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| Picasso's Guernica: (Copyright) 2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; all other photos (Copyright) Corbis Images. |
Early in this century,
Leon Trotsky commented, "You may not be interested in war, but war
is interested in you." He would know. A leader of Russia’s 1917
October Revolution and a war commissar who devised military policies that
led to the defeat of the anti-Communist White Army in the Russian civil
war of 1918-20, Trotsky was eventually exiled by Stalin, then hunted down
and murdered. His remark casts war as a kind of baleful intelligence that
turns a predatory eye upon the complacent who presume to live as though
peace will continue indefinitely.
Dr. Michael Ryan and Dr. Daniel
Traister, rare-book librarians at Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, reciprocate
war’s interest. In the spring semester they co- taught a general
honors seminar on Experiences of War in the Twentieth Century.
Trotsky’s quote stands at the head of the course syllabus, which
characterizes the seminar not as a history of war but as a "retrospective
tour of the ways in which ordinary, and not-so-ordinary, men and women
have dealt with war, and the ways in which war has dealt with them."
Together with the instructors, 14 undergraduates read and discussed poems,
memoirs and novels that offered firsthand accounts of the First and Second
World Wars and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, mostly from the perspective
of American infantrymen (see box). The group met in a seminar room on
the library’s sixth floor.
In one of the class readings,
novelist James Jones creates a striking metaphor that lays out the absolute
divide separating war and civilized life. The Thin Red Line tells
the story of C-for-Charlie Company, which lands on Guadalcanal in the
second wave of attackers. The initial assault force had already pushed
the Japanese defenders off the beach, so Charlie Company had not yet been
plunged into war. Approaching a jungle, they move skittishly along its
edge, bending down at points trying to peer through the dense "wall
of green leaves." Peering at the "meaty green leaves,"
one of the characters, Big Queen, "felt that you might almost expect
one of them to bite back at you if you shoved it." Once the group
steps through, they are dismayed by "the suddenness and completeness
of the shutting off." The "enormity" that stood before
them "was more than they had bargained for. Whatever else you could
call this teeming verdure you certainly could not call it civilized. And
as civilized men, it made them fearful."
Poking around inside the
jungle, the group of innocents soon discovers the remnants of an earlier
battle: a torn and bloody shirt from an American soldier, which the narrator
calls the "death flag," and a mass grave from which the leg
of a Japanese soldier protrudes. In search of souvenirs, Big Queen seizes
the leg and hauls the corpse from its grave. With the exhumation also
comes the vile stench of death, an almost palpable presence that compels
the group to flee immediately, "jettisoning their dignity and everything
else." In this symbolic encounter with death, "[n]o man who
was sane and at liberty to leave was going to stay around." Later,
these and other characters and individuals the class studied would not
be free to run away and are forever scarred by their sojourn in the domain
of death. Private Joker, the grimly cavalier narrator of Gustav Hasford’s
Vietnam novel, The Short-Timers, teaches that Marines "live
by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out."
In Experiences of War,
Ryan and Traister lead an intellectual reconnaissance through the wall
of leaves–at least to the degree possible for those dwelling in what
the German author Ernst Jünger, in his World War I memoir, The
Storm of Steel, calls "the dominion of comfort." The students
go as spectators, and though they all come out, some are not quite the
same as when they went in. "I literally had to catch my breath and
put the book aside," says one student of a reading assignment. Freshman
Ji Young Park reports weeping as she read All Quiet on the Western
Front. "This course really gave me something to think about that
four years of high-school history failed to do: the personal experiences
of war."
The particular and individual
perspective paints a starker picture of war’s meaning than does the
broad, single-sweep brush stroke of historical overview. Jones portrays
Charlie Company’s first killing when Private Bead goes off alone
to relieve himself. Squatting with pants down around his ankles, he spots
a Japanese soldier moving through the trees who suddenly turns and charges
with the bayonet on the end of his rifle extended. Bead manages to elude
the bayonet and bring down the enemy soldier. Sobbing and wailing in a
"wild animal scream," Bead claws, kicks and chokes him; then
grabs the rifle, thrusts the bayonet into his chest and finally fires
the weapon point blank when he can’t pull it out. When the beaten
soldier continues to thrash weakly, Bead drives the rifle butt into the
man’s face again and again "until all the face and most of the
head were mingled with the muddy ground. Then he threw the rifle from
him and fell down on his hands and knees and began to vomit."
Bead is ashamed to tell his
buddies about the "hysterical, graceless killing" and the "shameful
botched-up job." It was not an exemplary killing for a citizen from
the home of the brave: John Wayne would have done it better. When the
dead soldier is discovered, the men admire Bead and convince him that
the killing was justified. It is, after all, war. Essentially, they interpret
the experience for him, and he eventually adopts that meaning, even if
he does so doubtfully at first. "[H]e was fitting the killing of
the Japanese man into the playing of a role; a role without anything,
no reality, of himself or anything else. It hadn’t been like that
at all." Later in the story, Captain Stein calls the reconstruction
of lived experience into an acceptable and coherent narrative "the
great conspiracy of history"–the kind of "augmentation"
that veterans use to tidy up their war stories. Bead’s first and
best expression of that unspeakable experience was to vomit. In the novel’s
final sentence, after probing like a connoisseur of pain the nuances of
Charlie Company’s experiences on Guadalcanal, the narrator states:
"One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but
none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it
that way." They had already "made sense" of the war.
July/August Contents | Gazette
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Copyright 1999 The Pennsylvania
Gazette Last modified 7/7/99