When the Lights Went Out

It was The Great War -- until a global clash of arms even more apocalyptic erupted a mere twenty years later and eclipsed the horror of 16,500,000 combat and civilian deaths by a factor of almost five. And yet despite the United States' more prominent role in the latter, borne on the broad shoulders of many of our own fathers -- aptly labeled "the greatest generation" -- I find the politics, military aspects, ramifications, and tragic folly of World War One much more fascinating.

It was, as depicted in Ken Follett's one-thousand-page melodramatic account of five families -- British, Welsh, Russian, German, and American -- swept into the maelstrom, nothing less than the Fall of Giants: the demise of the Prussian monarchy; the toppling of the Romanov dynasty; the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the collapse of Ottoman hegemony; and the unraveling of British imperialism. Were any of them ever haunted by the supreme irony of a world turned upside down or the baneful consequences of their ill-conceived motives? They went to war to preserve or augment their power and domain, and ended up punished, banished, or diminished, dragging the wasted lives of millions in their wake.

While World War One's death toll pales in comparison to its successor's, pure numbers can be deceptive. Eliminating civilian (a staggering 45 million in World War Two, 6 million in World War One) and Pacific theater (5.5 million in World War Two) deaths from the total reduces the disparity in European combat deaths to 20 million in World War Two compared to 10 million in World War One -- and most of that can be attributed to the 10 million men expended by the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler, over five times Russian losses in the earlier war. Conversely, four European countries -- the United Kingdom, France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy -- recorded higher combat deaths in the earlier war, and in the case of France and the United Kingdom by a count of 2.5 million to 600,000.

Of course, in 1940, Hitler's blitzkrieg overran France in a matter of months, while the German offensive in 1914 stalled at the gates of Paris; the Western front settled into a four-year stalemate during which each side sacrificed thousands in a series of attacks and counterattacks that yielded little territorial or strategic advantage. Nineteenth-century tactics stood helpless against twentieth-century weaponry.

"The magnitude of slaughter in the war's entire span was beyond anything in European experience: more than 35 per cent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out were killed in the next four and a half years . . . [and] one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 . . . Roughly 12 per cent of all British soldiers who took part in the war were killed." (Hochschild, p. xiv)

" 'The Great War lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,' wrote the historian Barbara Tuchman . . . Cities and towns in the armies' path were reduced to jagged rubble, forests and farms to charred ruins." (Hochschild, p. xiv)

"More than 700 million artillery and mortar rounds were fired on the Western front between 1914 and 1918, of which an estimated 15 per cent failed to explode." Every year roving French bomb-disposal specialists collect and destroy 900 tons of unexploded munitions. (Hochschild, p. xii)

George F. Kennan called World War One "the great seminal catastrophe -- the one out of which a century of catastrophes arose." A decimated and demoralized Russian populace shook off the bonds of its Tsarist oppressors, only to usher in, with German complicity, a Bolshevik dictatorship that would turn out to be more brutal, more murderous, and more ambitious than its predecessor. In seeking to humiliate their vanquished foes and extract exorbitant recompense for their expenditure of life and treasure, the victorious allies sowed the seeds that would germinate into Nazi revenge and aggrandizement. And in carving up the Ottoman carcass into arbitrary spheres of influence, they would impose a perpetual curse on a dysfunctional and volatile Middle East.

The sparks that ignited this conflagration were two lethal point-blank bullets fired by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, on the morning of June 28, 1914, as they were traveling in a motorcade through the center of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia. Princip and his five co-conspirators -- one of whom had earlier thrown a pocket bomb at the royal procession -- were members of Young Bosnia, a radical patriotic organization linked to and supported by the Black Hand, a secret nationalist group committed to unifying all Serbs by violence. (Meyer, p. 6)

The Black Hand had provided Princip and his circle with their bombs and revolvers, trained them, and helped smuggle them across the border from independent Serbia into Bosnia. The Austrians rightfully alleged that Serbian officials had blessed the plot, and seized upon the assassination as a pretext to subdue their unruly and hostile neighbor, which had been fomenting civil unrest for a decade. Before acting, however, they needed assurance that Germany was firmly in their corner, in the likely event that Russia -- which was emotionally, ethnically, and strategically invested in the security of Serbia -- would backstop its partner with its massive army.

Flamboyant, erratic, blustering, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, was inclined to belligerence; even moreso were the men around him. Bound to Austria-Hungary by a thirty-five-year-old military alliance, encircled by the tightening noose of the three powers knotted against them, fearful of losing the expensive naval and land arms race they had been contesting since the turn of the century, they were willing to risk a continental war at what they considered the opportune moment. Meeting with an Austrian emissary on July 5 just prior to departing on a Baltic cruise, Wilhelm was emphatic that Austria-Hungary must "march into Serbia" with German backing even if it meant war with Russia; the famous "blank check" was reaffirmed the next day in writing by German chancellor Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg. (Stevenson, p. 13)

On July 23, the emboldened Austrians presented an ultimatum to Serbia. Although at least half of its demands were reasonable, the most objectionable called for direct Austrian involvement in Serbia's investigation of the assassination and related internal affairs, the acceptance of which would compromise Serbia's sovereignty. Two days later, it was duly rejected, although in the most conciliatory language.

By now Tsar Nicholas II and his Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov were convinced that Austria-Hungary was acting not independently but as a tool of Germany, that Germany was on the brink of launching a preventive war, and that Russia could protect itself only by acting forcefully and quickly. (Meyer, p. 53) Taking a momentous -- and disastrous -- step, they promulgated a Period Preparatory to War, or pre-mobilization, which entailed canceling leave, clearing frontier railway lines, and mustering 1.1 million troops in the four districts closest to Austria-Hungary. (Meyer, p. 54)

As tension mounted, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey proposed a four-power conference of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to defuse the crisis; it fell on deaf ears as Germany and Austria were adamant that Serbia not escape its crimes unscathed.

On July 28, Kaiser Wilhelm returned from his cruise, read Serbia's gentle response to the ultimatum, trumpeted it as a "capitulation of the most humiliating kind," and urged his ally to moderate its intransigent attitude. But it was too late. Only hours later Austria-Hungary initiated partial mobilization in the Balkans, declared war on Serbia, and began shelling the capital, Belgrade, from Bosnia.

The next day the momentum toward war seemed to hang in suspended animation. The two cousins, the Kaiser and the Tsar, exchanged telegrams, each appealing to the other to restrain himself and his advisers. If Russia would refrain from full mobilization and Austria would confine its occupation to Belgrade, just across the border, perhaps the firestorm could be averted.

The warriors would not be denied. All through the 30th, at the behest of the Russian general staff, Foreign Minister Sazonov implored the Tsar to authorize full mobilization, asserting that the Germans were similarly arming themselves, a brazen falsehood. Conscious of the magnitude of his decision, the Tsar protested: "Think of the responsibility you are asking me to take. Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their death!" (Meyer, p. 76) But in the end he gave the fateful order -- even though, tragically, "in no real sense had the security of Russia, with the biggest army in the world, been threatened." (Meyer, p. 78)

Germany now dispatched its own ultimatums, giving Russia twelve hours "to suspend any war measures against Austria-Hungary and ourselves," and France eighteen to promise neutrality, demanding as hostages the great fortresses of Verdun and Toul, too high a price to be considered seriously.

In an eleventh-hour flurry of telegrams, Kaiser Wilhelm reiterated the terms of his ultimatum. The Tsar replied, "So long as the negotiations with Austria on Serbia's account are taking place, my troops shall not take any provocative action." He said that he understood Russian mobilization might require Germany to mobilize as well, but it need not mean war. He asked Wilhelm "for the same guarantee from you as I gave you . . . [and to] continue negotiating for the benefit of our countries and the universal peace dear to all our hearts." (Meyer, pp. 84-85)

But an open-ended postponement of hostilities would give Russia and France an advantage that would grow as time passed. Only Russia could prevent war, Wilhelm's generals insisted, and only by terminating mobilization.

At midday on Saturday, August 1, the deadline for the double ultimatum passed without an answer from either Russia or France. The Berlin government informed St. Petersburg that its continued mobilization constituted a state of war between the two countries.

In Paris, Marshall Joseph Joffre exhorted the French Cabinet: "Every delay of twenty-four hours in calling up reservists means . . . a retardation of the concentration forces, that is, the initial abandonment of ten to twelve miles of territory for every day of delay." When the German ambassador asked the French premier for a response to the ultimatum, he was simply told, "France will act in accordance with her interests." At 4:00 PM France announced mobilization of its armed forces, followed by Germany thirty minutes later. (Marshall, p. 43)

Britain's motives for entering the fray went deeper than its mutual defense covenant with France. It could not ignore Germany's impending violation of Belgian neutrality, which it had pledged to defend. "But more than national honor was at stake. British strategy could not tolerate [the threat] of a strident and overarmed Germany solidly positioned on the Channel coast and master of its greatest port, Antwerp, and its largest industrial complex." (Marshall, p. 50) When Germany failed to comply with Britain's ultimatum to respect Belgium's independence and integrity, it presented the Cabinet a righteous cause and a smoking gun.

Foreign Secretary Grey made one last futile try for peace. On August 1, he passed word to the Kaiser through his ambassador in London that "if Germany would hold off, he would promise to keep France neutral." Clutching hard at the straw, the Kaiser directed his Chief of Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, to "march the whole army east." (Marshall, p. 50) Not only was it too late; it was impossible, irrational, and irresponsible, Moltke calmly explained -- to stop the momentum of this enormous force, "to call off the great wheeling movement that was the whole and only point of German mobilization and almost certainly Germany's sole hope of victory . . . to turn its back on sixty-two French divisions ready for action and equipped with their own carefully developed plans." (Meyer, p. 97)

On Sunday, August 2, an advance contingent of German cavalry rode into Luxembourg to seize its network of railways. That evening Germany demanded unobstructed passage for its troops through Belgium. King Albert refused, harboring the vain hope that Germany would reconsider rather than risk international condemnation. When two days later the defiant Germans resumed their march, the British, in the words of Grey, could not "not stand by and witness the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history," and declared war. Later he added a mordant postscript: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." (Marshall, (pp. 52-53)

The Belgians made a valiant defense at Liege, holding off the marauders for ten days before they overwhelmed the twelve forts surrounding the city. The Germans crossed the Meuse River and swept west and south in a massive flanking wave spearheaded on the far right by Alexander von Kluck's First Army followed in line by Karl von Bulow's Second Army.

Marshall Joffre was certain the Germans were advancing with a relatively small army. "His intelligence bureau had estimated that they would begin the war with sixty-eight combat-ready divisions in the west -- not seventy-eight infantry divisions, ten cavalry divisions, and fourteen brigades of territorial militia, as was actually the case." And it had incorrectly assumed that no newly-mobilized reservists would be fed into combat. (Meyer, pp. 140-141) The result of Joffre's overconfidence -- a series of attacks by his five armies from Upper Alsace on his right through the Ardennes Plateau in his center to the town of Chaerleroi on his left -- was a multiple disaster known thereafter as the Battle of Frontiers.

"In grotesque encounters the French were everywhere beaten," their generals throwing their infantry against the Germans whatever the circumstances and no matter how grisly the outcome. 'They did not try to advance in short rushes or to wiggle forward or to make a stealthy use of the ground in their approaches . . . They charged straight in, expecting by audacity [and their unconquerable spirit] to stampede the enemy." (Marshall, p. 73) But as a young captain named Charles de Gaulle would later write, "In a moment it is clear that all the courage in the world cannot prevail against gunfire."

By the end of the month, the French had suffered 260,000 casualties, including 75,000 killed (27,000 of whom died on one day, August 22), compared to 18,000 German deaths, a disparity that can be explained by a difference in tactics. (Meyer, p. 142) The Germans would wait below ground or behind barriers, mow down their attackers with deadly machine-gun fire, punish them in retreat with artillery, and then emerge from their holes in vigorous pursuit. (Meyer, p. 162)

They were not, however, immune from blunders of their own.

Kluck, irascible, rough-hewn, aggressive, and relentless, wanted to circle his First Army far right around not only the French but also the forward elements of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's First Corps, taking both in the flank and possibly destroying them. But for coordination purposes he had been placed under the command of the more cautious and conventional Bulow, who favored a direct approach.

Consequently, on August 23, in the town of Mons, Kluck encountered British forces head-on, where they were strongest instead of weakest; his troops were repeatedly "shot to pieces in a field of fire so devastating that many of them thought they were facing an army of machine guns." Two days later Smith-Dorrien held his ground at Le Cateau, a bigger, bloodier fight than the one at Mons, with 55,000 British holding off 140,000 Germans and narrowly escaping envelopment. By this time Joffre had already reported to his war minister that his "cult of the offensive" had failed and that his armies were turning south to establish fortified defensive positions. (Meyer, pp. 161-163)

"When the Allies began their Great Retreat, the Germans appeared closer to victory than they would ever be again." But their advance was taking a heavy toll. Kluck's men were now beyond their frontier railheads and were marching twenty miles a day in the sweltering heat, burdened by 10-lb. rifles and 60 lbs. of gear. They could sustain themselves with forage but not their horses, exacerbating their supply problems. The lack of a telegraph system and a dearth of wireless sets impaired critical communications. Their ranks were depleted and could not be replenished, as soldiers dropped from exhaustion or were killed or wounded. (Stevenson, p. 45)

Then Chief of Staff Moltke made several fateful -- if not catastrophic -- decisions. Goaded by subordinates proclaiming the war in the west was virtually won, he sent two corps to Antwerp, one to the French stronghold at Mauberge, and two to East Prussia, a severe reduction of 275,000 men. Meanwhile, Joffre was doing the opposite -- using his interior rail lines to transfer troops from his right to his left, bolstering his newly-formed Sixth Army for the defense of Paris, and bringing the number of divisions facing the German right wing to forty-one, up from seventen.

The great German lightning strike force that had obsessed the general who had conceived it, Alfred von Schlieffen, now found itself not only bone tired, short of supplies, and increasingly without food but also outnumbered. (Meyer, p. 193)

Moltke now flinched, and proceeded to compound his errors. Having received sketchy reports of strong resistance by forces swarming near Paris, on August 27 he advised Bulow and Kluck "that it may be necessary to abandon the southwestern direction of the advance and wheel south." The next day Kluck was ordered to stay not in line with Bulow but slightly behind him -- an adjustment which would require him to suspend his progress for a day or more, or even turn around. Kluck decided that by shifting to the southeast, away from Paris, he could comply with his instructions yet continue to press forward.

"With Moltke's concurrence, the whole concept was changed, and the plan the Germans had followed since Liege fell by the wayside . . . Herewith was abandoned the main idea of crossing the Seine west of Paris and taking that city, the hub of all communications arteries, the citadel of French resistance. Instead, the now partly-fortified capital, and its garrison, would be left to threaten the flank of Bulow's armies." (Marshall, pp. 79-80)

Suddenly, a veil was lifted as French intelligence -- intercepted radio messages, papers found on a German officer, aircraft reconnaissance -- revealed the inexplicable opportunity at hand. "Kluck's army was 'in the air,' its communications exposed. The gap between it and Bulow's yawned wide; it would not stay open long." (Marshall, pp. 85-86)

It took the fiery colonial veteran, General Joseph Gallieni, who had been coaxed out of retirement to organize the defense of Paris, to convince Joffre it was time to act. On September 6, he ordered General Michel Maunoury to move his Sixth Army against Kluck's dangling left wing. But events had outrun him. Twenty-four hours earlier Kluck had sent General Wilhelm von Gronau's Fourth Reserve Corps west to the River Ourcq to protect his flank; surprised by the Sixth Army advancing eastward, he inflicted heavy damage before calling for help and retiring six miles.

Kluck now realized that he was facing a serious threat from the west; overnight he marched his entire army back across the Marne to the Ourcq, but left himself dangerously off balance, with his weak wing too far forward, when the Sixth Army renewed its attack. "For the next two days, the two beasts locked horns in a death struggle. Giving and taking great blows, the raw, unorganized French began to bend against Kluck's hardened veterans." When Maunoury tried to get around Kluck's right and was met head-on by two German corps, Gallieni commandeered 1200 Paris taxicabs and rushed reinforcements to the front. (Marshall, pp. 89-90)

"Men battled over worthless ground, ignoring great prizes close at hand. Artillery was fired, often wastefully, because shells were available though reliable target information was not. Generals advanced their troops who might better have spared them, fearing to miss their moment of glory." (Marshal, pp. 87-88)

As the madness rose to a climax, the outcome hung "on whether any of the German armies in the east could crack the French line or, alternatively, whether the German First Army or the French Sixth Army could destroy its opponents. The Battle of the Marne became a series of crises following one after another until finally something broke down." (Meyer, p. 207)

Kluck remained confident of victory. Having withstood all the French could throw at him, on the 8th, he ordered an encircling attack from the north led by an infantry corps under General Ferdinand von Quast. That night, however, the French secured an important bridgehead that ended all possibility of closing the gap between his army and Bulow's, completely demoralizing the latter.

Moltke, encamped a hundred and seventy miles to the north in Luxembourg, was getting almost no reports from Kluck or Bulow, and was in fact on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He sent his chief of intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, a man equally ridden by fear and doubt, to the front, empowering him "to issue such orders as were necessary" to save the German army. (Marshall, p. 92)

Arriving at First Army headquarters, Hentsch told Kluck's Chief of Staff that the BEF was now north of the Marne, that the gap between Kluck and Bulow had widened to thirty miles, that Bulow was planning to withdraw, and that Kluck had no alternative but to retire as well. When Kluck returned and learned of Hentsch's visit and Bulow's impending retreat, he reluctantly acquiesced. He had been monitoring the progress of Quast's corps, which had smashed through the disintegrating French defenses. Nothing lay between it and Paris but thirty miles of open ground -- which Quast was now ordered to turn his back on. It was the final melancholy chapter in the gruesome tragedy of how Moltke and the Germans had repeatedly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. (Meyer, p. 212)

While the tide ebbed and flowed along the Marne, one thousand miles to the east the Germans stumbled into "the most dramatic and complete victory achieved by either side in more than four years of bloody struggle." (Meyer, p. 177)

The German Eighth Army -- undermanned at 135,000 men and deficient in heavy artillery, medical service, and field telephones -- had already been badly mauled by Pavel Rennankampf's First Russian Army at Stalluponen on August 17 and at Gumbinnen on August 20 when Commander Max von Prittwitz learned that the Second Russian Army under Alexander Samsonov was entering East Prussia from the south, bringing the total forces arrayed against him to 650,000. Fearing envelopment, Prittwitz called Moltke and told him he was now compelled to abandon East Prussia and withdraw behind the north-south line of the Vistula River.

Prittwitz's Chief of Staff was Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann, one of the war's foremost tacticians. Using a map and compass, Hoffmann showed his superior that Samsonov's army was already closer to the Vistula River than the Germans and that a clear escape was not possible. Together the two conceived a plan to attack the divided Russian armies separately, although Prittwitz overruled Hoffman in identifying Samsonov to the south as the optimal first target.

Meanwhile Moltke -- whom Prittwitz had failed to inform of his new strategy -- was having second thoughts about vacating East Prussia without a fight; he decided that a change in command was required. The choice was inspired: Erich Ludendorff, the hero of Liege, whom he ordered to join the Eighth army as Chief of Staff. Too young, too junior, too much the commoner to be designated commander -- that position was accorded the sixty-seven-year-old Paul von Hindenberg, called out of retirement because of his reputation for steadiness and knowledge of the terrain. (Meyer, p. 168)

When Ludendorff proposed attacking the two Russian armies before they could unite, Moltke approved. It was Hoffmann's plan exactly, and it was already in motion by the time Ludendorff arrived on the scene.

The great battle turned on two minor incidents -- which solved the German dilemma of how to leave its northern flank undefended against Rennankampf's army. On the body of a Russian officer the Germans discovered intelligence indicating that Samsonov -- having detected a minor tactical adjustment by a German infantry corps, which he misinterpreted as a retreat -- was moving west and north, further away from Rennankampf. The Germans also intercepted a radio message disclosing "exactly what direction Samsonov intended to take and what timetable he intended to follow. It stated also, not surprisingly, that he wanted Rennankampf to come forward to join him." (Meyer, p.170)

Hoffmann was an expert on the Russian army and knew that Rennankampf and Samsonov belonged to rival factions, disliked each other intensely, and would do little to assist one another. Risking all, the Germans posted only a single division of cavalry opposite Rennankampf and moved the rest of the Eighth Army west and south. Nine divisions were maneuvered into a wide arc sixty miles across with the center left intentionally weak.

Samsonov marched straight for the vise. On August 26, a jittery Ludendorff ordered his normally aggressive First Corps commander, Herman von Francois to attack, but Francois protested that his artillery, his ammunition, and many of his men had not yet arrived on the battlefield. Oddly enough, his failure to strike lured Samsonov further into the trap.

Feeling pressure on his left flank, Samsonov sped a staff officer to his North-West Front commander, General Yakov Zhilinski, suggesting he should perhaps veer westward to confront this worrisome enemy force. "I will not allow General Samsonov to play the coward," Zhilinski imperiously replied. "I insist that he continue the offensive." (Meyer, p. 174)

Zhilinski was fulfilling a promise he had made to the French two years earlier as chief of the Russian general staff; he had rushed his troops to the field in fifteen days -- without adequate food, weaponry, equipment, medical care, or communications. From his headquarters one-hundred-sixty miles to the rear, he thought he was masterminding a historic victory. (Meyer, p. 173)

On the 26th, two German corps with superior artillery collided with Samsonov's naked right flank and drove it back in confusion. The next morning Francois opened an artillery barrage that devastated Samsonov's left wing, and then sent his infantry forward into unexpectedly stiff resistance. Samsonov, incredibly, resumed the advance of his center, so aggressively, in fact, that Ludendorff was about to recall Francois's corps until Hindenburg calmly overruled him. (Meyer, p. 175)

At dawn on the 28th, Francois attacked again and discovered that the Russian left had evaporated; its troops had had enough and had fled en masse into the nearby woods. Francois swung around to the south and sealed off any hope for escape. "When a corps that had been stationed to the northeast in case Rennankampf showed up, reversed course, and marched toward Samsonov, the trap was complete." (Meyer, p. 175)

The net ensnared 90,000 Russian prisoners; another 150,000 were killed or wounded, compared to 37,000 German casualties. "Samsonov, saying he had failed the Tsar and could not go home, walked off alone into the woods and shot himself." (Meyer, p. 175)

Attempting to exploit his spectacular triumph, Ludendorff turned north to engage the malingering Rennankampf. In the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, fought September 5-13, Francois again penetrated the Russian left and worked way to the rear, but Rennankamp's center held, and he was able to retreat in good order. His pursuers encountered the usual problems of invading armies: exhaustion and outrunning their supplies. On September 25, the Russians counterattacked, ultimately driving the Germans back twenty-five miles to the Angerrap River, where they had commenced their campaign one month earlier.

On the same day that Samsonov's left collapsed, General Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf's Austro-Hungarian armies were suffering an even greater disaster -- on the killing fields of Galicia three hundred miles south. Even with an army of 500,000, the Austrians were outnumbered by their Russian opponents three to two. For two weeks they advanced in blazing heat across featureless plains with little effective cavalry reconnaissance on either side, blundering into superior Russian artillery in suicidal frontal attacks. When the bloodshed was over, they had lost 100,000 killed, 200,000 wounded, and 100,000 captured (compared to 250,000 Russian casualties), the cream of their competent junior military leaders, and two hundred miles of territory. (Stevenson, p.58)

Austria-Hungary would no longer be able to fight the Russians without German help.

On the Western Front, the year would culminate in a hellish nightmare that would haunt the landscape until the Armistice -- the month of slaughter known as the first Battle of Ypres. When the great armies converged on this quiet Belgian center of religion and cloth manufacturing, the Allies determined that it could not be defended from trenches. The higher ground to the east became the battlement, a pregnant bulge soon christened the Ypres salient. "Within this narrow compass through four years, more than one million human beings were to suffer death and wounds," at triple the rate of other sectors. (Marshall, p. 134)

Replacing the embattled Moltke, General Erich von Falkenhayn was determined to regain the offensive. He decided to extend the German front west along the Somme River all the way to the Atlantic, which would give him control of northern France and the key Channel ports of Calais and Boulogne; Ypres was the last obstacle in his path.

After ten days of round-the-clock shelling, Antwerp fell to the Germans on October 6, although 60,000 Belgian troops under Prince Albert managed to escape. They hurried west until they were almost in France and arranged themselves in a defensive line north of Ypres behind the barrier formed by the Yser River as it flows to the sea. There they awaited the arrival of the French Second Army -- now commanded by Ferdinand Foch -- racing to the sea from the south and Sir John French's British Expeditionary Force, whose goal, thrusting eastward, was Brussels.

Once again the Germans subjected the Belgians to murderous shellfire, killing or wounding over one-third of them. At Foch's suggestion, Albert ordered the sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea opened. A belt of water two miles wide and shoulder high flooded the Germans crossing the Yser and saved the Belgian army. (Marshall, p. 133)

"The next German drive opened October 20, raged ten days, and would not spend its fury until October 31, just as the British neared the breaking point." (Marshall, p. 135) "Along this part of the line there were no dikes to be opened, so that the opposing forces could be separated and their misery brought to an end. The fighting continued day and night, the two sides taking turns on the offensive, and as the casualties mounted companies were reduced to the size of platoons and the tattered remnants of units were mixed together helter-skelter." (Meyer, p. 228)

"Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides and horror after horror." The Germans persisted in attacking in mass, charging straight into bunched machine guns and volleying rifles. "Losses were no less shocking on the other side. When Scotland's Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was taken out of action, only about thirty men remained of the thousand-plus who had come to France at the start of the war." (Meyer, p. 229)

"Somehow, the Germans and British launched simultaneous attacks on October 30, and again they ran head-on into each other in a struggle in which the losses were almost unsupportable on both sides." Two hundred fifty men of the Second Worchester Regiment, with nothing between them and Ypres but open countryside, fixed bayonets and drove off twelve hundred confused German soldiers who thought they were the vanguard of a powerful force. (Meyer, p. 230)

"That night Falkenhayn called a halt. He had no idea that the BEF was on the brink of defeat -- out of reserves, nearly out of ammunition, at the limits of endurance. He still thought that a breakthrough was possible, but he wanted to gather more trained and experienced troops before trying again." (Meyer, p. 230)

"What he got was not victory but another series of inconclusive battles all along the ridges outside Ypres." The town of Lombartzyde changed hands seven times. As the Germans managed to inch forward and tighten their grip on the salient, Foch repeatedly had to rebuff French and British generals who suggested that a retreat might be in order. (Meyer, pp. 232-233)

"All that saved the British hold on Ypres, beyond mortal valor, was the extraordinary defensive strength of the salient, a maze of wood plots, dikes, ditches, canals," houses, and walls, which could be stormed by the enemy only at a heavy cost. (Marshall, p. 137)

The German offensive crested on November 11. Their most elite regiment, the First Guards led by the Kaiser's son, uncovered a clear path to Ypres, but it too was spooked -- this time by a ragtag assortment of cooks, clerks, engineers, and staff officers. (Meyer, p. 233)

The fighting finally ended on November 22, when the incessant rain turned to snow, the mud froze, and the impossibility of achieving anything became too obvious to be ignored. The British had taken 58,000 casualties, the French 50,000, the Belgians 20,000, and the Germans 130,000. Even the old lion, British War Minister Lord Kitchener, was horrified. 'This isn't war," he said. (Marshall, p. 138)

By whatever name, the unprecedented carnage collaborated with the coming of winter to drive the contending forces to ground. Soon opposing trench systems, fitted with deep artillery-proof dugouts where soldiers existed like rodents, extended from the Alps to the North Sea. Intermittently, over the next four years, they would emerge from their warrens in supreme efforts to break the deadlock -- with little to show for thousands of lives sacrificed on the altars of national honor, stubborn generalship, and political self-righteousness.

REFERENCES

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Love and Rebellion 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Marshall, S. L. A. World War I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914 t0 1918. New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.

Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Still Here

No one knows what month or even what year Schewel Furniture Company was founded, even though it will celebrate a 115th Anniversary in May 2012.

Forty years ago, when I hardly knew the difference between a sofa and a loveseat and a dresser and a chest, this annual commemoration was a genuine door-buster -- not because anyone really cared about "the good old days" (Don't Grand Openings draw bigger crowds?) but because the company invested in it an aura of inevitability and import.

Back then the company's primary advertising consisted largely of primitive black-on-white newspaper displays and ponderous radio commercials. Once a year it would produce what is commonly known as a circular, a four-page broadsheet blanketed with specially-purchased, bargain-priced decorative delights lavishly rendered in monochromatic line drawings with red accents (as compared to today's digital perfections) which my father Bert would flourish like a winning lottery ticket as soon as the first samples arrived hot off some distant press.

Perhaps he or his father Ben or his uncle Abe plucked the May flower from the garden calendar because it signaled a seasonal warming trend that might awaken eager shoppers from months of hibernation or because it synchronized with the premiere of tasty new appetizers from the April Furniture Market (although July, October, and January offered their own flashy menus). Regardless of the rationale, the signature Anniversary Sale couldn't stand the test of time, and gradually surrendered its preeminence to a barrage of round-the-clock, deep-discount, high-impact promotions.

As for the purported year of origin, 1897, it marks the opening of a small furniture store on Twelfth Street between Main and Church in Downtown Lynchburg by my great-grandfather, Elias Schewel -- and conveniently coincides with the founding of the city's Jewish congregation, still existent today, where Elias was employed as part-time rabbi, a serendipitous convergence of dates which makes me somewhat suspicious as to their reliability, at least of the former.

Elias was a native of Latvia, and came to America in 1889, riding the massive wave of immigration that deposited two million of his coreligionists upon its shores between 1880 and 1920.

Always considered outcasts because of their quirky beliefs and stubborn independence, they were fleeing the iron fist of the Russian Czar, who confined them to barren farmlands, restricted their choice of occupations, coerced them into abandoning their faith and converting to Christianity, and turned a blind eye to the riots or pogroms which threatened their lives and property. Perhaps his most odious policy was to draft Jewish men into his army for terms that might last thirty years.

Elias's given surname was Heend. According to legend, upon disembarking at his port of entry, Baltimore, Maryland, he regurgitated the only word he knew, Schievel, which was the name of his American sponsor or patron; a frazzled bureaucrat wrote down "Schewel." Most likely, though, Elias was already a "Schievel," having been adopted by a select widow from his hometown by arrangement with his parents, since the only sons of such widows were exempt from the military.

Apparently Elias publicized his reputation as a promising rabbinical student. At a synagogue in Baltimore he met a visitor from Lynchburg who persuaded him to move there as a teacher and minister for the embryonic Jewish community. The salary was a pittance, and to enhance it he began peddling door-to-door, first with a pack on his back, and later, when he could afford to buy them, from a horse and buggy, which enabled him to broaden his product line from pots and pans to split-bottomed chairs.

Within a year Elias had saved enough money to book passage for his wife and four children; the fertile soil of Central Virginia yielded five more in rapid succession, all of whom would survive to adulthood except the youngest, a daughter who died in the flu epidemic of 1918.

Elias Schewel's situation was typical of Jewish immigrants. Lacking capital, education, and professional training, many opened retail stores to support themselves. At one time there were at least forty Jewish-owned businesses on Lynchburg's Main Street; today there are two.

Elias was a shrewd merchant. Since much of the furniture at the turn of the century was manufactured in the Midwest, he hoisted the sign "Chicago Furniture Bargain House" over his shop, implying a frugal elimination of the middle man and foreshadowing the decades-later practice of many dealers who simply substituted High Point, North Carolina, as their source. Rumor has it he seized an inspired advantage over his competitors by allowing his customers to pay for their purchases over a period of time, in weekly or monthly installments, although how he managed to forestall his own creditors remains an enigma. As they grew taller and stronger, he enlisted his progeny to help in the store, thus laying the groundwork for succession -- and retirement.

In this case the best-laid plans came to fruition. Sometime around 1917, the year the enterprise was incorporated, Elias sold it to his second oldest son Abe, who subsequently recruited his two younger brothers, Ben, a traveling salesman, and Ike, recently returned from the European war theater, as partners. Elias retired to Chicago with his second wife (his first had died in 1915) to re-immerse himself in the Torah and Talmud and debate their finer points with a host of Biblical scholars.

Abe Schewel, grinning through his tightly-clenched pipe stem, was a natural-born politician, serving several terms on Lynchburg's City Council. He liked to travel, had many friends and acquaintances throughout the state, and pioneered the company's modest expansion, which he placed in the capable hands of a redheaded, freckle-faced youth, W. E. Wilburn, whom he lured off the assembly line of the Lane Company. The first satellite was launched in Altavista in 1930, followed by Harrisonburg in 1931, Lexington in 1933, Danville in 1934, Luray in 1941, and Winchester in 1950.

By this time the sons of Abe, Ben, and Ike -- Elliot, Bert, and Henry, all college graduates, all war veterans -- had joined the firm. Business was good, fueled by a pent-up demand as former GI's landed in a burgeoning job market, married their sweethearts, bought houses and automobiles, and ignited the baby boom. After selecting an attractive three-room group, a young couple asked if they could add a refrigerator, probably on credit; within days appliances and electronics were on display, since Mr. Ben hated to lose a sale.

By 1953 or 1954, the Twelfth Street location was bursting at the seams. The owners purchased a spacious four-story former J. C. Penney building with an attached parking lot one block west at Eleventh and Main and relocated their flagship store and headquarters.

Imagine the dynamics of three overbearing brothers and their equally aggressive sons patrolling a territory not broad enough for responsibilities to be delineated nor all egos to be massaged. Tempers flared, and during one altercation one family member attacked another with the closest weapon at hand, a vacuum cleaner rod. Incensed, insulted, and irreconcilable, Ike and Henry sold their interests to the other four -- who mirrored the geopolitics of the Cold War by settling into a peaceful coexistence.

The company enjoyed steady internal growth into the late sixties, when it suddenly turned more ambitious -- opening stores in South Hill, Front Royal, Culpeper, Bedford, Amherst, and Reidsville, North Carolina, between 1966 and 1973. Abe and Ben Schewel died in 1968 and 1969. Elliot Schewel followed his father into the political arena, winning election first to City Council and in 1980 to the Virginia State Senate, where he became a fixture for sixteen years -- and left his cousin at the helm, where he had long aspired to be. Bert surveyed the retail landscape, observed how the chain store formula was evolving, hired advertising and credit experts, delegated regional oversight to two key managers, and ramped up the volume.

Although my father, emulating wise old Elias, had put me to work in the Lynchburg store during the Christmas and summer breaks (once I outgrew sleepover camp), I always regarded my temperament as too cerebral and introverted for the rigorous effusiveness required of retailing. An English major graduate of Washington and Lee University, I received a fellowship to pursue a masters degree at Columbia and was preparing to matriculate in the fall of 1969 when I received the dreaded notice to report for a draft physical.

It was the height of the bitterly divisive Vietnam War; like many of my peers I questioned whether my interests -- and the nation's -- were best served by further feeding the quagmire. Abandoning my fellowship, I snagged a deferment teaching English at Appomattox High School where the principal's desperation overcame my lack of certification.

Facing thirty unruly adolescents five hours a day was a daunting experience; soon I was harboring doubts as to whether I could persevere long enough to evade battlefields which I was beginning to think might be less violent than these classrooms. I threw up the white flag, and enlisted in the Naval Reserve -- sentencing myself to one year of local meetings followed by two years of active duty.

At that point, good fortune intervened -- three times. The Selective Service instituted a lottery, and I drew a birthday number that effectively eliminated me from the draft -- barring a World War. My Commanding Officer informed me that the Navy's ships were full to the brim and that, as a college graduate, I was an overqualified enlisted man; he offered me a voluntary discharge -- which I graciously accepted. Then, seeking productive non-teaching employment, I went to work for Schewels -- temporarily.

From a more mature perspective I discovered a vocation that was challenging, multifaceted, novel, transforming, addictive, and fun. As my father -- astute, indulgent, visionary -- granted me greater authority and responsibility, I looked for and found,ways to further the company's growth and progress.

The next fifteen years -- 1971 to 1986 -- witnessed not only the addition of six stores -- bringing the total count to nineteen -- but also the implementation of centralized merchandising, purchasing, and advertising, and the installation of a data processing system designed first to automate inventory and later accounts receivable -- all of which, now taken for granted, was lengthy, costly, painful, frustrating, and disruptive.

Nineteen-eighty-six was a watershed year for the company. It opened three stores -- Roanoke, Radford (which was later moved to Christiansburg), and Waynesboro. It built a 75,000 (later expanded to 100,000) square foot six-level racked distribution center, enabling it to consolidate inventory from three regional warehouses. Posting record sales and profits, it solicited a lucrative recapitalization proposal from a New York City investment firm -- in other words, a leveraged buyout.

By this time, my brother Jack, ten years my junior, had joined my father and me in active management -- my sister Donna Clark would make it a holy triumvirate before long -- while Elliot Schewel had no next generation members involved. He and his brother and sister -- all in their sixties -- were understandably desirous of converting their fifty per cent ownership to more liquid assets -- for the right price. In other words, they wanted their money.

After several months of contentious negotiations, my father, my siblings and I decided to reject selling out to a third party -- forfeiting our share of the proceeds -- and instead to redeem our partners' stock for an amount in excess of twice its book value; for the first time in its history, the company (and its new sole owners) woke up one morning in the same uncomfortable condition as most of corporate America, the federal government, and millions of imperturbable homeowners: buried under a mountain of debt. My father's unwavering faith in a rosy future was hardly reassuring, since he had recently been diagnosed with the terminal cancer that would kill him in twenty-four months.

His optimism was justified. Buoyed by a vibrant economy and the housing boom (or bubble), for two decades the company prospered, tripling its revenues and adding twenty-eight stores, including six acquired when the billion dollar chain Heilig-Myers shuttered its doors, a victim of too rapid expansion, too much borrowing, and too many slow-paying customers.

Some of the growth can be attributed to significant upgrades in several established markets. Recognizing that some debt can be useful, the owners financed the construction of handsome new 30,000 square foot buildings in Lynchburg, Winchester, Culpeper, Harrisonburg, Emporia, Roanoke Rapids, Roanoke, Henderson, and Martinsburg, and the purchase and renovation of a former Wal-Mart in Danville.

Disaster was narrowly averted in September 2005 when a disgruntled employee set two sofas ablaze in the Distribution Center. A prompt response by the local fire department and the expedient deployment of the sprinkler system contained the fire, although the entire contents was deemed unsaleable due to smoke damage. The insurance carrier made full restitution, and a yeoman effort by buyers, suppliers, clean-up crews, truckers, and inside workers had merchandise restocked and flowing to stores and customers in three weeks.

The Great Recession struck the company with a vengeance. From their peak in 2006, sales declined a cumulative 18% over the next three years, and profits 50%, a steady, confounding, demoralizing erosion that gnawed at one's self-confidence and tested his resolve. Retrenchment and cost control replaced expansion and investment, especially since the persistent bleeding of the one new store opened during this period, in 2009, has yet to be stanched.

Finally, after each feeble protest that it couldn't get any worse proved to be mere wishful thinking, the interminable downhill skid hit bottom. Sales rebounded 3.6% in 2010 and a slim 1% in 2011, and while 2012 seems to be showing signs of real life, the steadfast pessimist constantly reminds himself that furniture is the most easily postponed of the fickle consumer's wants and needs.

A silver lining in this lingering cloud of doom is that, after twenty-five years of paying interest and nibbling away at the principal, the company was able to retire 100% of its debt. Counterintuitively, in an environment of declining revenues, its accounts receivable generated a healthy cash flow as customers were paying down their balances faster than others were adding on with new purchases.

Is there any moral to be gleaned from this historical fable, other than to declare that after 115 years of inspiration, expansion, transition, reinvention, and contraction, the company is still here, still independent, still family-owned, and still profitable? Are there any special characteristics of this business or personality traits of these owners that might be helpful in explicating this remarkable longevity?

Consider first the nature of the product. While mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy have managed to monopolize almost every consumer category -- from food and clothing to housewares and electronics -- and steamroll any retailers standing in their way, home furnishings has remained stubbornly resistant to their encroachment. For example, Sears, Costco, and J. C. Penney briefly flirted with free-standing furniture stores, but ended the experiment when they proved to be ill-suited to their modus operandi.

Furniture manufacturing -- actually the proper term these days is supply, since most is made overseas, in China,Vietnam, and Malaysia -- is, and has always been, a fragmented cottage industry. With national advertising non-existent and brand recognition, except at the very high-end, a misnomer, consumers have little basis upon which to judge quality or to make buying decisions. Critical to the process are a trained salesperson and the establishment of a personal relationship, in contrast to the discount/department store's simplistic self-service format.

Handling, storing, and moving heavy, bulky furniture demand specialized logistics, which must be designed to accommodate extensive warehousing and to facilitate assembly, inspection, preparation, and home delivery. Such systems are costly, inefficient, and incompatible with those employed by mass merchandisers.

Finally, home furnishings represents a major purchase for which many consumers do not have the cash on hand nor the credit card capability. Financing -- whether by the actual seller or an outside source -- must be arranged, which often requires an interview with a trained credit counselor, although much of the processing is now conducted online.

For years self-financing by furniture retailers was quite commonplace, especially in the south where minorities lacked access to credit. As credit became more available, even to marginal borrowers, most abandoned the practice due to increased collection costs and to free up their capital.

For Schewels, financing its customer accounts is both a profit center and a marketing tool -- since it calculates that at least half of them would not qualify with a third-party provider. Many still hand deliver their payments to the store where they may be enticed to make another purchase, perhaps a television, home appliance, or riding lawn mower; non-furniture items still compose twenty per cent of the company's volume despite widespread price competition. Included among 400,000 active accounts, they will receive at least one mail piece a month inviting them to take advantage of an upcoming promotion.

By managing its receivables to maximize cash flow and minimize losses, by refusing to compromise its underwriting standards, by retaining professionals in every store to evaluate, advise, and collect from its customers, the company has been able to thrive as a subprime lender even during the economic downturn.

While the adage that a business must grow in order to survive is hardly disputable, the rate of that growth is a function of the owners' ambition, acumen, and appetite for risk. Twenty years ago a friend of mine inherited a small furniture chain from his father and uncle, bought another larger than his, jettisoned the credit operation, and embarked on a meteoric journey; today his revenues are ten times Schewels'.

In the latter's case, each generation has adhered to the cautionary philosophy of its forebears. Preferring to finance the company's growth internally rather than with borrowed capital, the owners were content to add stores at a leisurely pace and always in small towns where start-up costs were minimal. They had only to rent a building, hire a couple of salesmen, buy a pick-up truck, transfer some excess inventory, and run a few newspaper ads.

They were conservative in another respect. Despite carrying millions of dollars of customer receivables and retained earnings on their books, an innate aversion to debt -- the only way any of it could be converted to cash -- deterred them from ever extracting any significant amount -- until it became incumbent upon one to buy out another. They compensated themselves sufficiently to maintain a comfortable standard of living, and plowed the remaining profits back into the business. A strong balance sheet enabled them to withstand the brutal oscillations of the economic cycle.

The success of any business depends on the dedication, ingenuity, and industriousness of its employees -- and on nurturing within each and every one a sense of pride and accomplishment. From their first tentative forays into dispersed markets, the company's owners grasped this concept, and, whether by accident or design, intuitively fostered a universal culture of entrepreneurship.

Even today, with technological security and sophisticated checks-and-balances to monitor free-flowing inventory and cash, people still manage to steal, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, although most eventually get too greedy -- and get caught. Imagine the trust it took seventy-five years ago -- and even into the 1980's -- when such controls were inconceivable, for Abe or Ben Schewel to hand over the keys to a store a hundred miles away, which he might come to inspect once every six months. Managers were owners in a true sense of the word -- responsible for their buying, advertising, display, collections, hiring, firing, sales, and profits.

A proliferation of storefronts and the attendant complexities of operation inevitably necessitated the centralization of many of those functions. But the level of trust persists, defining the culture and motivating absentee owners and key personnel to innovate, perform, and produce results. Managers now have more time to focus on sales, service, and building the team that will make them successful. In every corporate department -- buying, distribution, credit, advertising, human resources -- leaders are encouraged to think creatively and act independently.

Like ebullient winemakers, particularly gratifying to the owners is the fermentation process -- watching eager foot soldiers from modest backgrounds with limited education when given an opportunity exceed all expectations, realize their hidden potential, and explode from spark to superstar. Every day the message is reiterated: common sense, a willingness to apply oneself, and communication skills trump degrees and IQ.

The mysteries of human nature dictated that the personalities and leadership styles of each generation would be as variable as the upholstery fabrics they were purveying. I am more introspective and analytical than my impulsive and extroverted father, who acted at times as a calming influence on his own. Ben and Abe Schewel were salesmen to the core, and never stopped selling, even when they could afford to hire surrogates; as managers, their successors had the luxury of delegating these duties, and could concentrate in areas more to their liking: merchandising, advertising, real estate. But, regardless of their differences, all owners shared one important trait: an abiding passion for their work.

Undoubtedly, it's easier to be passionate about one's business when he reaps the benefits, both psychological and monetary, from its success. Conversely, one could argue that the persistence of that business through four generations derives to some extent from an acute emotional attachment that may either erupt spontaneously or pass from one to another almost by osmosis. Too obsessive, too irrational, too tinged with romanticism to be attributed solely to material considerations -- as evidenced by the owners' continual rejection of the tempting choice to sell out -- it is what compels them to haunt the premises sixty hours a week, to brood over sales hourly, to exult or despair over every minor victory or setback.

The owners were also deeply passionate about their community. Liberated from the prejudices and oppression of their country of origin, they were free to exercise their talents, apply their intelligence, enjoy the fruits of their labor, and appreciate the bountiful amenities of the interesting spot where fate had landed them -- a pleasant climate, excellent schools, seamless assimilation, abundant recreational and cultural facilities, and generous, caring citizens. And once having attained the requisite stature and acquired the wherewithal, they embraced an obligation to share their prosperity with those who had enabled it and to improve the condition of their fellow man through volunteerism, philanthropy, and public service.

Nothing lasts forever; soon the sun may set on family ownership of Schewel Furniture Company. My three children have their own passions, and none includes furniture. A nephew has expressed an interest, but he's still in college, and who knows if this is a suitor that will touch his heart, when so many glamorous alternatives beckon.

I hope he does -- for sentimentality, for tradition, for all the company's loyal employees and customers, and for his own personal satisfaction, which, of course, is the only reason that matters. Should the next generation indeed decide to enter this business, he will encounter unprecedented challenges -- and unlimited opportunities.

He will have to evaluate the company's marketing strategies and determine if they are still relevant: operating in small towns and cities, which might require leapfrogging to non-contiguous areas; carrying a diverse product line in the face of relentless competition; maintaining a costly and capital-intensive credit department. He must find creative ways to make his store heard amidst all the noise emanating from mass merchandisers, power retailers, restaurants, and the tourist industry. He must control escalating insurance, occupancy, and transportation costs. He must work to deliver his product more efficiently to his customer. He must master technology and the internet, and adapt to the ever-accelerating pace of change. He must resist the certitude and complacency inherent in proprietorship, and keep his mind open to new ideas.

If he can do that, the company's next fifty years will be as exhilarating, as rewarding, as fruitful, and as memorable as its first one hundred.

REFERENCES

Schewel, Elliot. "Elias Schewel." Lynch's Ferry, Spring/Summer 2009: 36-39.

Oral History

The past is obdurate -- obstinate, unyielding, intransigent -- reflects Maine schoolteacher Jake Appling in Stephen King's engrossing new novel 11/22/63 each time he emerges from the pantry of Al Templeton's diner and finds himself transported to a 1958 world of soda shops, tail-finned automobiles, and sock hops. Knowledge of the future is no guarantee of one's ability to alter events -- even to produce a more desirable outcome, such as preventing a drunken man's brutal slaying of his wife and three children or the cold-blooded assassination of the nation's thirty-fifth president.

In fact, concludes Jake, after his initial attempt to set things right, to spare the lives of the Dunning family, as the cohort of individuals ultimately impacted by his idealistic intrigues expands, so proportionately do the obstacles strewn in his path seem to multiply.

The problem -- the sobering reality that shadows Jake like the ubiquitous cigarette smoke of a bygone era before staggering him with a hacking cough -- is that "life turns on a dime." Every act has a consequence, no matter how insignificant it might appear -- even a butterfly flapping its wings on some distant continent. While time travel is a fantasy -- in spite of this kingly tour de force, which almost convinces us otherwise as the master weaves his mesmerizing and artful tale -- the labyrinthine confluences that have brought each of us to the present are not.

For example, my father Bert was adopted by his aunt, Rae Schewel and her husband Ben at the age of two when his birth mother was abandoned by his father and left without resources. Pride and self-delusion deterred his surrogate parents from ever disclosing his origins, and it wasn't until he enlisted in the Air Force upon graduating from college that he learned he had been born in St. Louis and that he had an older sister who had grown up in an orphanage.

He met my mother Helene at the home of one of his Lynchburg aunts -- Lily Schewel -- a kindred spirit whom he persuaded to host a mixer for him and all the Jewish girls enrolled at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Helene was in her second year there, having transferred from Carnegie Technical College in Pittsburgh at the behest of a cousin-in-law.

Lily was rotund, jovial, effusive, and apparently more inclined to entertaining than Rae, which was surprising since the latter was surely determined that her son meet and marry a nice Jewish girl. While Lily's culinary expertise paled in comparison to Rae's, she could call upon the services of her "help" -- to use the current vernacular -- Eloise.

Out of four eligible candidates, only two showed up: my mother and her roommate, Elaine.

"Don't get too excited. I think he's already taken," said Elaine, having heard whispers that Bert was engaged to a Savannah belle, Bobbie, whom he had squired while working in a furniture store there, prepping for immersion into the family business.

Some weeks later Elaine invited her current beau to Lynchburg to escort her to a fancy holiday soiree and instructed him to bring a companion for Helene. When the friend backed out at the last minute, Elaine implored Helene to call Bert, whose impending marriage must have been merely a rumor, as he had been sighted at a dance in the arms of another Macon coed, Patsy.

"I've never asked a boy out and I'm not going to do it now," said Helene, hands on hips, valiantly asserting her sense of propriety. "You have to," insisted Elaine. "Otherwise I'll be stuck alone with my date." She dragged Helene to the pay phone adjacent to their dorm room -- life turns on a dime -- and strong-armed her into dialing the number.

Oral history doesn't reveal if it was love at second sight, but the subsequent courtship was as swift and decisive as the proverbial whirlwind; within a year, the two were married and planning to settle in at the Columns. Helene had every good intention of ambling across the Avenue to Randolph-Macon to complete her degree, until Bert called her one day while she was visiting her parents in Pennsylvania and informed her that the starter Cape Cod he had just purchased on Greenway Court was probably too far for a pedestrian commute.

The perspicuous Mr. King also tells us that the past harmonizes. Twenty-four years later I signed a contract for a trim split-level abode on Club Drive while my first wife Betty was similarly absent.

"What do you think attracted him to you -- besides your incandescent charm, stunning good looks, and smoldering sex appeal?" I asked my mother. "I was a good dancer," she says, "and he liked to dance."

With two fractured marriages in my rear-view mirror, I profess the utmost admiration for those couples for whom "till death do us part" is no hollow slogan, including my parents, whose fifty-three year union was a more a testament to perseverance than patience -- at least from the perspective of an innocent bystander rudely exposed to overheated shouting matches. My father had a volatile temper that could erupt like a thundercloud -- and just as quickly subside -- while my mother was no shrinking violet, having endured a childhood dysfunctional enough to elicit this tribute from one of her aunts: "You are strong like your father."

Her father, Jack Parish, a handsome man with heavy jowls and a gentle smile, may have been strong, but in other respects he was, according to his brother Abe who spied him hanging out at the pool hall, "a poor total loss." Jack's first retail men's store in Altoona, Pennsylvania, folded in 1929, when my mother was four. Abe, a successful overall manufacturer, set him up in business again, promising to hand over complete ownership in good time. Three years later, seeing that Jack was still just drawing a salary, two brothers-in-law, Hyman and Iz Brody, proprietors of their own thriving department store in Indiana, Pennsylvania, packed Jack off to nearby Kittanning and agreed to guarantee his credit for yet another "Parish Men's Shop."

Jack barely made a living. Probably his heart wasn't in retailing. His true passion was baseball, at which he was apparently proficient enough to star on a semi-professional team and garner a minor league contract offer. When his bearded Orthodox father forbade him from accepting it -- playing (or working) on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, was heresy -- Jack found good use for the manual dexterity that had enabled him to scoop up ground balls and smash line drives by altering his customers' suits.

Could Jack have exaggerated his athletic prowess? A World War I veteran, he was fond of brandishing a rusty sword he had swiped from a fallen enemy soldier during the ferocious Battle of Argonne Forest -- a fanciful tale, my mother learned years later. Jack had fallen ill shortly after making landfall, and had spent the duration of his tour of duty confined to a hospital far from the front lines.

Years of poor hygiene caught up with Jack suddenly and sadly at the age of sixty-five. He went to a traveling dentist to have thirteen teeth pulled, was administered a heavy dose of sodium pentathol, suffered a presumed heart attack while unconscious, and, turning blue, grievously expired -- pure 1950's Alfred Hitchcock sensationalism. My parents were vacationing in Mexico -- courtesy of General Electric Appliance Company -- when they received the appalling news.

Helene's mother, Rae Parish -- stout, buxom, always a little unsteady, but soft-spoken and kind, at least to her grandchildren -- was psychologically fragile, and her husband's futility most likely pushed her into manic depression. She suffered two nervous breakdowns in the early years of her marriage, the first coinciding with Jack's first store closing and the second with the family's relocation from Altoona to Kittanning. Although this was generation when couples clung together in spite of discord, disillusion, and mutual disgust, she considered leaving Jack, but, after consulting with her adolescent daughter, decided that he lacked a support system and would be devastated by a divorce.

Her parents' emotional and financial turmoil, while traumatic and deep-seated -- she remembers so much eighty years later -- were like an anvil of adversity for Helene, fashioning a character resilient and flinty. She loved her Curtain Elementary School and piano teacher in Altoona, from which she was summarily uprooted when her mother was initially institutionalized and farmed out to her Aunt Fanny and Uncle Max Finkelstein in Greensburg; it was a year of torment.

Her cousin Sara Louise showed her how to write her name in script -- it wasn't taught at Curtain until the fourth grade -- but that didn't help her with the rest of her schoolwork nor enable her to escape the wrath of the "horrible teacher" who humiliated her in front of the class by scolding: "You wrote your name, stupid."

After a brief respite back in Altoona, Jack's new venture took her to Kittanning, another disappointment. "My parents didn't give a shit where I went," says Helene, in an uncharacteristic burst of profanity. This time it was a two-room amalgamation of eight grades -- four on either side of a hallway. A better school was a couple of miles away across a bridge, where she could have transferred had she not been daunted by the long trek home for lunch. "Why didn't anyone think of packing my lunch?" she asks rhetorically.

In Kittanning she hopscotched from one residence to another, from the Applewood Development to Water Street to North McCain Street to Locust Street, as the family chased upward mobility or had a rental property sold out from under them. When Rae's father, Pa Brody, dangled a carrot of $5000 for her to build a house of her own, she consulted again with Helene, eleven at the time, and then spurned the offer, stubborn pride, in retrospect, trumping common sense.

If she was precocious enough to advise her mother on such serious matters, is it not surprising that she considered herself old enough to appropriate her parents' car for underage joyrides -- prompting one of Kittanning's finest to observe, five years later when she became legal, how well she drove for someone who had her license for only two months?

The past harmonizes. Helene had a cousin, Burton Parish, who like Bert Schewel was adopted by his aunt. Both Helene and Bert had grandfathers, Pa Brody and Pa Schewel, who were widowed and subsequently remarried. All nine of Pa Schewel's children were borne of his first wife. Pa Brody fathered three of his eight by his second wife, Dora, a classic evil stepmother, whom the first five (which included Helene's mother Rae) branded "the old lady."

Both Helene and Bert were only children; their grandfathers' progeny yielded a plethora of first cousins who served as surrogate siblings. None of Helene's lived with her in Kittanning, yet she forged lasting bonds with the Brodys of Indiana, Donald, Milton, Leonard, Morton, and Bobby, sons of Hyman and Iz; Barbara and Buddy Silverman of Newcastle, children of Aunt Rose; and Sara Louise and Buzzy Finkelstein, with whom she spent that "terrible year" in Greensburg. I met them all, and some of their children, for the first and, for most, the only time at my Bar Mitzvah fifty years ago.

She was probably closest to Sara Louise, who with her big blue eyes and perfect nose was, she says, "the most beautiful girl I ever laid eyes on." Helene thought she would be on "easy street' when she married Lou Rose, whose father owned a chain of elite ladies' clothing stores called The Bon Ton. She received the shock of her life -- that is until all three of her children would one day deliver the same joyless tidings -- when she called Aunt Fanny years later and Sara Louise answered the phone with the stunning announcement "I just left my husband." It seemed that Lou's trips with his female buyer had progressed (or regressed) from business to pleasure.

Sara Louise's brother Herbert, nicknamed Buzzy, was eleven days older than Helene, and, "Boy, did he lord it over me," she says. A "real devil," he teased her mercilessly, ignoring her pleas to "be nice." Remembered as a condom salesman, he died in his early fifties, a victim of mental instability and drug abuse.

His mother Fanny -- a more harsh, stocky, infallible, and intimidating version of her sister Rae -- was the matriarch, "the boss," of the Brody family. When Jack Parish died, she took command, instructing helpless Rae that she would bury him in a family plot in Greensburg, where she could join him when her time came -- a grand design she could not consummate from the grave as my grandmother now rests beside my father in a Madison Heights cemetery. Aunt Fanny's domineering demeanor roiled her own marriage; referring to her husband Max, she issued this order to Sara Louise: "Don't you dare cry at his funeral."

While Helene's high school years were more placid, suffused with routine transitory friendships, intermittent romantic entanglements, and surreptitious smoking experimentation, she never wholly embraced Kittanning, her sojourn there too peripatetic and too perilous for her ever to regard it as a cozy refuge. Would the anchor she longed for be found south of the Mason-Dixon line?

As gloomy as Kittanning was, at least it was in the north, where the rich dark soil of Western Pennsylvania far surpassed in beauty and fertility the muddy red clay of Central Virginia, where chefs seasoned their concoctions with something besides salt, fat, and Crisco, where one could buy a drink in a restaurant, and where motorists knew the purpose of an accelerator. One of Helene's uncles probably articulated her own sentiments when he characterized her provincial hometown as not just "the sticks" but "the stinks" -- a rather severe condemnation when one considers that Kittanning was no urban mecca and that Helene's parents were now living in a house that faced the railroad tracks.

Such pseudo-sophisticated disparagement stemmed from a culturally-ingrained stereotype of the south which highlighted bogus and illusory disparities. Helene says she was amazed to see black moviegoers excommunicated to the balcony, yet acknowledges only one black in her high school class, whom she felt sorry for because she had no friends. And it didn't take long for her to adopt the local mores and avail herself of low-priced domestic help. I suspect the 1940's discriminatory practices which prevented Bert from purchasing a home in a certain Lynchburg neighborhood because he was Jewish were not confined to the south.

Helene admits there were moments in those early days when she regretted asking Bert to that dance. He was absent much of the time, working six days a week, figuring out the furniture business, navigating a maze of six employed family members, and, always a raconteur, after hours holding court, cocktail in hand (strictly byol), at the old Blue Dahlia on Bedford Avenue or at Oakwood Country Club.

She broadened her cooking skills; her mother had taught her how to prepare only one meal: spaghetti. "It will last you two nights," she told her.

She had a mother-in-law, also named Rae (the past harmonizes), who, doting over her only son, was loath to sever the umbilical cord. Little Rae -- she had a sister-in-law, Big Rae Finkel -- was petite, vivacious, loquacious, overbearing, and meddlesome, and imagined her parental role had doubled rather than diminished. Helene wanted to wallpaper her bathroom; Rae insisted she paint it. When the young couple failed to invite her to a dinner party, she showed up anyway.

Helene found solace in a large, vibrant Jewish community which included other newlywed women who had also recently moved to the area. Her best friend was a Philadelphia native, Zelda, whose husband Henry owned a men's store. The two would shop, have lunch together, attend Elk's Club dances, and commiserate over their banishment to this southern wilderness. "I nearly died when she moved away," she says.

Her other outlet was golf, which she took up in 1950 after my sister Donna was born. Having quit the game myself five times, I'm not sure what psychological benefits it offers. Perhaps she inherited enough hand-eye coordination from her bat-swinging father to develop a more competent, consistent stroke than I ever could and thus overcome the persistent embarrassment of hooks, slices, dribblers, and outright whiffs. Certainly it was an avenue to social opportunities, introducing her to a number of lifelong friends, most of whom she has survived.

Helene's true proficiency at this frustrating sport remains a well-guarded secret. Her habitual response to the question, "How's your game?" echoes my own when I am asked about business conditions: "Terrible." As for bridge, a less taxing alternative pastime at her advanced age, she says, after forty perplexing years, she's finally unearthed the secret: "Concentrate."

"Those were the slavery days," says Helene. Here was her family's furniture store well-stocked with washers, dryers, and freezers, and yet she had nary a one. (I'm a little skeptical of this protest of poverty, since our household was the first on our street to own a color television.) She claims credit for Schewel executives driving company cars, which freed up one for her when she finally convinced Bert (and his father) to implement the perk. Her best source of spending money was her father-in-law Ben, who used to slip a few dollars her way when they went to the movies together.

She more than made up for all those years of deprivation. The turning point was 1958, when Bert coughed up enough credit -- $50,000 -- to enable her to build the house of her dreams -- the 3800 square foot ranch I now live in on the corner of Elk and Belfield. The birth of my brother that same year necessitated larger living quarters, and although she claims it was her father's death that precipitated her pregnancy (she named Jack after him), is it not conceivable that she harbored an ulterior motive? She pored over every detail with her architect and contractor -- I'm surprised they didn't wilt under the scrutiny -- while my father, probably content to remain on Greenway Court, kept his eye on business. Although the design is a 1950's relic, this signature creation is convenient, comfortable, and functional, and boasts as one of its prominent amenities one of the few carports in town.

Since Helene is now ensconced only one block away in the elegant duplex she was able to customize from its original cookie-cutter floor plan, she regularly cruises her BMW X-3 by her piece de resistance on her way to a bridge game or the grocery store, and can't resist detouring for a meticulous inspection should she espy a strange vehicle in the driveway -- unannounced intrusions that annoyed my ex-wife to no end, so much so that she finally moved out two years ago. That wasn't the only reason, although it does underscore my poor judgment in nesting us in a house not entirely her own.

Once Helene realized that, with a little feminine persuasiveness, she could have the best of everything, like a Pennsylvania coal miner's daughter who has just won the lottery, she raised the bar on conspicuous consumption. From some mysterious reservoir -- or maybe it was just the product of a burgeoning financial wherewithal -- there sprang to life an exquisitely refined taste -- in jewelry, furnishings, art, clothes, shoes, and accessories, all of which put my minimalistic needs to shame, as she never fails to point out.

Because not only must Helene wear Mephisto shoes, model a Rolex watch, drink Chivas Regal scotch, gratify her sensitive palate at Whole Foods in Charlottesville, have her teeth fixed in Richmond, and travel to Miami for her facial enhancements, so must every other person, especially family members, if they have a modicum of sense.

No furniture store or catalogue ever contains the exact piece she wants. Desperately seeking some rare lucite lamps to complete her living room decor, at the age of eighty-six, she is prepared to drive two-and-a-half hours to High Point, park a mile from the Market, and wander through acres of showrooms. Why not? She's probably been there more times than I have, and certainly deserves a permanent gold pass.

Helene is having some trouble with her emails -- she sends and receives about six a week -- and is convinced that only the newest Apple Mac can rectify the problem. Every time Sony introduces a bigger television screen, she's got to have it. When bottom-drawer refrigerator-freezers came into vogue, she immediately switched. Exasperated by $4-a-gallon gas, she considered trading her BMW for a Honda with better mileage -- until, after calculating her fuel usage based on her driving 6000 miles a year, I offered to buy her gas for the rest of her life if she paid me the difference in price.

"They missed a few," she said with authority, after thumbing through a book I gave her, One Thousand Places to See before You Die. After having cruised, caravaned, or flown by conventional means to most of them, she hopped aboard the Concorde for an around-the-world excursion, in fourteen days, the only way to travel, she said, managing to duplicate the adventure one more time before sudden tragedy terminated supersonic transport for the foreseeable future.

Her husband's aversion to travel -- except by automobile to Myrtle Beach -- never inhibited her own wanderlust. In fact, having cultivated a fiery streak of independence, after a proper period of grieving, she embarked on the widowed stage of her life with courage and gusto, content to go her own way, rejecting all overtures of male companionship.

Now, she says, her days of international globe-trotting may be over. Her last trip -- two years ago, at the age of eighty-four, to Antarctica -- stretched the limit of her endurance. "It's for a younger person," she said, peering into my sixty-year-old eyes, as she described the turbulent seas of the Drake Passage, the precarious tender transports, the rocky terrain, and the steep shorelines that were too treacherous for her to climb. New York City by bus is still manageable, although traipsing through Times Square at night amongst thousands of other crazed sightseers -- which is where she found herself last month -- can be harrowing. Fortunately, her Dominican grand-daughter-in-law, Patricia, was there to lend her arm for moral and physical support. "I love Nanee!" she texted me.

Yes, Nanee was the name she chose for herself at the birth of her first grandchild thirty-six years ago, Grandma and Nana too indicative of old age, she says, or maybe they just evoked some unpleasant memories.

Besides bridge and golf, Helene discovered another avocation late in life -- philanthropy. Having been advised by her attorney and her children that she could afford to give away a substantial portion of her modest estate without materially impacting her standard of living (or theirs), she proceeded to disburse over fifteen years approximately $3 million -- to such important causes as Centra Health, Randolph College, the YMCA, Amazement Square, the Salvation Army, New Vistas School, the United Way, and the United Jewish Appeal. In recognition of her generosity, in 2002 she was named Philanthropist of the Year by the local Association of Fund Raising Professionals.

In one respect, she hasn't slowed down -- hosting the family for dinner on special occasions, at which the number of attendees seems to shrink every year as more grandchildren move farther from home. Still, she lovingly prepares her Whole Foods extravaganza weeks ahead of time and freezes it, lays out the proper number of place settings in her immaculate dining/living room (always bemoaning the lack of an accurate head count), supervises her "help" with an eagle eye, and never sits during the entire meal.

If she is, in my brother's well-chosen words, "an expert on everyone else's life," perhaps she's earned the right, so remarkably spry is she at eighty-six. While it's tempting to dismiss her unsolicited advice on clothes (Joseph Bank is a cheap store.), furniture (Who picked this color?), and physicians (I made you an appointment in Richmond.) as typical maternal (and mature) presumption, it's difficult to ignore the healthy longevity harvested from her disciplined lifestyle -- no sodium, sugar, butter, eggs, cheese (or flavor) and only one scotch a day, down from two.

Her diet continues to hold top priority in her circumscribed universe. She has forbidden her children to dispatch her to Westminster-Canterbury should she no longer be capable of caring for herself. "The food there is atrocious," she says.

One can excuse her occasional cantankerousness, stubbornness, and reprimands. She never asks for sympathy. Oh, that we all should age so gracefully.

The Big Game

There was a big game Saturday.

The anticipation was as palpable as the restlessness of crazed bargain hunters waiting for the doors to open on Black Friday. Excitement, uncertainty, analysis, prognostication hung in the air, permeating every public gathering like the lilting tones of elevator music in a furniture store.

Fans on both sidelines smelled victory, yet suppressed their overconfidence, lest they succumb to an ignominious embarrassment. Each team was on a roll, although one's string of successes had come by perilously close margins, and the other's defensive line had been debilitated by a rash of frustrating injuries.

The waiting begets its own intensity. Unlike baseball and basketball, whose long, leisurely seasons diminish the impact of any single contest, whose wins and losses follow each other so rapidly that one has little opportunity to savor the former, mourn the latter, or contemplate the consequences of either before the next is upon him, football's titans clash only once a week.

During the interval, the suspense builds to a fever pitch, fueled by an incessant spate of partisan posturing and media blather rushing to fill a vacuum, until it abruptly implodes with the opening kickoff, to be reconstituted within hours in the form of pretentious postmortems and specious Sunday morning quarterbacking.

The manufactured drama even got my attention. I made a bet -- a daring twenty dollars -- mainly to silence the cavalierly clatter of a friend of mine. I watched the first half on television with four of my children -- who were more spellbound by their Scrabble game than any rumblings on the field -- and listened to the sobering conclusion on the radio while driving my daughter and her husband to Roanoke to catch a plane.

Having acknowledged my apostasy, would it be disingenuous to proclaim once again on this web site my distaste for this communal combat disguised as sport?

Lift the veil of gladiatorial romanticism and transcendent athleticism, and consider what lies beneath: controlled violence and orchestrated brutality that in any other setting would be deemed assault and battery; interior lines anchored by hooded behemoths of such size and strength as to render ordinary mortals Lilliputian by contrast; a repetitious series of maneuvers in which the belligerents face off in a crouched position, engage their alter egos in bone-jarring collisions, and scatter across the field to pursue and upend a feisty ball carrier; and a sedentary expenditure of three hours to watch all of fifteen minutes of real-time action, net of huddles, unpiling, and replays.

To make full disclosure, I never played the game. Once I reached puberty and looked around at my peers, I realized I was too small, weak, slow, uncoordinated, nearsighted, and averse to physical contact for pads, helmet, and cleats to do me any good.

Perhaps this handicap prevents me from fully appreciating a friend's spirited defense of football in response to my previously documented disparagement. "It is the most team-oriented sport of all," he said. "Everyone works together to achieve a common goal. Of twenty-two players on the field, fifteen have no chance to touch the ball, barring a fumble or interception."

The rewards of football come at a high price, according to Kris Jenkins, former all-pro defensive lineman for the Carolina Panthers and New York Jets.

"Pain in football is consistent over time," he writes in the New York Times, November 20, 2011. "You're still hurting in the off-season. You're hurting when the next season starts . . . You ever been in a car crash? Done bumper cars? You know when that hit catches you off guard and jolts you? Football is like that. But ten times worse. It's bad . . . From the double teams over the years, I wore the left side of my body down. I was past hurt. I was at the point of numb . . . I couldn't feel part of both arms. I couldn't feel part of both legs . . . I'm just starting to get feeling back in my left side."

Of course, he's talking about professional football. Maybe it doesn't hurt so bad, or so long, at the college level, even though recent hits in that arena have been equally devastating.

For the true devotee, there's obviously more to the big game than what meets the eye of the uninitiated, but whatever it is eluded me when I visited Annapolis, Maryland, two years go to watch Navy square off against Wake Forest -- ending a two-decade hiatus for me. It was all downhill after the soul-stirring parade of one thousand midshipmen and an exhilarating flyover by the Blue Angels prior to kickoff.

Seated fifteen rows back on the fifteen-yard line, I strained to penetrate the amorphous confluence of black, gold, and blue brush strokes slithering back and forth across a muddy streaked canvas. So well-hidden was the ball that I doubted its substantiality, until I glimpsed it briefly wobbling through the gloomy mist. A few minutes into the second half, a curtain of water descended on this dreary charade, mercifully dispatching my companions and me to the warmth and dryness of our hotel room to commiserate over the televised swamping of the Deacons with a bottle of wine.

Perhaps I chose the wrong venue.

Friends extol the joys of tailgating -- those lavish outdoor cocktail parties where thousands of enthusiasts feast upon sumptuous home-cooked delicacies or professionally-grilled entrees and consume gallons of free-flowing alcohol (but none shall pass the lips of the underage students hovering in the background, I assume), thus to be well-fortified for a rigorous agenda of shouting, cheering, booing, cursing, and general hell-raising.

On some campuses, I am told, the masses are treated to a grand revue worthy of the British monarchy, where the home team disembarks from its royal coaches and marches past the star-struck revelers in its resplendent armor, en route to a valiant defense of its sacred turf.

What are these festivities all about? Love of the institution, whose raison d'etre is, ostensibly, the higher education of our youth? Adoration of the team, upon whose broad, padded shoulders are borne the hopes, dreams, credibility, and wagers of its disciples? A lust for aggression, which is sublimated, displaced, and resurrected in the bodies of these noble avatars? I suspect it is all of the above, plus semi-calculated theater to inspire the faithful and keep their plentiful dollars flowing.

Why do "schools work so damn hard and often take ethical shortcuts to forge themselves into football powers," to nurture a culture of unconditional team worship? Because, says sports journalist Michael Weintraub, a graduate of Penn State, "if they are successful, then the game serves as as the lifelong bond between alums and townspeople and the university, thereby guaranteeing the institution's self-preservation through donations and season-ticket sales and infusions into the local economy . . . [and] college football [will become] (other than our own families) the purest emotional attachment of our adulthood." (Gitlin, The New Republic, November 14, 2011)

Such fervent loyalty is hardly limited to "alums." Some of the most ardent collegiate sportsmen I know never sniffed their adopted alma maters until well into their post-graduate years.

The seeds of sustainment are planted early, as legions of students are swept up in the frenzy -- painting their faces, baring their chests in sub-zero conditions, standing in solidarity throughout the entire contest, berating their opponents with malicious taunts. Sometimes their enthusiasm overruns the boundaries of juvenile delinquency.

In 2008, after their Nittany Lions defeated the Ohio State Buckeyes in Columbus for the first time in thirty years, back in State College "thousands of inebriated Penn State students poured into a downtown residential area known as Beaver Canyon and began to riot, breaking windows and toppling street signs." Police officers resorted to pepper spray to subdue the unruly celebrants. (Ben McGrath, The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, p. 21) At the most civilizing of establishments, the outcome of a child's game shattered the restraints on wanton behavior, and society ran amok.

Three years later its emperor would prove to have no clothes.

The most explosive scandal in the history of college sports erupted on November 4 when state authorities released a 23-page grand jury report documenting multiple incidents of sexual abuse against young boys committed by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky between 1994 and 2009. Most occurred either in Penn State's football facilities or at football functions. (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

Despite his prominence and relatively young age, mid-fifties, Sandusky retired in 1999, but was allowed full access to the facilities and provided with an office and a phone. One year earlier police had investigated a complaint by an eleven-year-old boy that Sandusky had bear-hugged him in the shower, but had closed the case without filing charges. (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

The most damaging grand jury accusation stemmed from the testimony of receiver coach Mike McQueary, who said he saw Sandusky raping a boy in the shower in 2002, after which he informed head coach Joe Paterno. As the account moved up the chain of command, ultimately reaching university president Graham Spanier, its severity moderated to the point where no one felt it necessary to inform any police agency. The lone reprimand was that Sandusky was prohibited from bringing children onto the campus. (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

The fallout from these revelations was swift and lethal. The Board of Trustees fired Spanier and Paterno. For the latter, the fatherly figure affectionately known as JoePa, irreparably shattered was a legacy enshrined in 409 wins, two national championships, an 89% graduation rate, the library that bears his name, a health center for which he was the major contributor, the football fortress underwritten by his friends, and the $2 billion endowment he espoused. (Werthem and Epstein, Verducci, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

Sandusky's heinous acts were only half the story; equally despicable was the coverup -- a pattern of deceit and denial designed to preserve and protect the sanctity of a quasi-religion, which, insulated, isolated, and bereft of a moral compass, had assumed a monolithic life of its own. When President Spanier tried to coax his seventy-seven-year-old icon into retirement seven years ago, he was firmly rebuffed -- long before "too big to fail" became a sound bite.

The Penn State football program was hardly a model of purity. Between 2002 and 2008, forty-six players were charged with a total of 163 crimes ranging from public urination to murder. In 2008, McQueary broke up "a player-related knife fight in a campus dining hall." (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

In 2007, six players were charged by the police with forcing their way into an apartment and beating up several students. The school's chief disciplinarian, Vicky Triponey, subsequently resigned, citing "philosophical differences" over a judicial process by which football players were treated "more favorably than other students accused of violating community standards." In one meeting, Coach Paterno stated that "his players couldn't be expected to cooperate with the school's disciplinary process because, in this case, they would have to testify against each other, making it hard to play football together." (Reed Albergotti, The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2011)

If the cult of JoePa turned out to mask a culture of corruption, its exposure was only the latest -- if not the most egregious -- confirmation of the endemic rottenness of the whole nasty enterprise. Just since 2010, one shock after another has rattled its glass facade.

The University of Southern California was stripped of its 2004 National Championship and Reggie Bush of his Heisman Trophy after the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) determined that Bush and his family had received "improper benefits" -- free airfare and limousine rides, a car, and a rent-free home -- from overzealous sports agents. The father of Auburn quarterback Cam Newton allegedly used a recruiter to solicit $180,000 from Mississippi State University in exchange for his son's matriculation. Ohio State coach Jim Tressel resigned after Sports Illustrated reported that twenty-eight players over nine years had traded autographs, jerseys, and other memorabilia in exchange for cash and tattoos. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

These trespasses pale in comparison to the sordid activities of University of Miami sports booster Nevin Shapiro, whose poisonous tentacles ensnared seventy-three athletes, seven former football and basketball coaches, and three staff members, according to Yahoo! Sports. (Alexander Wolff, Sports Illustrated, August 29, 2011)

Dazzled by Shapiro's bulging checkbook, the school's administrators, with the blessing of President Donna Shalala, permitted Shapiro to fly on the team charter, lead the players onto the field, and stamp his name on their lounge in the Hecht Athletic Center. They turned a blind eye to his eight-year spree of lawlessness, which included stocking hotel rooms with prostitutes, paying for an abortion, installing a stripper pole in his luxury box, offering bounties for incapacitating opposing quarterbacks, and drunkenly threatening a compliance director in the Orange Bowl press box. (Alexander Wolff, Sports Illustrated, August 29, 2011)

Inflated egos, overweening ambitions, the unrelenting pressure to win, and above all endless streams of money have inundated and indelibly stained the gridiron. Indeed, protecting its obscene profits -- $50 million generated from $70 million in revenues at Penn State in 2009 -- is the core value of college football. (Joe Nocera, The New York Times, November 11, 2011)

In 2010, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference became the first college league to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts.

The bulk of the purse comes from television contracts, in pursuit of which the signers readily cede their weekend destiny and compromise their academic mission. "We do everything for the networks," says William Friday, a former president of North Carolina's university system. "We furnish them the theater, the actors, the lights, the music, and the audience for a drama measured neatly in time slots. They bring the camera and turn it on . . . If they want to broadcast football on a Thursday night, we shut down at three o'clock to accommodate the crowds." (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Scandals proliferate in darkened corridors; multinational corporations, submissive universities, the voracious NCAA, and media moguls wheel and deal like Wall Street wizards; coaches and their assistants rake in huge salaries; alumni and friends pour buckets of tax-deductible dollars into foundation coffers. And the laborers in the trenches -- many of whom cannot afford movie tickets or bus fare home -- go unpaid.

Is it conceivable that the volunteers upon whose backs this edifice is constructed might decide to protest their exploitation?

Last year CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting paid the NCAA $771 million to televise its 2011 basketball tournament -- its principal source of revenue since a 1984 Supreme Court decision stripped it of exclusive football broadcast rights. Friday recalls a threat to boycott the championship game. "This team was going to dress and go out on the floor but refuse to play" -- jeopardizing millions of television dollars, countless livelihoods, the NCAA budget, and subsidies for sports at more than 1000 schools. Fortunately, it lost before the finals. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

For $29.99 a piece, the NCAA now offers dvd's on demand from its huge vault of college sports. In 2008, Electronic Arts sold 2.5 million copies of a football video game licensed by the NCAA. None of the profits derived from their being depicted in these products goes to the athletes. "Once you leave your university, one would think your likeness belongs to you," says Ed O'Bannon, a former college basketball player of the year who has filed a class action antitrust lawsuit claiming a share of the revenue generated from his image. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In 2000, after twenty-five years of legal haggling, an appeals court ruled that Kent Waldrep -- a running back for Texas Christian University -- was not an employee when he was paralyzed in a 1974 game against Alabama, and thus ineligible for worker's compensation. School officials testified that they had recruited Waldrep as a student, not an athlete -- a patent absurdity, says Waldrep. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

The NCAA's moral authority -- and indeed its defense in all such cases -- is embedded in the concept of the student-athlete, which it crafted in the 1950's. The logic of the device is that, as students, college players would never have to be compensated for more than the cost of their studies. As athletes, however, whose enrollment was necessary for success on the field, they would not be held to the same academic standards as their peers. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Ironically, this deliberately ambiguous terminology, and its sanitized corollary, "amateurism," are nothing more than synonyms for the essential hypocrisy that girds this superstructure.

While players' scholarships often don't cover the full cost of attending college, coaches' salaries have escalated dramatically. According to Charles Clotfelter, economist at Duke, "The average compensation for head football coaches at public universities, now more than $2 million, has grown 750 per cent since 1984 (adjusted for inflation), more than twenty times the cumulative 32 per cent rise for college professors." Many coaches pile on assorted bonuses, endorsements, speaking fees, country club memberships, and negotiated percentages of ticket receipts. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Are athletes granted special treatment in the classroom?

In 1989, Dexter Manley, Washington Redskins defensive end, famously teared up before a Senate subcommittee when admitting he had been functionally illiterate in college. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In the 1980's, Jan Kemp, an English instructor at the University of Georgia alleged that she had been demoted and then fired because she refused to inflate grades in her remedial English course. Documents showed that administrators had replaced her grades with higher ones; on one notable occasion they awarded unearned passing grades to nine football players who otherwise would have been ineligible to compete in the 1982 Sugar Bowl. Once, said Kemp, as she struggled to maintain her integrity, a supervisor questioned her judgment: "Who do you think is more important to this university, you or Dominique Wilkins [a star basketball player]?" (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In 2009, following an admission by academic tutor Brenda Monk that she had asked a member of the basketball team to submit electronically another player's test answers, Florida State University conducted an NCAA-mandated "vigorous self-investigation." Interviews with 129 athletes revealed that absentee professors had allowed group consultations and unlimited retaking of open-computer assignments and tests. Sixty-one athletes were suspended, and the football team was required to vacate twelve victories, but the harshest penalty fell upon Monk, who had testified voluntarily. Through a dreaded "show cause" order, the NCAA, in all its perverse wisdom, rendered her effectively unhirable at any college in the United States. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

The logic of the NCAA's inverted moral universe has it chasing intermittent petty violations like a traffic cop swooping down on unwary speeders while a bank robber makes off with thousands one block away.

At the start of the 2010 season, the NCAA suspended Georgia wide receiver A. J. Green for four games for selling his Independence Bowl jersey -- to raise cash for his spring break -- while the Georgia Bulldogs flaunted replicas of the same jersey for $39.95 and up. Five Ohio State players were suspended for five games for selling Big Ten Championship rings and trading autographs and other memorabilia for discounted tattoos -- while commercial insignia from multinational corporations were plastered on their bodies. Last season, while he and his father were under scrutiny for allegedly taking bribes, Cam Newton wore at least fifteen corporate logos -- on his jersey, helmet visor, wristbands, pants, shoes, and headband -- as part of Auburn's $10.6 million deal with Under Armour. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

When players are seriously injured and can no longer play, or when they underperform, coaches often yank their scholarships, forcing them to drop out of school. (Joe Nocera, The New York Times, November 11, 2011) The National College Players Association -- which seeks modest reforms such as safety guidelines and better death benefits for college athletes -- reported that 22% of Division I basketball scholarships were not renewed in 2008-2009. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Since 1973, an NCAA rule "has prohibited colleges and universities from offering any athletic scholarship longer than one year, to be renewed or not unilaterally by the school -- which in practice means that coaches decide each year" who is in and who is out. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In 2009, Joseph Agnew was cut from the Rice University football team and his scholarship revoked before his senior year, leaving him with a $35,000 tuition and expense bill if he decided to complete his degree. The coach who had recruited Agnew had moved on to another school, and his replacement switched Agnew's scholarship to a recruit of his own. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011.)

In October 2010, Agnew filed a class-action lawsuit over the cancellation, seeking to remove the NCAA's cap on scholarships. Agnew argued that without the one-year rule, he would have been free to bargain with the eight colleges who had recruited him and could have received a multi-year guarantee. While it has yet to be decided, the case represents a direct challenge to the rationale for the NCAA's tax-exempt status, which is the promotion of education through athletics; restricting the availability of scholarships would seem to deny opportunities rather than foster them. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

College athletics programs have dodged the IRS for years -- and foisted a heavier burden on the tax-paying public -- because of their purported educational mission. Yet when coaches pull down $4 million salaries, the NCAA builds a $50 million complex and purchases a $1 million jet, and two-thirds of the athletic revenue at large universities is derived from ticket sales, television rights, and advertising and merchandising contracts, one is hard-pressed to detect a link between all this rabid commercialism and academics. (Eric Dexheimer, Austin American Statesman, December 26, 2009)

Much of the money is plowed back into a spiraling arms race as "universities spend increasing resources on measures of athletic success that, at most, benefit their own institutions at the expense of others." (Eric Dexheimer, Austin American Statesman, December 26, 2009)

Contributions from individuals and businesses -- including fees to purchase prime seats and luxury boxes and facility naming rights -- continue to be tax-deductible, often against the recommendations of the IRS, which are repeatedly rejected by Congressmen feeding at the trough of powerful lobbyists. (Eric Dexheimer, Austin American Statesman, December 26, 2009)

"College football and men's basketball have drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university," says James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan. "They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete's health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university." (Todd Gitlin, The New Republic, November 14, 2011)

"Ninety per cent of the NCAA's revenue is produced by one per cent of the athletes," says Sonny Vaccaro, a former executive at Nike, Reebok, and Adidas. "Go to the skill positions, the stars -- ninety per cent African-Americans . . . The least educated are the most exploited." (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

NCAA rules require college athletes to sign a "Student-Athlete Statement" attesting to their amateur status. Implied in the document is a waiving of their rights to profits from any sales based on their performance. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

"But the NCAA has no recourse to any principle in law that can justify amateurism. There is no such thing . . . No legal definition of amateurism exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repugnant and unconstitutional nature -- a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship," and the right to be compensated fairly for their labor. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

For one brief, terrible moment a few weeks ago, as the Penn State scandal burst into the public consciousness, one dared to imagine that a tipping point had been reached, that some influential individuals might take an objective look at a cancer that was not merely localized but indeed systemic, and broach the subject of fundamental reform. Such hopes were illusory.

Instead, the season has marched inexorably toward its routine controversial denoument, in which millions bemoan the absence of a true playoff, but for which I am forever grateful, because it exposes for once the ultimate futility of taking sports seriously. The outrage has subsided, and been superseded by conference championships, BCS computations, Bowl matchups, and the next Big Game. Resisting the initial pleas that it shut down its program, Penn State will justify its participation in the TicketCity (formerly Cotton) Bowl as an obligation to its guiltless players and devoted fans and by donating the proceeds to sexual abuse prevention groups.

In other words, it's business -- I mean football -- as usual.

By the way, Virginia Tech beat Virginia 38-0.