Re: A matter of the heart
Larry, you're really pushing us to the moral center of this novel's commentary on war. You write:
Perhaps it is that whereas he could impersonally kill before, now he must share a dying man's moments, a man he himself has killed. This is more intense than his feelings of compassion for the Russian prisoners; here he can't escape the most intimate consequences of war--taking from another human being his most precious possession, his life. Thus Paul comforts the man, the enemy, in his dying; but more--he cannot resist knowing his identity, giving him individual identity beyond his official designation as enemy: "I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval." And now that he knows whom he has killed, the dead man's entire life unfolds before him: wife, children, friends, life's work, and so on.
War is never anything but savage, but it seems to me that in wars before the modern era, warriors almost always had to look their enemies in the face. Killing was personal. In the modern era, technology abstracts warriors (and the populations on whose behalf they make war) from the human destruction of war. I think of how cool ("cool") it was to watch those videos taken from inside the cockpit of US military aircraft, filming laser-guided missiles hitting their targets in Baghdad. It was like a video game. And I was sitting in a bar in midtown Manhattan watching TV when the shock-and-awe bombardment of Baghdad got underway. It was like watching a movie. Not only were our soldiers removed from the consequences of their actions, but so were we.
The conservative writer Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam and Gulf War veteran officer who is now an international relations professor (and whose son recently was killed in action in Iraq), wrote a book at year or two ago called "The New American Militarism." In it, he argues that that same sense of abstraction from what war actually is, and what soldiers actually do, has caused the American people to make a false idol of the military, and to be far too quick to attempt military solutions to problems, because, basically, it is a video game or a movie for most of us. Except for the soldiers who have to kill and be killed.
Incidentally, Remarque later described himself as a "militant pacifist." I can see how he got to that point, but it should be noted that he himself had to flee Nazi Germany. I don't know how militant pacifism stops the Hitlers of the world. War is always going to be with us, because there will always be thugs and lunatics like Hitler who have to be stood up to. The lesson I drew from this novel is that war should always be the last possible option, because once you start it, there's no telling where it will stop.
Which, come to think of it, is what John Paul II said about the coming war in Iraq.
Comments
You make such a key point: among other things, the killing technology that WWI introduced made looking one's enemy in the face no longer either necessary or even possible in most instances. This seems very different to me than the matter of a soldier's romanticizing war until he gets into it (a common theme in novels and films such as Red Badge of Courage and Gallipoli).
I go back to Homer a lot because the Iliad is our proto-epic about war. There, warriors not only look each other in the face but tell each other their personal histories, focusing on lineage--"my father is so and so; you've probably heard of his great deeds; my son is so and so, and he'll be greater than me," etc. Rod, it didn't occur to me until your comments that this is basically what happens when Paul goes through Gerard Duval's wallet and discovers the details of his life.
Maybe it's the taking of life--any life--that's at issue here as well. I'm thinking of Native American traditions of the hunt, when the hunter ritually apologizes to and thanks the victim for its sacrifice to feed the hunter's people. Faulkner makes much of this in Go Down, Moses, and it's in the opening sequence of Michael Mann's recent film version of "Last of the Mohicans."
Is this the real curse of technology--that it can so completely remove us from a sense of community with other living things that the very value of life seems a fantasy, a fantastic abstraction? It's another paradox: the whole world is available to us, but it's less real than ever.
Posted by: Larry Allums | June 27, 2007 11:32 AM
This isn't about war, but it's related to your point. I've often marveled over how much more I know about the whole wide world than my father. I've traveled to Europe and the Middle East many times, I read international media, maintain international friendships, and know a relatively great deal about what's going on on the international scene. Not my father. With the exception of my taking him and my mom to visit friends in Holland once, he's never left the US, and doesn't read much about what happens outside this country.
But he does know his little patch of ground, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, better than I ever will, or could. He's lived there his whole life, and is so intimately familiar with it. He has seen it with his own eyes for 72 years.
I don't know who understands the world better, then, me or my dad. Superficially, I do. I have looked at the world, but my dad, he's seen it. If you follow me.
Posted by: Rod Dreher | June 27, 2007 11:40 AM
Speaking of a little patch of ground (and this is off the subject of war, too), one of my favorite books gets to just the point you make: John Hanson Mitchell's "Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile." It's about a place in New England called Scratch Flat and makes the argument that you can become wise about the world without leaving home. When you enter "ceremonial time," Mitchell says, "you can actually see events that took place in the past." Maybe this is not so far off the subject after all: in the trenches at the Front, there is no sense of ceremony; maybe that's one of the necessary absences in war that's fought entirely with technology.
Posted by: Larry Allums | June 27, 2007 01:03 PM