suggestion confirmed and reinforced by the
way
these numbers met their deaths. Sixty per cent of casualties on the Western Front were from shell-fire, against which shelter was
the infantryman’s only defence. Artillery fire transformed the foot soldier from an active participant in conflict to an almost passive victim of a force unleashed randomly around him.
‘Being shelled,’ Louis Simpson claimed later, ‘is actually the main work of an infantry soldier.’
Even the artillery officers who dispensed death were tools in the hands of the war machine, calibrating and adjusting something whose destructive might was inbuilt and pre-determined. The real
aggressor was industrial technology itself. ‘One does not fight with men against
matériel
,’ the French commander-in-chief, Pétain, was fond of saying; ‘it
is with
matériel
served by men that one makes war.’
If shelling meant that courage would increasingly consist of endurance rather than gallantry, the introduction of gas condemned the soldier to a state of unendurable
helplessness. Once an enemy gun emplacement had been knocked out, the danger from that source ceased immediately. Once a gas attack had been launched, all soldiers – even those who had
initiated it – were simply at the mercy of the elements.
The first lethal gas, chlorine, was an inefficient weapon compared with phosgene and mustard gas which came later. Urinating in a handkerchief and breathing through it – as Robert Ross
persuades his men to do in Timothy Findley’s novel
The Wars
– was often protection enough. Against mustard gas – which attacked the skin and eyes as well as the lungs
– no protection was available. Since it could not be evaded, resisted or fled from, it eliminated the possibility not only of bravery but of
cowardice
, the dark backing which
heroism, traditionally, had depended on to make itself visible.
Mustard gas was designed to torment rather than kill. Eighteen times more powerful than chlorine, phosgene was invisible and lethal – but effective masks soon became available. For their
survival, then, soldiers were at the mercy of the same industrial technology that was evolving new means of destroying them.
The pattern for the century had been set: the warrior of tradition becomes little more than a guinea pig in the warring experiments of factories and laboratories. Cowering becomes heroism in
passive mode. The soldier of the Great War comes increasingly to resemble the civilian sheltering from aerial attack in the Second. ‘The hero became the victim and the victim the hero.’
Men no longer waged war, it has often beensaid; war was waged on men. It therefore made no difference if the early zest for war had, by the autumn of 1916, begun to exhaust
itself; by then the conflict had acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own.
All of which tempts us to forget that, in spite of Anderson’s suggestion, the boys marching off to die for their country were hoping to
kill
for their country. We have become so
accustomed to thinking of the slaughter of the war that we forget that the slaughtered were themselves would-be slaughterers. For all their abhorrence of war the poets of protest like Owen, Sassoon
and Graves continued – for very different reasons – to wage it. Dominic Hibberd has pointed out how the official citation for Owen’s Military Cross refers to his having
‘personally manipulated a captured enemy M[achine] G[un] . . . and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy’; in the
Collected Letters
Owen’s family offer a milder
rewrite of the citation, in which he ‘personally captured an enemy Machine Gun . . . and took a number of prisoners’. Sassoon seems to have oscillated between bouts of frenzied violence
and bitter loathing of the war that unleashed this strain in him. Graves recalls that he ‘had never seen such a fire-eater as [Sassoon] – the number of Germans whom I killed or caused
to be killed could hardly be
way
these numbers met their deaths. Sixty per cent of casualties on the Western Front were from shell-fire, against which shelter was
the infantryman’s only defence. Artillery fire transformed the foot soldier from an active participant in conflict to an almost passive victim of a force unleashed randomly around him.
‘Being shelled,’ Louis Simpson claimed later, ‘is actually the main work of an infantry soldier.’
Even the artillery officers who dispensed death were tools in the hands of the war machine, calibrating and adjusting something whose destructive might was inbuilt and pre-determined. The real
aggressor was industrial technology itself. ‘One does not fight with men against
matériel
,’ the French commander-in-chief, Pétain, was fond of saying; ‘it
is with
matériel
served by men that one makes war.’
If shelling meant that courage would increasingly consist of endurance rather than gallantry, the introduction of gas condemned the soldier to a state of unendurable
helplessness. Once an enemy gun emplacement had been knocked out, the danger from that source ceased immediately. Once a gas attack had been launched, all soldiers – even those who had
initiated it – were simply at the mercy of the elements.
The first lethal gas, chlorine, was an inefficient weapon compared with phosgene and mustard gas which came later. Urinating in a handkerchief and breathing through it – as Robert Ross
persuades his men to do in Timothy Findley’s novel
The Wars
– was often protection enough. Against mustard gas – which attacked the skin and eyes as well as the lungs
– no protection was available. Since it could not be evaded, resisted or fled from, it eliminated the possibility not only of bravery but of
cowardice
, the dark backing which
heroism, traditionally, had depended on to make itself visible.
Mustard gas was designed to torment rather than kill. Eighteen times more powerful than chlorine, phosgene was invisible and lethal – but effective masks soon became available. For their
survival, then, soldiers were at the mercy of the same industrial technology that was evolving new means of destroying them.
The pattern for the century had been set: the warrior of tradition becomes little more than a guinea pig in the warring experiments of factories and laboratories. Cowering becomes heroism in
passive mode. The soldier of the Great War comes increasingly to resemble the civilian sheltering from aerial attack in the Second. ‘The hero became the victim and the victim the hero.’
Men no longer waged war, it has often beensaid; war was waged on men. It therefore made no difference if the early zest for war had, by the autumn of 1916, begun to exhaust
itself; by then the conflict had acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own.
All of which tempts us to forget that, in spite of Anderson’s suggestion, the boys marching off to die for their country were hoping to
kill
for their country. We have become so
accustomed to thinking of the slaughter of the war that we forget that the slaughtered were themselves would-be slaughterers. For all their abhorrence of war the poets of protest like Owen, Sassoon
and Graves continued – for very different reasons – to wage it. Dominic Hibberd has pointed out how the official citation for Owen’s Military Cross refers to his having
‘personally manipulated a captured enemy M[achine] G[un] . . . and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy’; in the
Collected Letters
Owen’s family offer a milder
rewrite of the citation, in which he ‘personally captured an enemy Machine Gun . . . and took a number of prisoners’. Sassoon seems to have oscillated between bouts of frenzied violence
and bitter loathing of the war that unleashed this strain in him. Graves recalls that he ‘had never seen such a fire-eater as [Sassoon] – the number of Germans whom I killed or caused
to be killed could hardly be
Similar Books
