War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrote this book in the absolute conviction that there never has been, nor ever can be, a ‘good’ or worthwhile war,” wrote the Canadian World War II veteran Farley Mowat. “Mine was one of the better ones (as such calamities are measured), but still, a bloody awful thing it was. So awful that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cotton-wool of protective forgetfulness, and would have been well content to leave them buried forever . . . but could not, because the Old Lie—temporarily discredited by the Vietnam debacle—is once more gaining credence; a whisper which soon may become another strident shout urging us on to mayhem.” 7
    In Homer it is the malice of the gods that propels both sides to destruction. In Shakespeare, it is the capriciousness of men. There is, at the end of Troilus and Cressida , one of the great scenes of war set down in literature. It is the moment when Achilles, roused to fury over the death of his companion Patroclus on the battlefield, finds Hector, unarmed, stripping the armor off the body of a Greek soldier whom he had struck down as he was fleeing the battlefield.
    Shakespeare turns the scene into butchery, with the helpless Hector begging Achilles not to strike him while he has no weapon. Achilles has no chivalry. Rather than a fight between equals, it is murder, with Hector being surrounded and struck by a swarm of Achilles’ Myrmidon soldiers.
    ACHILLES:
    Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set,
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels;
Even with the vail and dark’ning of the sun,
To close the day up. Hector’s life is done.
    HECTOR :
    I am unarm’d, forgo this vantage.
    ACHILLES:
    Strike, fellows, strike, this is the man I seek.
So, Ilion, fall thou next! Come, Troy, sink down!
Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone.
On Myrmidons, and cry you all amain,
“Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain!” 8
    Moments after Hector’s death dozens of heavily armed men thrust spears into Hector’s corpse. Achilles commands his Myrmidons to cry out to the Greeks that he “hath the mighty Hector slain.” Here is the lie of the heroic ideal, an ideal we nurture,despite centuries of war. Here is the instant creation of heroic myth, out of murder. Here also we see the mutilation of the dead that has been part of military behavior since there were men in arms. If you kill your enemy his body becomes your trophy, your possession, and this has been a fundamental part of warfare since before the Philistines beheaded Saul.
    In Bosnia there was a local Croat warlord who rode around his village with the skull of the local imam for a hood ornament. In El Salvador government soldiers sometimes carried photos of themselves squatted around the body of a rebel killed in a firefight.
    History for Shakespeare was not the example of the inner workings of the divine or the fodder for some generalized principle. It was merely itself. It moved toward no goal. Shakespeare understood the monstrous, deadly neutrality of nature.
    â€œThose who believe that God himself, once he became man, could not face the harshness of destiny without a long tremor of anguish,” Simone Weil writes, “should have understood that the only people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane, who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes. The man who does not wear the armor of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul.” 9
    And when the rhetoric of war is long forgot, what happens to the heroic dead, the bereaved mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children of those killed and lost? What comes of those who made, in the glib term of politicians, the supreme sacrifice?
    A passage from the November 18, 1822, London Observer caught the aftermath of