Roast me re: the first 18 lines of The Wasteland [OPINION]

I'm waiting for the Weston book to come in, so I took a crack without any secondary sources based mostly on the publication date (the idea that this had something directly to do with The Great War).

I read lines 1 - 4 as describing the trenches of April 1915 (the death of Eliot's friend Verdenal at Gallipoli, Ypres, the first use of Poison Gas, etc. when the war got very real, generally, and very real, specifically for Eliot), the lilacs are soldiers coming out of the trenches going over the top, ending with "spring rain", which is not the regular kind of rain in my reading. I have no doubt that there are other associations, but I'm reading Eliot as assuming that readers of the day would intuit these associations at least.

Imagine the first four lines as being shouted by a British sergeant major to troops in the trenches as a grim and surrealistic pep talk as the one minute alert counts down and then the whistle blows.

Lines 5-7, starting with the non-sequitur "Winter kept us warm", recall the previous winter, when there was a Christmas truce in 1914 ("feeding a little life with dried tubers", potato pie was a favorite at the front, food was shared during the armistice) with the "forgetful snow" hiding the carnage from view for a minute or two.

Now Lines 8 - 18,

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

\*“I'm not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, pure German.”

I was a little lost here (in terms of my admittedly idiosyncratic, maybe idiotic, reading). Are we still in the war or what? Well, I think we're at the start of the war, in the summer of 1914.

From Wikipedia: "According to historian Zbyněk Zeman, in Vienna "the event \[assassination of Franz Ferdinand) almost failed to make any impression whatsoever. On 28 and 29 June, the crowds listened to music and drank wine, as if nothing had happened."\[39\] Nevertheless, the impact of the murder of the heir to the throne was significant, and has been described by historian Christopher Clark as a "9/11 effect, a terrorist event charged with historic meaning, transforming the political chemistry in Vienna".\[40\]"

We can take the archduke as being alluded to in line 13 (I'm aware that there's a more literal archduke alluded to). So we're moving backwards in time from April 1915, to the Christmas of 1914, and now summer of 1914. They were drinking coffee, sledding in the mountains, staying up reading "much of the night" (does that mean reading "a large part of the night" or reading "a whole lot about the night"? Did he have forebodings?) and BOOM! ... down they went.

One other thing, you can read this as there being at least three nationalities, an ethnic German, an Austrian (the archduke), and Marie, who I take to be French (again, I'm aware that there's a more literal Marie). They're at least friends, and some are actually related. And then, all of the sudden, they're not friends or family anymore. At all.

So the picture is a contemplation of the war after the fact, from the standpoint of the average joe (or even a sophisticated character like T.S. Eliot), asking what the hell just happened? You can talk about Thucydides traps and the shifting balance of power and so forth. I don't think anyone really saw what was coming. Maybe I'm wrong about that (not like I'm a Great War historian).

Finally, I'm not suggesting that the first 18 lines are "really" about the war. I'm reading the the poem as representing the horror of the war to say something about the nature of life. So, a) the horror of the war is transmuted into symbols of growth and life, and then b) he wants you to read the symbols of growth and life in light of the war. So the lilacs are to be see first as flowers, then as soldiers, then as flowers again.

Is this reading circular in a bad sense?