// War Literature

Hey guys. Like the rest of you, I am working on the first paper assignment. As I looked back on the material we learned so far, I remembered a movie that sort of relates to something we mentioned in class. The movie I am talking about is Red Cliff II, a 2009 Chinese-epic war film based on the Battle of Red Cliffs (208-209 AD) and events during the end of the Han Dynasty and immediately prior to the period of the Three Kingdoms in ancient China. It is the second part of a 2-part release. Both Red Cliff I and II are pretty good films and I recommend both.

Here is the link to the movie: http://www.megavideo.com/?v=TAGBCGLH
Two of my favorite scenes from the movie are about the “Fog of War” in a literal sense. Skip forward and watch from 28:22 to 30:49, then 36:20 to 44:04. Those of you who appreciate military strategy and tactics might find the scenes pretty clever like I did.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Paths of Glory turned out to be a surprisingly captivating movie. Based on what we have seen so far in class, the two themes that repeatedly came to my mind are corruption and the injustice of the ranking system, although I do not know if the latter can be classified as a theme per say. When we think of the military, we imagine strict rules and guidelines to enforce discipline. While discipline is present here, it is being enforced for selfish reasons. This movie is all about power, where the French military officers do not care if they obtain it by hook or by crook.

When we think of “Paths of Glory” as a term, we think of a warrior giving their all to be glorified, to be memorable, and to leave a legacy. When we watch “Paths of Glory” and look at the path General Mireau chooses, we realize how power and corruption can cost the lives of innocent soldiers. I repeatedly mention corruption because the desire to have power corrupts Mireau, since he was willingly to risk the lives of his soldiers for a promotion, while knowing that the desire to take over the “Ant Hill” was a lost cause from the start. Once he sets out on this path, he keeps on getting more corrupted, in the end only caring about his promotion and reputation. In order to fix his mistake of ordering the attack, he keeps making more and more mistakes. In the end, he does not care about how many soldiers die, since he was willing to kill them himself by ordering the gunfire on them, as long as it means that his chances of a promotion are firm.

The biggest example of an under layer of corruption in the military is most definitely the court trial scene. In this scene, even the best of the military lawyers is unable to defend the soldiers because he is not given a chance to. None of the accused are given a chance to speak, not even the lawyer, which shows the layer of corruption that coats the just court. All that the ranking officers wanted was to get the matter done and over with, without any blame coming on their persons, which was why the defendant was not given any opportunity to present his case. The past of these soldiers is completely neglected, along with the fact that every soldier who was not dead had retreated, not just a handful. While it is possible that such cases do occur in real life, I just wonder how everyone involved lives with their conscience afterward.

This movie shows that where authority of an officer over his regiment will keep the soldiers together, it can also suppress them. One such example is of Lieutenant Roget, who willingly puts the life of Corporal Paris on the line in order to keep his cowardice hidden. Corporal Paris could not do much, since he knew that Roget’s word would be considered above his. At every turn, all of the commanding officers of the military try to get away with stuff using their higher ranking, whether by threatening them or suppressing them by not giving them an opportunity to even defend themselves. Corruption exists everywhere, and this film shows that it exists in even the most strictest of institution: the military.

Two things I have come to expect before this attending this class:

1. War films will have a lot of “war” in it (even if it is Kubrick, I really did think there was going to be more tribulation, less trial).

2. The French aren’t all that bad.

No I kid, I have nothing against the French, they give me wine and women.

But as far as being extremely surprised at the lack of martial conflict between the belligerents.  In fact, the Germans were not shown whatsoever, not a single one.  Even the “siege” on the ant hill depicted zero Germans, though possibly some of the corpses in No Man’s Land could have been German.  An interesting lack of one side of the war.  Kubrick makes it a clear point that this battle isn’t even about the ant hill, but more a question of leading and following, thought that aspect also has complications in the movie.

Col. Dax is absolutely defining as a hero, in both arc and scope, he has the morality, humanity, and leadership traits to be a man that any would follow.  I couldn’t agree more.  But it’s strange, as rebellious as he is to the dehumanizing and outrageous aspects of the orders given to him, he still carries them out.  He obeys the chain of command, he objects, but he still carries it out.  One one would expect that somewhere in the movie, he would wholeheartedly decline an order.

Like Captain Rousseau.

That’s the battery commander.  Who, if I remember correctly, refused 3 consecutive orders, to fire upon his own men with artillery on the basis of mutiny.  A person, who barely has 5 minutes of screen time in the entire film, has more of the aspects of humanity and heroism than the character Kubrick wants us to pay attention to. Not only does he refuse an order, multiple times, he comes forward with that very evidence in order to both support the men being tried for cowardice, as well as discredit the general.

But let’s look at the larger scope of what is trying to be conveyed here, I don’t want to paint the Colonel as a coward or undeserving of any praise.  He does indeed go to great extent to try and save his men.  The underlying theme that I took from this film is that the soldier, as was depicted in this film but also as a general statement for the era, is minuscule in importance, a number and rank if anything.  Most people tend to think that the atomic bomb was the advent of true weaponry of massive destruction, but taken in context, it started in World War I, with the machine gun and mustard gas.  Casualties that were once in the thousands, became hundreds of thousands. Instead of killing one, five, ten soldiers with a gun, you could kill hundreds.  The very human and basic body function of breathing would kill.  Battlefields were so entrenched that they would serve as the theatre of war for years instead of weeks.  The literary world, as well as sectors of public opinion, began to realize just how capable humanity was in its ability to annihilate itself.  It no longer fell to the individual soldier to create victory, but instead a race for survival until your weapons can kill that man a few hundred yards away.  And if it means over half a battalion’s forces will perish in a conflict, so be it, because you’ll die for “cowardice” for doing something human.

Depressing yes? Well, this is the start of mordernism, and all the lovely depression that goes along with it.

It also seems that “Glory” in the title takes on a more sinister sense in the film.  The general was trying to follow a path of glory in his quest for promotion, and it backfired.  Col. Dax followed a path of glory as well, which ended up being misconstrued as a power play for a promotion, and ended with the men he so desperately wanted to save dying.  So if “Glory” becomes a freighted word, what does the title of the film really mean then?

Many things happened in Paths of Glory but I would like to focus on something that is related to what we already read in class.

“Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper.”

The quotation above was taken from one of the paragraphs in Book I, Chapter VII of Clausewitz’s On War. It comes to mind because during a scene in Paths of Glory, the corrupt General Mireau demands that Colonel Dax round up his men for one massive charge and take over the Anthill. When Colonel Dax is confused by the seemingly impossible order, General Mireau makes “rational” calculations that stun both the colonel and myself. A good 5% killed by “our own barrage”…10% more in no man’s land….20% more getting into the wire…and after that, the worst part is “over.” General Mireau explains those odds in a nonchalant manner as if his soldiers are nothing more than numbers. He finishes off by stating that 25% will fall when attempting to take the anthill, “but at least we’ll have the anthill.”

It was sad to see a general, probably many years removed from the battlefield, to stoop to such despicable means of getting a promotion. He clearly ignores the “friction in war” and does not realize that it is easier said than done. As we saw in the movie, things did not go according to plan. What General Mireau believed would happen, the “war on paper,” the systematic takeover of the Anthill, was tossed aside. “That is why we play the game,” a popular phrase in sports, is very fitting for this situation. You never know how friction will affect the outcome of a war. In General Mireau’s case, the enemy artillery was so deadly that his soldiers either found themselves dead, forced to retreat, or too scared to even get out of their trenches.

I applaud you, Stanley Kubrick!

What an excellent portrayal of war without the “war” part. What we see in this movie is more than just World War I battle scenes – the French fighting the German along 500 miles of trenches. We go beyond that. We dig deep into the nitty-gritty of human behavior; of man’s greatest desires and greatest fears, and his means of achieving those desires and avoiding those fears. This story is about many paths to glory in which men of different military rank advance themselves up the string of command by any means possible. This never-ending lust for self-advancement brings devastating results: men’s lives were at stake, people’s reputations on the line, and the notions of bureaucracy and the justice system seemed to shake at their foundations.

Most importantly, men’s lives were at stake. Most important – to Colonel Dax maybe, but not to General Mireau and Broulard. When Broulard suggested Mireau send his men to Ant Hill, Mireau declined at first, but with little persuasion decided that his men had it in them to do it. What persuaded him was the mention of a promotion. Ant Hill would devour 60% of their men, but that didn’t matter because the objective was to defeat the enemy.

The generals look at their soldiers as tools instead of individuals. It’s easy for them to command when they’re not on the battlefield day-in and day-out fighting for their lives! What is so audacious about two old farts sitting in their throwns of gold in a palatial chateau? And then they have the nerve to charge two privates and a corporal for “cowardice in the face of the enemy” because they didn’t advance to Ant Hill when it was virtually and humanly impossible to do so? All for status and reputation. Sickening.

A perfect example of hypocrisy: Mireau says to Dax that he never got in the habit of sitting because he likes to be on the move. He says, ” I can’t understand these arm-chair officers. Fellas trying to fight a war behind a desk, waving papers at the enemy, worrying about whether a mouse is gonna run up their pant leg.” Who is Mireau to talk? But then Dax replies honestly, “If I had a choice between mice and Mausers, I think I’d take the mice every time.”

What is cowardly and what is brave? Mireau speaks of bravery and patriotism, but he is a coward in all aspects. True bravery would be owning up to your mistakes instead of purposelessly convicting 3 men of a crime and killing them ruthlessly. The trial was a frustrating scene. All evidence and information in the men’s favor was denied because it didn’t pertain specifically to the case at hand. This exemplifies how our legal systems seem to run like clockwork, but what may seem just can turn into something unjust and unfair.

I could barely watch the prison scene. You know you only have a few hours to live. How many? You don’t know. All that’s left is to make circles around the prison cell while you envision your whole life and the future that never will be. I thought of what O’Brien said about death, how the closer you are to death the more real life seems and the more you appreciate it. You notice the little things. Corporal Paris observed a cockroach: “Tomorrow morning I’ll be dead and he’ll be alive. It will have more contact with my wife and children than I will. I’ll be nothing and it’ll be alive.” Private Ferol kills the cockroach and says, “Now you’ve got the edge on him.”

Pride, glory, and personal gain are all good things when taken in small doses. General Mireau was too power-hungry to see the dividing line. If he’d only remembered that “patriotism…is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

One of the most impressive art series about war is by German painter Otto Dix, also a former soldier. Please compare this art project to the writings of Wilfred Owen and Ernst Juenger.

Otto Dix _war

This is one of the most famous poems in English describing the horror of War War I:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST₁

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares² we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest³ began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots⁴
Of tired, outstripped⁵ Five-Nines⁶ that dropped behind.

Gas!⁷ Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets⁸ just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime⁹ . . .
Dim, through the misty panes¹⁰ and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering,¹¹ choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud¹²
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest¹³
To children ardent¹⁴ for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.¹⁵

8 October 1917 – March, 1918

1 DULCE ET DECORUM EST – the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean “It is sweet and right.” The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country

2 rockets which were sent up to burn with a brilliant glare to light up men and other targets in the area between the front lines (See illustration, page 118 of Out in the Dark.) 

3 a camp away from the front line where exhausted soldiers might rest for a few days, or longer

4 the noise made by the shells rushing through the air

5 outpaced, the soldiers have struggled beyond the reach of these shells which are now falling behind them as they struggle away from the scene of battle

6 Five-Nines – 5.9 calibre explosive shells

7 poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with fluid had the same effects as when a person drowned

8 the early name for gas masks

9 a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue

10 the glass in the eyepieces of the gas masks

11 Owen probably meant flickering out like a candle or gurgling like water draining down a gutter, referring to the sounds in the throat of the choking man, or it might be a sound partly like stuttering and partly like gurgling

12 normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew; here a similar looking material was issuing from the soldier’s mouth

13 high zest – idealistic enthusiasm, keenly believing in the rightness of the idea

14 keen

15 see note 1

a

To see the source of Wilfred Owen’s ideas about muddy conditions see his letter in Wilfred Owen’s First Encounter with the Reality of War.

Notes copyright © David Roberts and Saxon Books 1998 and 1999. Free use by students for personal use only. The poem appears in both Out in the Dark and Minds at War, but the notes are only found in Out in the Dark.

Copyright © 1999 Saxon Books.

Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel is a memoir that shows vivid description of his experience in World War I.  Ernst Junger tries to capture mostly the horrifying experiences that soldiers had to undergo.

“But finally we were so accustomed to the horrible that if we came on a dead body anywhere on a fire-step or in a ditch we gave it no more than a passing thought and recognized it as we would a stone or a tree. . . .”  From this quote we can see that their experiences in war is far extreme that in the battle field they had to undergo a form of transformation to be able to view sickening events in a daily basis.  I would have been overwhelmed of even seeing a body lying on the floor.  They view the corpses as if they were “stone or a tree”, as if they were something of the ordinary.  He also does mention “And we never for a moment dreamt that in this war the dead would be left month after month to the mercy of wind and weather, as once the bodies on the gallows were.”  Not only were their corpses but bodies that were their for months rotting.  Passing through a field of corpses and enduring the smell while avoiding bullets to keep from blowing your head off is an experience that Storm of Steel is trying to capture.  The multiple events that all come together as one and trying to capture that feeling to help us see what war truly is.

A scene that grabbed my attention was “I put French cartridges in my pockets, unbuckled a silk – soft ground- sheet, and carried off a water – bottle covered with blue cloth, and after three steps threw all away again.  I was induced by a fine striped shirt, lying near an officer’s ransacked valise, to pull off my uniform and change my linen, and I was delighted by the fresh, clean feel on my skin.”  This scene I think was the most interesting because it showed how little supplied they were and he is willing to throw everything away for one clean shirt.  They are in a situation in which a shirt becomes valuable.  I also interpret this as if he was making the shirt a symbol for a few seconds of escape from the world he is in.  But at the same time reminds him of the circumstances he is in.

His passages bring about what war truly means.  Trying to keep it together mentally.  It also brings in fear, uncertainty, instinct, a sense of rush, at one point also mentions ignorance.

I welcome anyone who wants to pick a scene and explain in detail what might Ernst Junger try to convey from these experiences.  What might he want us to understand or wants us to see from these events that occur in Storm of Steel.

Storm of steel deals with the horrifying accounts of WWI as told by a German soldier; through the stories/journal entries, which he shares we truly receive a glimpse at the horrors of war. While fighting in the war and staying in trenches, these soldiers received constant reminders of the frailty of life and were surrounded by death at every turn. “Another sat with the upper part of the body clapped down over the legs as though broken in the middle…the French must have carried on for months without burying their fallen comrades…white cartilage shone out from the red and blackened flesh.” These vivid descriptions serve as a reminder of the horrors they faced daily, of decomposing, dismembered bodies and the smells, which plagued the air. These are the conditions, which these men had to endure through every day. The writer even goes on to note that “this first glimpse of horrors…is a moment so important in the experience of war.” This is what he said the men desired, their upbringing consisted of just peace and they longed for destruction, which up until that point had only been satisfied through literature; but now they lived destruction. These glimpses are what lingered with the soldiers, not just the people they killed but also the images of the dead rotting bodies of men other soldiers killed; the images imprinted within their memories and the poor conditions they were forced to live in.

We also note how the writer has become desensitized by all which he has seen; “we all looked at these dead with dislocated limbs…as though we walked in a dream through a garden full of strange plants, and we could not realize at first what we had all around us.” The dead no longer invoked the same feelings within him as they would in a civilian. He had realized how accustomed he had become to them, that he no longer saw them for what they truly were, but rather just another piece of nature, like a “stone or a tree…” There are also, shockingly enough, many moments where the narrator is seen relaxing sipping his coffee or having a smoke, even though around him lay many dead and wounded. It makes me wonder how these men found possible to even try to relax when later on he explains, “shell followed shell…and still shell upon shell…We spent Christmas Eve in the line. The men stood in the mud and sang Christmas carols that were drowned by the enemy machine-guns” Those are not moments where a civilian can relax or bring themselves to sing holiday songs, even if the shells and gunfire were to stop; which shows how accustomed these soldiers had become to their surroundings and situations.

It also struck me how the writer goes on to later say, “They sobbed with rage. It is remarkable how little they grasp the war as an objective thing. They seem to regard the Englishmen who fired the fatal shot as a personal enemy. I can understand it…It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle…” The man goes into war with set values that he hopes to upkeep and planned to not hold any hard feelings towards anyone on the enemy lines. He seemed to view it as they are doing their job by shooting at me, as I am doing mine by shooting at them. I do not really know whether to find this side of him honorable or just plain shocking? Shocking at the thought that someone could even separate those feelings in a time of war, I know if someone shot at me, I would definitely take it personal.

-Lizbeth

I know we went into great detail about real vs. fiction etc, in regards to “Good Form”.  I also know that Tim O’Brian is using a literary technique of the untrustworthy narrator, or one that is subjective, that cannot be truly trusted.  And yes, I know that isn’t the point.

But then, what is really the point?  O’Brian could have very well done without his small confession, and he could have written the text without telling us it didn’t happen, but it did “happen”.  There has to be a point to him writing this, and not omitting it, and I think that this meaning was glossed over during class discussion.

Why did he put the effort into telling the reader that it didn’t happen, but it “happened”?  He takes away slightly from the empathy and sensual imagery, telling us (blatantly) that descriptions are fictional.  Why?

Also, in regards to “The Man I Killed”, I actually believe that the “man” in the title refers to the speaker, Tim, and not the man he literally killed.  I mean this in a literary sense.  Given that Tim does not speak whatsoever, shocked, it reminds me of the words of Jarhead which we often quoted:  “A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the rifle.”  I feel as if the shock of actually killing a man killed a part of him.  He is changed.