Media
The terrible beauty of fighting. Once, a kind of manly jauntiness was the proper attitude for a witness of war; now, compassion is required. Maurice Walsh wonders if either strikes the right note
Published 28 April 2003
Depictions and Images of War in Edwardian Newspapers (1899-1914)
Glenn R Wilkinson Palgrave, 185pp, £45
ISBN 0333717430
Jarhead: a marine's chronicle of the Gulf war
Anthony Swofford Scribner, 260pp, £14.99
We Did Nothing: why the truth doesn't always come out when the UN goes in
Linda Polman Viking Penguin, 234pp, £12.99
In October 1913, Hamilton Fyfe, a star foreign correspondent on the Daily Mail, dashed off a letter to his employer, Lord Northcliffe, from an assignment in Monterrey, northern Mexico. "Last week we had a two-day battle here. Bullets making funny little noise all about the streets, and shells knocking holes in house walls. I nipped about, enjoying it immensely. There were some horrible sights of course. Imagine a big square with a dead rebel hanging from every lamp-post and every telegraph pole! But the interest of it all was so great that one accepted the horrors as a matter of course. And dead men look so like waxworks that it is difficult to believe they really are corpses."
This description of being in the thick of the Mexican revolution was never published, but it captures a style and demeanour of the war correspondents of that era. Jaunty irreverence about the horror of battle was in; affecting testimony about the disfiguring brutality of warfare was out. Glenn Wilkinson - whose meticulous study of war reporting in the 15 years before the Great War reveals some remarkably enduring themes - would no doubt argue that Fyfe's bravado was characteristic of a sensibility for which images of war were mostly unchallenging. Wilkinson argues that this distancing and denial helped to shape a mentality of blithe optimism that nourished the enthusiasm to enlist in 1914 and was popularised in the poems of Rupert Brooke, among others.
But Fyfe's flippancy, faked or real, is not without its own honesty. Who among those who went to Iraq to witness the war would admit even privately that "the interest of it all was so great that one accepted the horrors as a matter of course" - even though this would be an entirely fair summation of a journalist's desire to be there? Just as nonchalance was expected of the well-regarded observer of war a century ago, so today some semblance of emotional empathy must be the veneer for even the most self-seeking spectator. Nonchalance and compassion may or may not be poses; truth and falsity in the language of war is the common theme of these books, both in a broad sense and the more particular sense of striking the right note.
On the radio a couple of weeks ago, Captain Frank Thorp, the US military spokesman in Qatar (the one whose every reply included the first name of his interviewer), attempted to evade a line of questioning about civilian casualties by declaring that "war is a very difficult proposition. It's just not that pleasant."
Anthony Swofford's memoir about his experience as a US marine during the first Gulf war presents conflict as a very different proposition altogether. Swofford reveals the profanity, machismo, cynicism and stupidity of his Marine Corps family. His book has some of the characteristics of the anti-war memoirs that emerged from Vietnam. Swofford is a cool guide to the craft of the sniper and to the marines' training to fight without mercy, and gives voice to disenchantment and a kind of stylised despair. The ruthless commitment to a war of annihilation as described by Swofford is echoed by a UN peacekeeper quoted in Linda Polman's book, who confesses that, compared with the Americans sent into Haiti in 1994, UN soldiers are "impotent missionaries". Later, in Rwanda, Polman wishes she could have the Americans to protect her when a UN captain who confronts government soldiers over the killing of a Hutu refugee is told: "We are the bosses." She is sure the Americans would never allow themselves to be addressed like this.
Swofford draws a very sharp line between civilian life and the Marine Corps. The depth of the distinction is revealed in his reference to "the almost civilian flavours" of the hamburgers he eats when he sneaks out of boot camp in California. The book begins as he sits in a basement, unpacking his desert camouflage gear from a rucksack he hasn't opened for many years. His uniform doesn't fit any more, and he uses this as a metaphor for the kind of distance he seeks from his former life. Swofford didn't see much combat - though he offers a vivid account of what it is like to be subjected to friendly fire - so much of his story is about the boredom of waiting for war to begin. He at once regrets that he did not have the chance to kill an Iraqi and recalls with sadness the occasion he stumbled on a circle of Iraqi soldiers frozen in death around a desert campfire, "bent forward at the waist" over their tin coffee cups.
Swofford became a marine because he was from a military family and because, modishly, following the break-up of his parents' marriage, he was "lured into a life of loneliness, boredom and fear". In truth, his seduction began many years before, when, aged 13, he watched the televised funerals of some of the 241 marines killed by suicide bombers in Lebanon in 1983. It was then, he says, that he fell "in love with manhood".
Swofford returns several times to the impact of images and representations of warfare. Several years after his adolescent epiphany, and now a marine himself, he watches the classic films of post-Vietnam disillusionment with his comrades in arms. Unlike civilians who find a comforting anti-war message in Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, the young marines interpret these images of conflict in an entirely different way. "Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message . . . the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of [the marines'] fighting skills."
When Swofford first arrived in Saudi Arabia, he was visited by newspaper reporters. The marines had been told to present themselves to the press as a bunch of "shit-hot hard dicks" but who, at the same time, were there to convince and reassure. Swofford was contemptuous of those reporters who faithfully transcribed his platitudes about patriotism and the need "to get the job done". The idea of warfare as work was, as Wilkinson reminds us, a staple of Edwardian descriptions of war. General Kitchener's transfer to India, for example, was likened in the British press to a gardener moving to do some spadework in a particularly wild part of the estate.
Images from almost a century ago have a contemporary resonance. In 1904, the Daily Express believed that the mere presence of British troops brought civilisation to Tibet. The Tibetan general who led the fight against the British is not described by his military rank in the Express, but as ringleader of a mob. Similarly, the Boers were criticised in the British press for raising the white flag and firing on British troops. And military adventure was often conceived as a police action in which efficient force was used "against recalcitrant enemies portrayed as criminals".
Language becomes slippery when it deals with war; it is difficult to connect the reasoned or passionate diction of strategy and justification with the isolated individual experience of combat. Paul Fussell has argued that the influence of pacifism and the notion of United Nations control of international violence have made fighting harder for soldiers: "For the intelligent, sensitive and highly literate especially, each modern war becomes harder to fight than the one before because of the constant augmentation of anti-war writing."
Similarly, Wilkinson ends his book with a plea that war should be taken as instruction: "If we can become more conscious of the realities of war, we also might be less willing to resort to military conflict as a knee-jerk reaction to terrorism."
Swofford is certainly conscious of the realities of war; he is the epitome of the sensitive, literate soldier (he sat in a Humvee reading The Iliad and Camus while his comrades wrestled in the sand). Although he understands the stark realities of war, he remains resolutely ambivalent about his own response to them. Like many others before him, he finds it hard to strike the right note.
Maurice Walsh is a BBC journalist. He is completing a study of foreign correspondents who reported on the Irish revolution
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