Big Events, Little Moments

I’m currently re-reading Farley Mowat’s “And No Birds Sang,” one of my favorite memoirs of World War II.

I don’t have to tell you that World War II was huge, as the name implies. And even individual operations, individual battles, are much larger than a single person can tell.

But it’s done. Time and again.

And as I deconstruct Mowat’s story – and have done with many similar stories on topics ranging from World War II to the creation of the atomic bomb to the impeachment of Richard Nixon, I see the most effective way to tell big stories is to tell the little stories that make up the large.

I hope as you tell your stories in your personal essays that you can apply what I’m about to teach.

Mowat, for example, participated in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily by allied forces that started on July 10, 1943.

Wikipedia gives us the big picture. The invasion eventually involved more than 467,000 Allied troops battling against a combined force of 312,000 Italian and German troops.

That’s a big battle – and Mowat tells us successfully of his part of it, not by trying to wow us with numbers, but by telling us the little bits that happened to him.

While moving through the town of Piazza Amerina, they happened upon a public water faucet.

Says Mowat:

I nipped out of the cab to see if [the water] was drinkable; for it we hard learned one solid lesson sofar in Sicilty, it was never to miss a chance to fill one’s water bottle. When a Royal engineer sergeant assured me the water had been tested and was potable, I yelled at my section corporals to grab some water bottles form their men.

The four of us were crowded around the ornate cast-iron spigot when I became aware of the presence of a tall, dignified officer in serge dress uniform, complete with shining brass buttons and gleaming Sam Browne belt. He was as remarkable an apparition in that outfit, time and place, as a king in a chicken coop. Assuming that he must be some very senior variety of staff officer, I glanced at him nervously, expecting a reprimand for having let my men leave the truck; but when he spoke it was to quite a different point.

“I say, old man, would you mind awfully if I took your photograph?”

The question seemed so out of place that even Mitchuk grinned, and I heard Hill ask under his breath: “Have we got ourselves a movie star?” I was too nonplussed to reply, and our driver was gunning his engine as a signal that the convoy was moving on, but I must have nodded acquiescence. In any case, a picture of me, dust-caked and clad in stained and torn shorts and bush shirt that had not been changed since leaving Derbyshire, eventually graded the august pages of the London Illustrated News.

I have labored long and hard to find a copy of this photo, to no avail.

But in this short passage from his book, Mowat tells us a lot with an instance that others might not regard as important: A photo taken at a drinking fountain. Nevertheless, it’s with a series of events like this, some pedestrian, some much more Hollywood-war-movielike, that Mowat tells his story. Little things writ large make for a bigger picture than we think.

And he packs a lot of detail here too. We’re left to imagine why it’s important to have a full water bottle, unless, of course, we’ve been on long hikes, or worked in the heat, and experienced what it’s like to be doggedly thirsty.

And he contrasts his own appearance, dusty and in torn clothing, with the snappy outfit of the photographer’s.

If he were to write a shorter piece, say, like the personal essay you’re writing, he would obviously have to include more information here so you’d understand more of what’s going on, and how it fit into the bigger picture (per my announcement last week). But as this is part of a larger work, he has the luxury of leaving some information unrepeated here, since he has mentioned it earlier.

Nevertheless, we get the urgency of the moment, with the gunning engine. The war must go on, photographer or not.

Little details add up in little moments.

And little moments add up in the big picture.