The New Old Lie: On War Art and the Meaning of War
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Every so often the word goes out at Fort Leavenworth to gather along Grant Avenue. Leavenworth is not a typical military post. At most bases, young servicemen and -women dominate the population, but the focus at Leavenworth is educating midgrade officers, a more experienced group. These days, the overwhelming majority has been to war in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or both. They have seen combat firsthand. They have seen a lifetime’s worth of death and destruction. Even more, they have led troops under fire and have had to order young people into harm’s way. They have seen the people they had to guide and protect shot down, blown up, and shattered beyond all recognition. They have had to write the letters to grieving families, trying to explain why their world will never be the same.
This perspective is what the midgrade officers bring to the assembly at Leavenworth, when the entire post lines up along Grant Avenue, to pay tribute at a funeral procession for another life destroyed at war in a far-off land. The veteran officers salute the body and the long line of cars carrying broken families, and they remember the soldiers they lost and the families they’ve seen torn apart by war. Then they head back to work, haunted by the wars they have known and the wars yet to come. The prevailing mood is not that they do not want to do their job. It is that they must do their job better.
Recently, Benjamin Schwarz, a literary critic at the The Atlantic Monthly, reviewed a collection of Ambrose Bierce’s writings. Bierce fought in the Civil War, and he was disillusioned by that experience. As Schwarz writes,
Emerging from the charnel house, Bierce shunned any effort to invest the butchery with meaning… . For him the war was nothing more—could be nothing more—than a meaningless and murderous slaughter, devoid of virtue or purpose.For Schwarz, this was Bierce’s greatest attribute: to cut through the phony cant of the war’s causes, “including the North’s smug myth of a Battle Cry of Freedom (still cherished by many contemporary historians, as it flatters their sense of their own righteousness).” Bierce’s cynicism was not just the result of a painful individual experience that allowed him to produce affecting works of art; it was an identification of the universal truth of war.
Schwarz has made similar claims about the chroniclers of the Second World War. Artists and nonfiction writers like Steven Spielberg and Stephen Ambrose have earned his ire for their supposed mythmaking of America’s G.I. “plaster saints” nobly fighting the “Good War.” To Schwarz, literary figures like the historian qua memoirist Paul Fussell have captured the true meaninglessness of it all.
The latter view, Schwarz has written, “that combat, even combat that defeats Nazi Germany, is without uplift, without virtue, and without purpose” is “unusually clear-eyed” about “real war.” This belief has been overlooked by a population that wants to be coddled and so refuses to recognize that true artistry goes hand in hand with, as Schwarz would have it, the accurate, nihilistic view of war.