Points Summer Book Club

The power of Fussell’s book lies in its not being an anti-war diatribe. It’s not just a laying-out of the facts, either; history can never be just that. Fussell creates an image of war by giving us glimpses of it from many angles, rather than just accumulating gory or shocking details. His chapter 4, on “Myth, Ritual, and Romance,” is a good example.

The trench fighters of the Great War did what human beings do: whether or not they found it, they looked for meaning in what they were ordered to perform, and they did so in the only way open to them—through education and tradition, ie, what they already knew. A man going to the trenches, or already there, tried to invest his experience with what Fussell calls “the power of myth,” recognizable to many of us as the language that mythologist Joseph Campbell made popular beginning about the time of Fussell’s book.

Fussell’s point is different from Campbell’s, which is about myth’s universality and its ability to bind different peoples together around common themes. In Campbell’s view, nothing is more enduring than myth—neither natural forces nor human passions, all of which are used by the “power of myth” in giving us our value systems. Fussell doesn’t deny this; rather, he shows that the measure of the Great War can be taken in part precisely by its capacity to overwhelm mythic values and deny higher meaning to actual experience.

Noting the habit of trench soldiers to create legends, practice rituals, and use such words as conversion and rebirth to describe their combat experiences, Fussell writes: “that such a myth-ridden world could take shape in the midst of a war representing a triumph of modern industrialism, materialism, and mechanism is an anomaly worth considering” (115). The anomaly extended to just about everything, Fussell says, including the “practical, ad hoc, empirical principle of three in military procedure.” For example, the triadic structure of the trenches themselves—front, support, and reserve—was filtered through the “magical or mystical threes of myth, drama, ritual, romance, folklore, prophecy, and religion” (127).

Fussell puts forth a convincing case that trench soldiers commonly practiced such interpretation of actual events “in order to confer some shape and meaning on their suffering” (141). In the end, though, it didn’t work; reality finally overwhelmed all the systems of meaning brought to bear against the horrors of the front line. This is Fussell’s conclusion: the Great War “refuses to be so elevated” and “resists being subsumed into the heroic myth…. The war will not be understood in traditional terms: the machine gun alone makes it so special and unexampled that it simply can’t be talked about as if it were one of the conventional wars of history” (153).

I wonder, then, if another way of understanding World War I is seeing war unmasked for the first time in history—seeing war for what it really is, divested of what the great WWI poet Wilfrid Owen called “The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” But is unmasking its raw brutality—in Remarque, Fussell, and Owen—enough to stop it? Obviously not.