EDIT: So, I’m an idiot. I had this thing about *Memorial Day*. My bad.
So it’s Veteran’s Day, and I feel the need to stir up the pot even at this late day. I’m sure many of you will hate me after this.
I posted the famous Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” instead of something like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” because I think Owen has it right. The McCrae poem is hostile and violent in its memorializing the dead, demanding apocalyptic revenge, perpetuating violence for violence and blood for blood, lest the dead have died in vain. The key, though, is that in war, to die in vain means to die on the wrong side; therefore, of course, at some point, soldiers’ have died in vain. We can avoid this all we want by saying they died for a movement or an ideal or simply that the fact that they died makes them heroes who by definition didn’t.
McCrae wrote:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
To me, that’s….vile. Dreadful. Let us go to war simply on the grounds that people have died in the war we’re in. What a way to thank our soldiers, by sending them into combat. That’s the desperate glory that Owen talks about. As I’ve written before, we all want to be heroes. We all want to be worth a damn. We all want to matter. And the old call goes out — “It is sweet and proper to die for your country.” And rather than heeding the call of the Gospel to moral greatness, to the abandonment of self into the hands of God in the service of others, we grab our guns and march into righteous combat.
I know, I know, that there are times when war is necessary. But I’m so often struck by how many people find it desirable, something in which we should find glory, rather than something we should mourn and wretch at.
But that’s me.
Night.
4 comments
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November 11, 2009 at 7:53 pm
kemiro
veteran’s day.
November 12, 2009 at 6:50 am
Ryan
“But the imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace, so that interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless. This is true; but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! And though these are past, the end of these miseries has not yet come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged, yet, supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description—social and civil wars—and with these the whore race has been agitated, either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak. If I attempted to give an adequate description of these manifold disasters, these stern and lasting necessities, though I am quite unequal to the task, what limit could I set? But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrong-doing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man’s wrong-doing. Let every one, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.” — Augustine, City of God, XIX.7
A long quote, but worth the read and certainly pertinent.
November 12, 2009 at 11:32 am
Anonymous
Hey there Brian! I really liked your last two paragraphs! You’re very right that we all want to be worth and damn, and that often times this rather directionless, and limitless, desire brings us to decisions and actions that have more to do with self than anything that is spiritually or externally noble. I struggle with this in my own faith—always trying to do something special for someone, or for God, when it is really only myself that I am serving! Great thoughts!
November 13, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Niall Mor
Brian,
I have to admit your post rubbed me the wrong way because my Dad was a veteran of World War II and Korea, and I felt your post was more than a little insulting to him and all the men of his generation who served in those wars. I respectfully suggest you’re oversimplifying the issue of what our proper attitudes toward war and war dead should be. I’d like to suggest that the truth about war is not found either in a tribute poem like “In Flanders Field” or in a protest poem like “Dulce et Decorum Est” but in both. The authors of both poems served in World War I, and obviously had radically different experiences of it. Yes, war is a terrible, bloody, brutal, destructive thing that should be avoided whenever possible. In the last analysis, there is absolutely nothing glorious or glamorous about it. I’d suggest that no one knows that better than soldiers, because they know they will be called upon to pay the price in war. I’d suggest that this is the truth that Wilfrid Owen was trying to get at in his poem.
However, I’d also suggest that the family and friends of those who die in war need to believe that their loved ones died for some good purpose, and that the lives of their loved ones were not merely lost in some senseless slaughter–hence the need for tribute poems like “In Flanders Field.” According to the Wikipedia entry for this poem, McCrae wrote it the day after seeing one of his best friends killed.
I’d suggest that what he’s really trying to say in this poem is not so much, “The bastards killed us, so you go out and kill the bastards,” as it is, “Life is fragile. One day, we are alive and living to the fullest, and the next, we are dead because of war. See to it that we didn’t die in vain or for nothing.” Of course, the terrible irony of World War I was that it accomplished almost nothing of its stated lofty aims. “The War to End All Wars,” did not end war, but in effect practically guaranteed World War II. It did not “make the world safe for democracy,” but instead gave birth to two of the worst totalitarian movements the world has ever seen: Nazism and Soviet expansionism.
Assuming the cause of a war is just and necessary (which can be a thorny question in itself) those who sacrifice everything in war, including their lives, for the welfare of others, deserve to be honored for that sacrifice. True, war always comes with a terrible cost, but those who pay the cost deserve to be honored.