I read George Toparceanu's "Balade Vesele si Triste" -- one of the ballads is required for summer reading for school, but I read the whole book. Like the title said some ballads were funny and some were sad. The one we have to read for school is about an ox, a magpie, and a dog. The ox puts puts up with the magpie because it's useful -- it eats the various bugs that disturb him, but throws off the dog, who just wants to be carried, and thinks the ox is stupid because he lets such a small bird sit on him.
At the end of the book it had excerpts from his other writings. The first were over Toparceanu's war memories during the Balkan war with Bulgaria, which set the stage for the first world war. The second Balkan war in which Romania took part started in 1913. In it Toparceanu was an officer and later a prisoner. He describes war as a way to return to the stone age for some and to a time before that for those who fought in the trenches, who are like beasts ready to pounce on each other for the entertainment of far-away leaders -- leaders who are stubborn and child-like and could not and would not learn from history because it's too long, and will not even learn from their own mistakes.
Toparceanu was taken prisoner in 1916. He and some of his fellow prisoners (the rest were dumped at various labor camps along the way) went all the way to Macedonia by foot. There among the tragedies of war he is impressed by the multi-annual crops and by the artificial mashes for rice plantations -- rice is described as wheat-like, but less nutritious and a lot more labor intensive. In the better part of his imprisonment, they were allowed to each dig a home in the Earth. The home had no window, only a door through which light could pass. For a bit of light at night he bought chestnuts dumped in grease through which he would pass a thread of cotton to turn it into a form of candle. This was the stone-age phase.
Some of the funny scenes include when he is put in charge of a locomotive, without prior training, and in charge of treating the sick as an assistant to a Greek who pretended to be a doctor, where he is quite successful in saving lives with the help of a Turk. The last adventure quoted is when he agrees to jump off the train that was taking him home to Romania to let the Bulgarian who was escorting him spend New Year's eve with his wife and family -- because he had been newly married and every moment of joy matters when death lurks near-by. What would everyone think when we jump off the train, he asks the escort: "that you are trying to escape, and that I am jumping after you to catch you". Then early on New Years Day they jumped onto another train. Toparceanu lived for another 20 years before dying of liver cancer. One wanders if the war-time privations did not seed the cancer.
It was pointed out to me that some of you might not know who George Toparceanu was. According to my dad, there are two kinds of famous people in Romania: the Mihais and the Georges. George Toparceanu like George Cosbuc is obviously from the second category.
My great-great-grandfather who's name was also George fought in the Bulgarian war in the same time as George Toparceanu. He became sick with typhoid fever and was thrown out with the dead and covered with lime-dust. They did not have had time to wait for everyone to fully die back then. The lime dust and the cold must have played a role in lowering the fever and waking him up. So, he crawled from among the dead and walked to a nearby Bulgarian village, where some women nursed him back to health. They helped him even though he was on the opposite side in the war and typhoid fever was contagious. The authorities sent his wive a notice of his death, but forgot to send news of his recovery. He reported back to the front-line to a different unit and kept fighting until the first world war ended in 1918. Then he wrote home and his five children and wife were surprised and delighted to have a father and husband again. Through the privations and tragedy of war, he learned enough medicine to become the unofficial doctor of his village. He could set bones that healed straight, and knew enough about plants to dispel fevers and treat various heart conditions before medication was routinely available. Although he did not have George Toparceanu's amazing talent, some stories about him are still remembered and retold 100 years later.
Grandma tells me that in great wars there are no winners -- and that the leaders who start them lose everything -- eventually. Alexandru Macedon was poisoned. Napoleon was imprisoned on the island of Elba. Hitler committed suicide by swallowing a capsule of cyanide and shooting himself in the head just before Germany surrendered unconditionally. Yet somehow I am not surprised by the past. I am only surprised by the present. It's strange that the leaders we have win at all in a so-called democratic society. Like Toparceanu wrote more than 100 years ago, today our leaders seem both stupid and child-like. Yet they stay in power -- the news are full of Trump's dealings with China to win the 2020 elections, and were full of his interaction with Russia in 2016. Somehow he is still the president, and how can he give up power when leaders and their whole families were court-martialed for less?
But in spite of all this, is there an upside to having a war that destroys the world as we know it only so that we feebly try to rebuilt years later? The up side of the stone-age/beast-age return is that the dreadful competition between nations leads to progress. A lot of technology has been developed and perfected during wartime -- this includes the back-bones of much of what is used today: the radio, planes, the telephone, nuclear energy.
The fight against COVID-19 is still seen as a form of war -- in that we feel proud of fighting by staying out of the way of the virus. But what will history say 100 years down the road? Will humanity survive 100 years? If so will the blanket measures that destroyed what was left of freedom and democracy be seen as a form of media-driven insanity that set the stage for wars with guns? will all this be forgotten? will it be judged in Nuremberg-type trials? or will it be praised? can the response of the various leaders be praised? will safety and democracy come back without a war with guns?
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