page take form. I am suddenly looking at photographs from 1940, staring through a window into the past.

There is a grainy black-and-white photograph of the brick barn in the yard where the men were executed. A bandoleer of bullet holes runs chest high for the length of the building. There is a photograph of a mass grave by a barnyard. Flat-brimmed British helmets are balanced like heads on the fence posts. Another picture forms. Are those bodies fallen against a wall?

Unsettled, I reach for the telephone on my desk.

I can tell you when it happened, I say to my mother. I can tell you where. I swallow.

I can tell you there was a trial.

I can tell you there was a hanging.

*

I WAS SEARCHING FOR BILL. I FOUND INSTEAD FRITZ KNOECHLEIN, THE German SS officer who ordered the executions.

I type his name.

There are 17 responses. The search takes 0.26 seconds.

I trace the man. I trace his unit. The links lead into an online Nazi nether world, through the Elite Forces of the Third Reich Web site, the SS archive, Das Reich home page and the Waffen SS in Pictures Web site. There is Waffen-SS.com, with chat forums and a newsletter.

One enthusiast wants help downloading SS war songs. Another is anxious to identify the make and manufacture of his Waffen SS war bonnet. A third, whose e-mail alias is Adolf Hitler1, is collecting SS training manuals. On impulse, I type “Adolf Hitler” and hit return. There are 87,200 responses. It takes 0.16 seconds.

Even among these online storm trooper sites--most of them set up by Americans, as best I can tell--there is a palpable distaste for the Schutzstaffel (SS) Third Panzer Division to which Knoechlein belonged, for these were Hitler’s Death’s Heads--the SS Totenkopf--who had charge of all Nazi concentration camps.

I type “Totenkopf” and hit return. There are 3,970 responses. The search takes 0.49 seconds.

When they encountered Bill’s battalion, Knoechlein’s company of SS men was still new to combat, but not to brutality or repression. They were all former concentration camp guards, I learned, posted as a unit to the Western front directly from Dachau. What military skills they possessed had been honed on prisoners.

Knoechlein joined the SS in 1934, barely a year after Dachau opened 10 miles outside Munich. Dachau was neither the largest nor the worst of the concentration camps, simply the first and the model for what would come. Between 31,000 and 230,000 Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, homosexuals and political prisoners died there through starvation, disease and torture or in medical experiments.

For his military service, Knoechlein was awarded the Iron Cross three times and promoted to regimental commander. He survived the Russian front. He was a war hero and a war criminal.

I find his picture, not in the Web gallery of autographed portraits of SS commanders, but online at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance: Knoechlein stands under a tree in full uniform, a field cap angled precisely across his brow, his left hand cocked on his hip. He is 28. His eyes are two shadows.

According to the curator’s caption, it was taken May 27, 1940, the day he ordered the battalion executed.

Almost immediately, German army staff officers tried to investigate the massacre, I would learn.

In a transcript of a radio broadcast from Berlin that evening of the shootings, I find a hint of just how far and fast the news must have traveled to the German high command. “It was announced in Berlin today that the special treatment accorded Allied prisoners so far has ceased,” CBS correspondent William L. Shirer told the United States. There was no further word.

The SS repeatedly rebuffed all inquiries, captured documents show, but even so, a German army medical examiner was on the scene within 48 hours to gather evidence. A German army staff memo survived in the files: “Why was the shooting of a large number of prisoners not reported?” There is no answer. Any evidence was suppressed.

Two years later, the executions were reported again to German authorities. Again the report was ignored. After the war, the shootings were twice reported as a war crime to British authorities, who discounted it or failed to act. From this, I learn something of denial.

In all, eight years passed before anyone arrested Knoechlein.

His trial in Hamburg took 12 days. He testified in his own behalf. His own men testified against him, as did the French farmers who witnessed the shootings and the two British soldiers who survived. His wife sat in the courtroom every day. They had four children, I discovered.

The verdict took three hours, his sentencing a few minutes. It took no time at all to hang him Jan. 28, 1949.

As I take the gist of this in from my computer--screen by screen--I feel a family pain that is no less sharp for all the decades it lay fallow before it grew again in me.

The only thing I had known of Bill was that he was a soldier who had fallen as he fought. All I had of him was pride in that valor. But he may have been a victim and that shocked me. Now, because of Knoechlein, his memory melds with my mental images of the camps and the sealed trains and the sorting platforms and the millions made to stand in line to die. What can one death mean among so many? I am linked to this in a way I had not known. These things all grew from the same poison seed during the same human eclipse. We think we see these things more clearly now. But time blurs more than memory.

I feel anger, outrage and also shame. Perhaps it is not only fear that keeps so many victims from speaking out. Perhaps it is shame at having been made so powerless. I think of that dying British officer pointing at his heart.

And what do I fashion from this to tell my children? Before there was any story, Bill did not exist in my home, but now there is the beginning of a story, however tentative. It gives him form and a place among us. I want them to know the past, yet not be burdened by it. My sons should know that history is embedded in every life, but I am still learning how to remember Bill, to understand so much courage stripped of pretense.

Still, my children do ask, if only to know why their father is so preoccupied. I measure the words, to keep the story as simple as the little truth I can confirm. My mother had a brother, I say, just as the two of you are brothers. And she lost him in the war.

I see my 4-year-old has left the room. It is too much to expect so young a child to listen. He returns in a moment with the family globe.

Show me where, he says.

*

I AM BEGINNING TO REALIZE THAT I MAY NEVER FIND BILL. Fifty of the bodies buried at Le Paradis have never been identified. He may have died in the fighting before that day or in the confusion after. All I have done is narrow that space into which he vanished, embraced by the fog of war.

Wandering the Web, I learn more and more about less and less. If history is the long shadow we cast across time, then what I find on the Web is a shadow of that shadow.

As all roads once led to Rome, all links in cyberspace somehow end in Amazon.com. Through the online bookseller I locate an oral history of Bill’s battalion from the sound archive at London’s Imperial War Museum. He is not mentioned.

Through online rare book services--Alibris, Bibliofind and the War Room--I discover a survivor’s story, long out of print. I locate a copy of it in New Zealand. With a few mouse clicks and a credit card, it is in the air to me in Santa Monica. But it does not mention Bill.

Linking back and forth, I find an old e-mail archived on a message board from a man in rural Canada looking for information about his uncle, who died at Le Paradis. On impulse, I send him a message, briefly telling him of my search.

In what seems like an instant, the telephone on my desk is ringing. The Canadian is on the line. “Did you get my e-mail yet?” he asks. “I sent you a Web address. The information you want is there.”

I link to it. I type Bill’s name. I hit return. He is there.

He appears on my computer screen: Name, rank, serial number, battalion, regiment, the day he died: Monday, May 27, 1940. His parents. His wife. The location of his memorial in the British War Graves section of the Dunkirk Town Cemetery. All arranged on the screen like a modest headstone. “Remembered with honour.”

I have linked to a virtual graveyard: a computerized register of 23,260 military cemeteries in 150 countries set up by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Maintained by an official bureaucracy of grief, this Web site contains every single name of the 1.7 million people in the Commonwealth armed forces who died in the two world wars. The database makes it possible for someone to identify the exact location, by cemetery plot or memorial panel, where any given name appears. More than 250,000 people visit this Internet necropolis every week.

With our newest technology, we do this most ancient thing to immortalize our dead. We erect cenotaphs in cyberspace.

I call my mother.

I can tell you when he died, I say.

I can tell you that I found him.

His name is engraved on a stone column of Dunkirk casualties erected at the graveyard. It is the only tangible trace of him.

In all, 208,848 of these Commonwealth dead from two wars lay in unmarked graves, by the bookkeeping of the war graves commission. Another 760,193 more are simply missing. Their only known remains are names inscribed on monuments and digitized in a database.

There may be no more permanent tombstone than this Web page that I called into existence by entering his name into a war graves database. When I turn off my computer, that page is reabsorbed into the chaos of the Web. It is a memory that exists for as long as someone has the will to call it back or until this Web link itself is dead.

I may never settle any more of him than this inscription. But my mother cared most about his name. That small certainty laid all other uncertainty to rest.

“When I climbed into bed that night,” she said, “something evil had lifted. I don’t have to think anymore about what might have happened to him or wonder where he is.” We can tell his child that much about the father she never knew.

My mother was surprised a computer search could end the uncertainties that had plagued her for so long. To me, it seemed I had only kicked up the dust of memories, but in it was something that settled her. “It all happens like falling into a whirlpool,” she said. “It was like being spun around. Such answers. Such ripples.”

*

SEARCHING FOR MY UNCLE, I SOUGHT TO ANSWER MY MOTHER’S QUESTION. I found a human face of war. Unexpectedly, it was hers.

In my mind’s eye, I can see her on that wedding day, the three of them in uniform on that London sidewalk, when so many things were still intact. I see the fatal symmetry: her men who vanished and the children they never saw; the woman who survived and the generations of children who know her well.

The war rescued her. Like so many, she slipped the harness of tradition and the past. She escaped too the widow’s cage of the peace that followed. She molted: married an American flier, changed her name, her country, and shed her accent. My brothers and I belong to that afterlife. Our father was too generous of heart to begrudge her ghosts their place in our home.

She was a refugee from the wreckage of war and the ruin of family, with an immigrant’s gift of transformation. The boarding-school girl born in Canada as Rachael Adele Willison--Rae to her friends--became in England Section Officer Birchall, the widowed mother of George, my oldest brother. In America, she remarried and re-christened herself Joan Willison Hotz, my mother. Her friends call her Birch and some of them wonder why.

My mother loved the war, I think, in the way you can love being young and feeling that much more alive for the proximity of so much death and the terrifying clarity of every choice. But what she loved claimed so much of what she loved. I strain for a glimpse of her as then she was, before this world was made, but there is no link in my computer to lead me there. Was I looking for her youth?

People vanish. She said it.