Scooping up
Unspeakable battles
November 30, 2009 9 comments
Reviewing Russia Against Napoleon by Dominic Lieven in the TLS, Alexander M. Martin writes of a kind of verbal Stockholm syndrome that can afflict the military historian:
[Lieven] has done all one could to find evidence by and about common soldiers, but the paucity of such material means that we mostly hear the voices of their commanders, and their euphemistic language in turn sometimes bleeds into the book. Thus, we read of Cossacks “scooping up” French stragglers. Lonely, frightened men, some of them mere boys, running for their lives as swarms of sabre-wielding riders descend on them — does “scooping up” really do justice to that? On the other hand, if we actually contemplated the reality of war, would we still care who won? ((Alexander M. Martin, “Feed the horses”, TLS, November 20, 2009, p9. (Not online.) ))
This is something that is apparent all the time in histories about war and conflict. It is almost impossible to avoid, geven the scale ofthe killing. Still, the final sentence of the extract is fantastically stupid:
“On the other hand, if we actually contemplated the reality of war, would we still care who won?”
Yes, I think we still might? (Perhaps the point is to problematize the concept of “winning”, but that would need to be fleshed out more than it is in this review.)
I’m not sure that you would come to “not caring who won” by merely contemplating the reality. That would require something a bit more subjective and visceral than the detachment of contemplation.
Doesn’t “scooping up”, in true Unspeak fashion, suggest the romantic image of a dashing cavalryman with an impressive moustache galloping up and, in unbroken stride of his snorting steed, swooping his strong arm down to swing a distressed damsel into his saddle and carrying her away to safety?
As much as anything else, who wins in a particluar conflict will have a bearing on how many more wars are likely to be fought, so we should care (although not always).
Count me among the stupid and contemplative; in general it seems to me that all state actors who engage in wars are generally willing to engage in further wars, no matter how horrific their experiences or how futile and unjust their cause, and those wars always involve suffering that simply cannot be justified. Lenses on history that emphasise economics or infrastructure tend, if anything, to make who “won” even more depressingly irrelevant. I am not saying that the conclusion is that all states are equally bad, nor that we should never care who “won,” but that, allowing for some overstatement for effect common to pretty much all rhetoric, I think the question a good one.
Of course WW2 looms over any arguments regarding “caring who won” but I don’t think that’s a very usable example, because it has now been so thoroughly mythologised that any lessons it might actually have for us are well and truly buried (sometimes under the best of sentiments). As for war fostering peace, the relative lack of warmongering will among European states since 1946 has, I think, mostly been a side effect of a shift in the cockpit of geopolitics and economics. Most of all, though, the author is generalising from Napoleon’s Russia campaign: as far as that goes I’m with Voltaire; “If you have nothing to tell us, but that on the banks of the Oxus and the Jaxartes, one barbarian has been succeeded by another barbarian, in what respect do you benefit the public?”
“Count me among the stupid and contemplative; in general it seems to me that all state actors who engage in wars are generally willing to engage in further wars, no matter how horrific their experiences or how futile and unjust their cause”
Even if that were true, and I don’t think it is really, there are still degrees that make a moral difference. And what about when a state makes war against a non-aggressive neighbour? Surely it makes a difference then which one wins?
“Of course WW2 looms over any arguments regarding “caring who won” but I don’t think that’s a very usable example, because it has now been so thoroughly mythologised that any lessons it might actually have for us are well and truly buried (sometimes under the best of sentiments). “
You’re trying to stack the deck. Of course it mattered which side won WW2 and you know it did and that debunks the point all by itself. There may be lots of mythologising and sentimentalising and even moralising, but we can all agree on that basic point, even if we disagreed (unlikely) on which side should have won.
“there are still degrees that make a moral difference.”
– “I am not saying that the conclusion is that all states are equally bad, nor that we should never care who “won,” but that, allowing for some overstatement for effect common to pretty much all rhetoric, I think the question a good one.”
“You’re trying to stack the deck.”
Yes, I am. We all are, all the time. It’s part of communication.
Let me be clearer as to my own point: I intend to say that war itself is evil, that engaging in war is evil, that it always leads to further evils. That does not logically exclude the idea that there might be relative evils, or even justifiable wars. Even if the evils definitively outweighed any justification regarding causes on some cosmic balancing apparatus, it would not follow that the consequences, including who “won,” had no weight at all. I do not defend the logical statement, “it never matters who won any war,” not least because it clearly always matters to someone.
Without having read the full piece at the TLS I can concur with the extract, however: confronted by violence done to individuals we may find the “bigger picture,” seen from the perspective of the commander, to be absurd. Martin asks about our emotional responses (“would we care”) when the commander’s unspeaking/filtering is taken away. I don’t know the answer, but I don’t think the question is valueless.
I imagine Martin is commenting on the large body of histories of war (which are not always military histories, per se) that address wars as something like factory processes, with causes and forces going in and winners and losers coming out. Such histories gloss over the wars themselves, their suffering and violence, and in that sense they work alongside the commanders’ own unspeaking, filtering those costs out of the equation, presenting slaughters as necessary clinical operations. The tendency to write in this mode is so strong that I think a little rhetorical overstatement is justified – in a review – in order to force the reader out of a passive habit of thought and into a discussion.
‘Scooping up’ is horrible – I agree it is crass and tasteless. As are the more frequently used terms ‘mopping up’ and ‘flushing out’, which are sometimes used by news broadcasters. Whether a military operation is justified or not, it isn’t a form of house-cleaning and it is disgusting to describe it as such.
“On the other hand, if we actually contemplated the reality of war, would we still care who won?”
I basically agree with what Roger said. This is just a question, but it is not a stupid one, even if virtually everyone would say that yes, even with all its evils, it can matter which side wins a war (though often, it really doesn’t much). It is worth contemplating the reality of war (in general and in particular cases) before considering the necessity of victory.
For a good example of someone who actually does this in the ultimate test case, I recommend Paul Fussell’s acccount of the Allied campaign in Europe from 1944-5, ‘The Boys Crusade’.
Fussell is a veteran of that campaign itself and ultimately concludes that the war was justified, ending with the liberation of concentration camps in Western Germany and the transformation of US soldiers from unwilling, cynical draftees into enraged believers in Eisenhower’s campaign
But he doesn’t jump there easily – he takes you through the war in gruesome detail, emphasising not only the raw horror but the utter futuility of so many of the deaths (men dying because of a minor ego-clash between low-ranking officers, being drowned off the side of landing craft, being mercilessly bombed by their own air force, deserting in the face of the absurd offensive on the Hertgen Forest – the longest but one of the least known battles of WW2, a costly Allied defeat in Germany itself in 1945).
Sorry, that should read ‘futility’.