The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Anatomy of War
THE ANATOMY OF WAR
Through the Wheat. By Thomas Boyd. 12mo. 266 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.75.
MR THOMAS BOYD'S Through the Wheat is much less brilliant than Three Soldiers, but I believe that it is nearly as important. Mr Dos Passos rendered one thing admirably: the nightmare oppression of the army, the ruin by war of certain characters which might under normal conditions have proved decent and useful. But Mr Boyd's theme is something different: the adventures of the man who does not break down. His Sergeant Hicks is a hero: he endures, he accepts authority, he fights boldly. But he is a hero tout autrement intéressant than that other hero Sergeant Empey. His endurance is half helpless exhaustion, his obedience is deeply tinctured with bitterness, and his bravery becomes finally an utter numbness beyond horror and beyond pain. This is probably the only candid account on record of what it meant to be a hero in the Marines, and a valuable document on the ordinary human virtues in reaction to the conditions of modern warfare.
Yet in tone Through the Wheat resembles Three Soldiers and most other sincere pictures of modern war. It is a tone which, I should think, if persisted in, should ultimately discourage humanity with war altogether. One finds it first in its characteristic coolness after the Napoleonic wars. Not that there had ever been lacking in European literature a realistic attitude toward war: Homer describes its ignominies as well as its glories; Aristophanes never tired of making fun of it, and Pindar writes, "Γλυκύ άπείροιοι πόλεμος," (war is sweet to those who have never tried it); The Roman Empire, to be sure, dignified its conquests with a noble ideal (parcere subjectis et debellare superbos); but by the chaos of the Middle Ages common sense was revolted again and great men from Dante to Kant devoted much thought to European peace: the religious wars provoked the satire of Erasmus and Grotius' foundations of international law, and as comment on the War of the Spanish Succession you had Swift's pamphlet on The Conduct of the Allies and Southey's poem about little Peterkin finding the skull from the Battle of Blenheim; then where Swift had applied irony to the economics of war Voltaire turned the same livid light on its cruelty and the whole civilized Europe of the Enlightenment was in general agreement against it. At last the tremendous boom in war under Napoleon brought the formula of our present detachment.
For the stagy and hectic glories of Napoleon had their counter-balance in a scientific dryness. Goya in his engravings gave frank expression to the scorn which had apparently been implicit in Callot's Misères de la Guerre of two hundred years before, and even the noble stoicism of de Vigny could not cloak the littleness of the military life; but it was Stendhal, who had ridden the tidal wave of the Napoleonic romance, who, outliving the romantic age, put warfare to its cruellest scrutiny. Not that he held any brief against war in general: he had merely a passion for ironic analysis. For him the Battle of Waterloo becomes a chaos of trivial or ridiculous incidents; as we go through it with young Fabrice del Dongo in La Chartreuse de Parme there is nothing glorious or romantic about it: first a vivandière, then a corpse, then a general swearing at getting splashed. And when Stendhal had described the first great battle of the century the foundation of modern war fiction had been laid. Tolstoy and Hugo acknowledged their debt to him and most of their successors have debts to acknowledge. Flaubert adds venom to Stendhal's coldness in his steel engraving of the shootings of '48 in L'Education Sentimentale; and in Michelet the attitude of mockery has invaded even military history so that the heroisms of Agincourt or Pavia wear a new and disconcerting aspect. Then the Franco-Prussian War drenched dryness in despair with Zola and his disciples: you find the same formula applied with more or less bitterness in any number of books—in the Soirées de Médan, in Maupassant, in the early novels of Mirbeau. In the United States Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, which, whether or not inspired by Stendhal, represents precisely the same approach to the subject.
With the World War Barbusse burst his bombshell of naturalism compounded with humanitarianism and Dos Passos drew on Barbusse and Stendhal for a more local bombshell of his own. Finally Mr Boyd has rewritten The Red Badge of Courage, which I am told he had never read, as Crane had rewritten La Chartreuse de Parme, which I dare say he had never read either. It is not merely a literary trick which they have all learnt, but a common way of thinking which they have arrived at. And it is a way of thinking which in the future may make the melodramatization of war more and more difficult. What books on war are likely to be read by the educated young people of the next generation? Not the movie-poster propaganda of the press bureaus, but the books I have mentioned above. There are scarcely any other literary works which can be conceived as having a chance of survival; the well-written books of the war, if they are not detached and prosaic like Mr Boyd's, are in general either the saddened reflections of non-combatant older writers—like Masefield's history of Gallipoli or Kipling's epitaphs for dead soldiers; or, like the poems of Siegfried Sassoon, they are the expression of madness and despair.