Brave actions never want a trumpet

Andro Linklater

THE BLOODY GAME: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN WAR edited by Paul Fussell Scribners, £19.95, pp. 830 WRITERS ON WORLD WAR II edited by Mordecai Richler Chatto & Windus, £18.99, pp. 727 WARRIORS' WORDS: A QUOTATION BOOK edited by Peter Tsouras Cassell Arms & Armour, £19.99, pp. 534 ECHOES OF WAR: PORTRAITS OF WAR FROM THE FALL OF TROY TO THE GULF edited by Robert Giddings Bloomsbury, £15.99, pp. 338 Each of these four glossy volumes, swollen fat as tombstones with pickings from military manuals, wartime reminis- cences, and poems about fighting, purports to concern itself with war. This is dishonest. Among their hundreds of excerpts, few dwell upon the boredom, bullying and bureaucratic vacuity which for 90 per cent of the armed forces comprise 90 per cent of their experience of war. In one of the rare allusions quoted here, that admirable ironist Field Marshal Wavell observed:

The main ethical objection to war for intelli- gent people is that it is so deplorably dull and usually so inefficiently run.

But as he went on to point out, peace suffers from the same faults, and so the compilers concentrate on what makes war different — the attempt to kill without being killed. This experience obviously differs from one individual to another. Winston Churchill, having come through Omdur- man unscathed, declared that

Nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.

Harrison Salisbury observed the Red Army shooting German prisoners during the recapture of the Crimea in 1944 and took a grimmer view:

War was the garbage heap of humanity. It was shit and piss and gas from the rump; ter- ror and bowels that ran without control. Here Hitler's Aryan man died a worse death than any he devised in the ovens of Auschwitz, anus open, spewing out his gut until a Red Army tommy gunner ended it with lazy sweep of his chattering weapon.

At the age of 82, General Douglas MacArthur offered a generation of West Point cadets young enough to be his great- grandchildren the perspective of a soldier fading away: I listen vainly, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange mournful mut- ter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes in my ears — Duty-Honor-Country.

And those of us who have not been shot at or seen someone killed in his own faeces or known a sweet corrupting nostalgia for the moral code of the drill sergeant tend to feel rather like virgins listening to the con- versation at a brothel door. What, we won- der, is it like to have thanatonic intercourse?

The least satisfactory answer comes from Echoes of War, a collection of snippets spanning 4,000 years of warfare, which attempts a Cook's Tour of killing through the centuries without any coherent pattern other than chronology. Just as pornography focuses on the act of penetration to the exclusion of all else, so it returns again and again to the moment of slaughter, and in excerpts so abbreviated they lose whatever literary or military significance the originals might once have possessed.

More sophisticated but equally lacking in pattern is Writers on World War II. This was originally supposed to be restricted to the accounts of novelists and poets, but Morde- cai Richler mistakenly decided to pad it out with combat reminiscences and journalists' reports. The result, which he calls 'a mosaic', is a mish-mash, although there are some good remnants of the original inten- tion, among them lain Crichton Smith's poem on the grave of unknown seamen, whose opening verse could stand for all the war's 78 million dead: One would like to be able to write something for them

not for the sake of the writing but because a man should be named in dying as well as living, in drowning as well as on death-bed, and because the brain being brain must try to establish laws.

In Warriors' Words, a dictionary of quota- tions addressed to 'junior officers, military professionals, and military enthusiasts', Peter Tsouras does try to establish laws, although only by the suspect expedient of quoting the maxims of dead generals. In his foreword he adopts the tone of a suburban madam assuring her clients that the house is really most respectable, and that they need feel no embarrassment if this is their first visit since more experienced customers have left detailed instructions on how to prepare for the encounter, how to achieve full satisfaction, and how to mop up after- wards. Showing his refinement, he talks of `the art of war', 'the profession of arms' and other genteel euphemisms for killing, and contrives to ignore the crude reality that conflict is finally decided by industrial might rather than military skill, as the pre- sent state of US-Vietnamese relations amply demonstrates.

It is only in The Bloody Game, whose field is 20th-century warfare, that a sense of pattern and moral purpose emerges. Although he presents the bloodiest and muddiest scenes of battle, Paul Fussell as an experienced former US infantryman knows how to give them their proper con- text.

But those are adept students of war [he writes in the introduction] who learn what Ernest Hemingway learned from his lifetime of observing men at war: 'Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justi- fied, is not a crime.'

Stripped of any glamour, the well-chosen accounts of his witnesses are moving and revealing and unchanging. Here is Siegfried Sassoon on the first world war:

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack - And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?

Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurch- ing back With dying eyes and lolling heads — those ashen-grey Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

And half a century later, here is Michael Herr in Vietnam:

He had one of those faces, I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn't wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he'd live it out old.

My one reservation concerns the title, which contradicts the book's sober pur- pose. For the participants to call war a game is understandable, but when it becomes a publishing venture there is an absolute necessity to name its multiple foulness rightly. But otherwise he provides as complete an answer to the virgins' question as words could convey — and we wished we had never asked it.