Crisis 22

Dead Young Men

A Tragic Trilogy - In the Shadow of War

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While the death of young men in battle may be accepted by the Kremlin as an inevitable price of what I call their special colonial operation (rather than special military operation), there’s a long literary tradition that argues that this price is too high. Even in Homer’s version of the Trojan War there’s a deep critique of violence. This starts when Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter so that the Greek ships will sail swiftly to Troy. It peaks when Achilles drags Prince Hector’s dead body all over the battle field, after which King Priam comes to Achilles secretly. The two enemies sit together, lamenting the division, destruction, and futility of war.

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A Tragic Trilogy

One of the most moving critiques of war is made by the English WW I poet Wilfred Owen. Three of his poems might even be seen as a trilogy on war’s tragedy: “Dulce et Decorum Est” portrays the brutality of fighting and the mental damage it creates; “Anthem for Doomed Youth” depicts a surreal funeral where no one is comforted; and “Strange Meeting” takes the dead soldier into the afterlife, where he meets a man who he calls “strange friend,” who is the enemy he killed.

The dialogue in “Strange Meeting” is dominated by the murdered enemy, thus allowing, from one point of view, the enemy’s view to win out in the end. Yet the , although reversing the roles for which they killed each other. The poem also presents a cruel irony: Owen makes a statement about war, yet the statement is about how the dead solider can’t, because he’s dead, tell his story so that others will avoid going to war. Owen of course was able to write this poem, which is a positive outcome that contradicts to some degree the pessimism of the “strange friend.” Yet in another way, the poem is tragically prophetic: after Owen wrote his poems against war he died in battle a week before Armistice. All those poems he might have written after the war lie, like him, deep in the ground.

In his 1918 poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen argues, skillfully, within the rhythm and rhyme of poetry, that we shouldn’t teach our children “the old lie” — that is, the idea that battle is a glorious affair. Owen refuses to finish Horace’s Latin phrase, dulce et decorum est (“sweet and proper it is”) until the end his poem, after he has shown how bitter and unfitting war is for the soldier in battle. At the end of the poem the phrase Dulce et decorum est / pro patria mori (“sweet and proper it is / to die for your country”) is preceded by three words: “the old lie.”

Owen’s less-famous poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917), might be seen as the next stage in this grim process: the funeral. Owen’s dark and poetic vision of the soldier’s funeral isn’t pervaded by a glorious notion of afterlife. Such a notion is for him as illusory and self-serving as Spenser’s claim to write the name of his mistress in the heavens (in his sonnet cycle Amoretti Spenser tells his mistress, “My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, / And in the heavens write your glorious name”). Instead of seeing soothing candles and hearing heavenly music, the attendees at the soldier’s funeral hear “the monstrous anger of the guns.” That is, they hear the very things that their brothers and sons heard before being blasted to death.

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In the Shadow of War

Graham Greene gets at the horror of war in a much more intimate way in his 1955 novel The Quiet American. Coming upon a dead Vietnamese mother and child, he writes:

They were very clearly dead: a small neat clot of blood on the woman’s forehead, and the child might have been sleeping. He was about six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony knees drawn up. ‘Mal chance,’ the lieutenant said. He bent down and turned the child over. He was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I said to myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’ There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, ‘I hate war.’

Like Greene’s The Quiet American, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five helps us see the present Ukraine crisis within the framework of ❧ the insanity of war, ❧ the brutality of aerial bombardment, and ❧ the geopolitics of the Cold War. Vonnegut understood the necessity of fighting Hitler and (later) the Soviets, yet his 1968 novel shows that he didn’t understand the demonization of the average German or Russian. In one moving scene, he has the POWs come up from the rubble of devastated Dresden, only to find that the only place they can eat or sleep is the inn of a normal, decent German family. The parallel to Mary and Joseph being given a place to sleep is subtle yet palpable. (I look at this scene more closely in🪞 Mirrors).

In an earlier scene, the protagonist Billy is wounded and doped up on morphine in a prison hospital. The prison has a barbed-wire fence dividing Western and Russian POWs.

[Billy] suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison night. Billy was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered himself to a barbed-wire fence which snagged him in a dozen places. Billy tried to back away from it, but the barbs wouldn’t let go. So Billy did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way, then that way, then returning to the beginning again.

A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy dancing — from the other side of the fence. He came over to the curious scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently, asked it what country it was from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So the Russian undid the snags one by one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night again without a word of thanks.

The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, “Good-bye.”

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Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories also deal with the rhetoric and insanity of war. In addition, they supply us with two paradigms, the Sufi conference of birds and the Hindu ocean of stories, both of which ❧ apply to geo-politics and ❧ give us insight into culture and religion in the Global South.

Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously does both of the above: it helps us see into the cultural and political situation of Cold War Indonesia in 1965 (which goes from simmering authoritarianism to apocalyptic violence), and it also supplies us with a southern paradigm, the Wayang shadow puppet theatre, which Indonesians use to explore and evaluate politics. Koch’s use of the Wayang can help us understand ❧ the larger context of the Cold War, ❧ the way Indonesians use religion and art to interpret politics, and ❧ the way puppetry and shadow worlds can help us to come to terms with the fact that much of what we try to understand — Who are the puppet-masters? How do they operate? What are their plans? — remains behind closed doors, beyond our sight-line, behind the screen.

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I see each of the ten novels as a unified, contextualized world that we can use to understand our own world. Each one gives us an imaginative yet realistic vision of alternatives, as well as a critical distance from today’s world of difficulty and pain. The novels of Gogol, Bulgakov, Vonnegut, and Rushdie also contain deep comic elements, which can help us deal with the present war in Ukraine, which might otherwise make us boil up in anger or break down in tears.

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Next: ☯️ War & Peace

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