DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION/WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION/GHOSTS

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION (1933)

As the film continues rolling, children play with sheets and scare each other, apparently an eureka moment for the formation of the Klan. This historical distortion disturbs Rommel.

“This film is less than useless,” he barks. “This is not the history I expected at all. Is this not the story of the origins of the Ku Klux Klan? Where is the ‘Wizard of the Saddle?’”

From the stuttering turntable Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries pitch-shifts in full song. Onscreen, Ku Klux Klan vigilantes battle a hapless militia of black men.

After grunts of disapproval, Rommel rises suddenly and walks towards the film projector. A hyper-real superimposition of Klan footage on the Lieutenant, with two hooded horsemen galloping and holding a cross, make the staff officers scrinch their eyes.

“Turn it off!” Rommel fumes and whacks a rostrum with a pointer. The adjutants jump, reach for a light switch and fumble with the film projector.

“Enough of this buffoonery and propaganda. I am unconcerned with cartoonish portrayals of final solutions.”

WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION (2001)

The more I study the collectibles store, the more I realize the place is a shrine to Nathan Bedford Forrest. Despite interrupting their lunch hour, the husband-and-wife antebellum memorabilia merchants spend the better part of the afternoon discussing the myths and folklore of the object of their passion, Forrest.

The stories are legend. One tale after another of Forrest risking his own neck in some daring ill-advised personal assault on enemy positions while his inferior forces triumphed exquisitely over a legion of bamboozled Yankees, each battlefield assault punctuated with pithy, percipient yet cornpone punchlines such as “Get there firstest with the mostest” and “Never stand and take a charge… charge them too,” also “Get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em.”

“This Forrest fellow was epic,” I tell my Cousin.

“Yes, he was,” he agrees, “but these fine folks didn’t tell you about all of his exploits.”

“Really? What did I miss?”

“What they didn’t mention was that Forrest was also the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.”

GHOSTS (1933)

“To know Forrest, I must go to the source,” Rommel cries. “To Brice’s Crossroads, the site of Forrest’s greatest triumph and the battlefield where he exercised his infamous pincer movement, movements to the detriment and annihilation of superior Northern forces. Find me a guide – a survivor… somebody who was there.”

“Herr Rommel,” Burgdorf reasons, “that was seventy years ago. Is there anybody there who is even still alive?”

“If not, we shall be guided by ghosts.” -30-

THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 4: THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

In a strobing smoke-filled classroom at the Potsdam War Academy, a silhouetted quartet of uniformed men puff cigarettes and fidget and watch a screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation. The air stings of crackling celluloid, and of the soot of history slowly melting from the heat of a movie projector’s lamp. As the film strip burnishes from age and friction, emulsions decay and nitrates metastasize, mixing with hot balls of dust that float through the tobacco haze like dirty satellites in space. It burns the nostrils and the singes the eyelashes.

In lieu of an orchestra or a proper pipe organ, the soundtrack to the silent film is a perpetual whir of the projector’s motor, a clattering grind of mechanical teeth champing on 16mm sprockets interrupted by a smattering of coughs from the assembled military staff.

A plump adjutant fiddle-fucks around with a flakey phonograph machine. A pair of staff officers, Burgdorf and Maisel, befuddled by the movie they have been forced to watch – an American film which purports to explain the necessity of the Ku Klux Klan in the Age of Reconstruction – squirm from boredom. A fourth viewer, Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, equally impatient with the movie’s plodding plot and maudlin histrionics, taps his creased thighs with his leather field gloves. “If Goebbels made such shit he would be shot,” the Lieutenant quips, and the rest of men chortle. The screening is Rommel’s idea; he commissioned a print because of his interest in Nathan Bedford Forrest, the savage and savvy Confederate General who, after the Civil War, became the Klan’s inaugural Imperial Wizard.

“Schneider! The needle!” Rommel urges, his frustration with the film compounded by the gnawing silences of the malfunctioning phonograph. The portly adjutant prods the phonograph, and strains of Wagner’s Die Walküre jump starts to life.

On the screen, former friends — and now adversarial soldiers — shoot at each other with primitive rifles and then a Title Card reads: “On the battlefield. War claims its bitter, useless sacrifice. True to their promise, the chums meet again.”

The scene cuts, and Griffith’s portrayal of hand-to-hand combat in the American Civil War resumes. A Confederate soldier is shot and drops to terra firma. His “chum” from the North attacks with a fixed bayonet, and just before the inevitable skewering, recognizes his fallen Southern pal, smiles and puts his weapon down.

“Why doesn’t he kill him with the blade?” Maisel asks, his lanky frame bent in a ball of confusion.

“His enemy must be his brother or his cousin, I think,” Burgdorf responds.

Their discourse is interrupted by Rommel. “In war, there is no room for sentimentality,” he argues. “Americans lack the cruel instinct necessary for pure, complete domination.”

Birth Of A Nation continues in background; as strings swell, the compassionate boy is shot and falls over his dead friend. Dying, he caresses his chum’s lifeless body. “The American’s last great conquest was maybe manifest destiny,” Burgdorf says. “Then they got soft.”

“Yes,” Maisel nods. “Maybe nothing was left so they turned on each other.” -30-

THE MICRO-FILM (2006)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 2: THE MICRO-FILM (2006)

I had heard the oral history about some psychic, cerebral and strategic connection between Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest – how Rommel had studied Forrest’s battle tactics to the point of actually retracing his predecessor’s steps. At the gates of a Confederate graveyard outside of the Brice’s Crossroads battle site I began to understand just how pushed, damaged and Jungian the folklore really was. At this junction – an intersection fabled to those who know the minutiae of war history, yet largely ignored and consigned to oblivion to the rest of the world — parked in front of a rather ramshackle replica of a cannon, sat a late model Chevrolet Impala SS sedan sporting Texas plates. Because of the generic make and model of the car, and the fact that it was domestic, it appeared to be a rental. Most probably, some Civil War moonie had rented the car in his or her hometown and blasted across Texas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi delta to get a glimpse of the same battlefield that – legend has it – had intrigued Rommel.

As I entered the gates near the graveyard for the confederate dead, I ran into the driver of the Texas rental. True to archetype, he was some mid-40s, mustachioed Civil War zealot/nut in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. My presence startled him, but he instantly recovered from shock to bug-eyed understanding, thinking he had encountered at this, arguably the most esoteric and forgotten battlefield in North America, a fellow traveler, another damaged authority on all matters military… a connoisseur of the conquest, and an enthusiast of eradication… and a friend of Forrest… (I am not sure I would have corrected him had he inquired to that effect…) In his zeal to share, he proffered a roll of 35mm film for my analysis and said: “I have the micro-film for Rommel.” This seeming non sequitur provoked a loud silence. I was stunned. He took my muted response as an appreciation for what he was saying.

“Everybody knows Erwin Rommel came here in the 1930s to study the lay of the land at the greatest American Civil War dark horse victories,” the Hawaiian shirt explained.

As the Teutonic Tropical Texan put his “micro-film” in the pocket of his garish garment, he concluded, “This time the Germans are going to get it right.”

Then he drove off. -30-

ROMMEL OVER SHERMAN/WHISPERS IN THE WIND

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 1: ROMMEL OVER SHERMAN/WHISPERS IN THE WIND (1942)

In North Africa, on the simmering southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, Nazi Field Marshall Erwin Rommel raises his binoculars and attempts to make sense of the swirling fans of desert dunes. In a maelstrom of blood, motor oil, grinding wheels, sand and tank snot, men are chewed up like gristle in a series of slow industrial accidents. Rommel is indifferent to the suffering.

The wind blows and the Field Marshall wipes his eyes. It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult… but Berlin had insisted on splitting the Reich’s firepower and manpower into two fronts — on separate continents, making the strategic deployment of arms and bodies half as efficient and twice as bloody.

His troops are getting pummeled, but they continue an inexorable march into the shape-shifting sands of utter annihilation.

“Hit them on the end!” Rommel growls, but his famed pincer strategy cuts no muster on a battlefield mushy as Malt-O-Meal.

It all continues to turn to shit. Disorientation is now situation normal. Infantry is immolated and Panzers are pummeled. The desert heat, the fumes, the bone-shivering bombardment, the earth is made of marshmellows and quicksand. Rommel wipes his eyes with a gloved hand, disbelieving.

Still trying to gauge the size, strength and position of his foe, he looks through his glass once more and the dust parts just long and wide enough to create a hole in his consciousness. He shakes his head. He cannot believe what he is seeing: The Allied forces are not in tanks, but are on instruments from a forgotten century. It’s Yankee cavalry. From the American Civil War… “Hit ‘em on the end!” he repeats, oblivious to the absurdity of the hallucination.

“Vas is Das, Field Marshall?” an adjutant inquires.

“Sherman,” Rommel exhales.

“Sherman tanks?”

“Nein,” Rommel mutters, lowering the glass again. “William Tecumseh Sherman.”

“Scheiße,” the adjutant whispers. -30-