I've been working on this for a while and it's still not really finished - I need to tie it back to Baxter again, so I will write a part two later.
The motivation for this post is a recent article in the ODT about
Archibald Baxter and the conscientious objectors. There's an
interesting quote in the article by Professor Tom Brooking, who
describes both the pacifists such as Baxter and the regular soldiers
as brave:
He and Mark Briggs
were the only two of the original 14 who held out to the end.
Whether fighting in
a uniform or refusing to put a uniform on, both are acts of bravery,
Prof Brooking says.
''It takes enormous
courage to be one of a small handful of people standing against
something that has huge popular support,'' he says.
''It takes enormous
courage to go over the top as well. Lots of men were being
extraordinarily brave. And Baxter himself said many of the soldiers
never condemned him.
''You can't deny
the courage of someone like Baxter who just refused to put on the
uniform because he was opposed to war in any form.
Of course, the
argument against that is that one of the democratic responsibilities,
in return for all the rights, is to go and defend your country.''
It was not just
bravery in the face of harsh realities that soldiers and
conscientious objectors shared.
Ultimately, both
were fighting for the same thing: peace. Conchies were trying to
bring about peace by stopping people fighting one another, just as
soldiers thought they were going to bring about peace by beating the
enemy.
''The ends were the
same; the means were dramatically different,'' Prof Brooking says.
''That's the
fundamental point of the debate.''
Has either succeeded? Not yet.
There are several
things about this which I find quite interesting. Firstly, it
reflects the fact that the story of Archibald Baxter and the other
conscientious objectors is receiving a lot more mainstream attention.
The recent TV movie 'Field Punishment No.1' and the proposed memorial
to the conscientious objectors here in Dunedin are also examples of
this cultural shift. Anzac day, especially in the enlightened and
peace loving utopia of modern day Aoteroa, is more and more
'liberalised': you can pick and choose your WW1 heroes as you see
fit. If you are conservative and think that it was vitally necessary
that the Germans had to be defeated, you can remember the ordinary
soldiers who went over the top with their bayonets flashing. If you
are a peace loving liberal, you can honour the pacifists with white
poppies. Either way, both political choices share a common underlying
virtue: bravery. This ethical substance transcends the nastiness and
confusion of politics, and allows us to bask in the poignant
spiritual radiance of the Anzac tradition, re-imagined and
re-invigorated by our 21st century notions of tolerance
and pluralism.
Secondly, this
elevation of the virtue of courage and the desirablity of peace is
very difficult to fault. Who can possibly demand the opposite in good
conscience? If we wore yellow poppies and celebrated the cowards and
shirkers we would be considered perverse. If we openly celebrated the
violence and the blood of war without any moral coding in terms of
political necessity, we would be considered bloodthirsty and evil.
Courage and peace are morally ironclad, unimpeachable imperatives.
These thoughts
prompted me to think about the idea of courage more generally. What
exactly is courage, and why is it so highly valued? I started by
reading Plato's Laches, a
dialogue devoted entirely to this question. As per usual, Socrates
demolishes all of the suggested definitions of courage, and the
dialogue ends up in the same place as most other Socratic dialogies:
aporia, or philosophical confusion. The beauty of Plato's thinking is
not the answers, which are few and mostly negative, but rather the
process and the insistence on not accepting the integrity of ideas as
given to us.
Without
going into the details of the dialogue, there is a movement from a
common sense notion of courage as 'standing your ground in a fight'
to a more abstract and cerebral definition which involves some kind
of wisdom or intelligence. Foolish acts of fearlessness are not
noble, so cannot count as being courageous. Courage is more than
fearlessness, and requires a certain kind of knowledge to count as a
kind of virtue. There are conceptual problems with this account, but
for the purposes of this essay I will put these difficulties to one
side, and make the assumption that Socrates was onto something even
if he didn't quite get there in the end: courage has to involve some
form of intelligence for it to be admirable courage. Exactly what
this conception entails – what kind of intelligence, what sort of
knowledge it requires and so on – I will leave these questions
open, and turn to consider some examples from WW1 based literature to
explore this idea some more.
My
first example comes from Robin Hyde's Passport to Hell.
The rebellious Starkie has just discovered the body of his 16 year
old 'mascot' friend Jackie. He takes revenge:
There was a German maxim-gun with a crew of three that in the rising
dawn made merry across No Man's Land, telling the story of a raid
that got cut to pieces before it reached the lines. But as the maxim
sang there was a shout overhead and a terrible figure crashed down
upon it. The figure wore a tunic torn open at its waist, clotted and
dyed and hideous with blood. Blood dripped from its nose and open
mouth, blood stained its nightmare club – a great axe-handle with
an iron cog nailed to one end. It was neither white man nor black.
Under the blacking smeared on face and throat the skin shone
red-brown. So much the three German gunners had time to see before
the figure uttered a madman's shriek, and with a madman's strength
leapt down on them. The axe-handle swung twice, and twice the iron
cog came away with hair and blood sticking to it. Then the butt end
was thrust into the third gunner's face as he turned to run. The
three lay in the pit. The figure groped forward with great brown
hands, swung the machine-gun round until its muzzle pointed directly
at the gunners. Then the rattle of bullets began. The maxim sang
again and its gunners lay on the ground, their bodies impaled by the
sharp little tusks of lead.
The terrible figure met an officer
from the Otago lines as it dragged the maxim towards the British
wire. The officer, a Major, stopped and said: 'Good work, Starkie!'
Starkie stared at him, a red world swimming before his eyes. He
wasn't the only one. Officers – men gently brought up, trained in
decency and self-restraint – were wandering about like madmen,
silly from the concussion of shell-fire. Their eyes were bloodshot
and dazed, and in their hands they carried naked bayonets, wet with
blood. They were still hunting, like animals, with no idea whom they
sought or why. Presently they would come to; you would notice nothing
unusual about them except in quiet moments, when the thick, glaucous
glaze swam over the pupils of the pupils of their eyes again1.
This is an interesting passage because it highlights a central
tension in Hyde's text: she clearly relishes the violence and bravery
of Starkie, but she also recognises it as being mentally unhinged.
The 'red brown skin' description emphasises Starkie's (supposed) Red
Indian ethnicity, and has echoes of the idea of a 'noble savage'.
When Hyde turns from the heroic and enraged Starkie to the officers,
her vision is less tainted by this sort of romanticism: the officers
are 'like animals' and their vision is obscured by a haze of blood.
There is bravery here for sure – but the enraged blood lust is
animalistic, and there is not too much thinking going on, just
aggression. Socrates would be disappointed.
The next example comes from Louis Ferdinand Celine's novel Journey
to the End of the Night (1932):
That colonel, I could see, was a monster. Now I knew it for sure, he
was worse than a dog, he couldn't conceive of his own death. At the
same time I realised that there must be plenty of brave men like him
in our army, and just as many no doubt in the army facing us. How
many, I wondered. One or two million, say several millions in all?
The thought turned my fear to panic. With such people this infernal
lunacy could go on for ever …. Why would they stop? Never had the
world seemed so implacably doomed.
Could I, I thought, be the last coward on earth? How terrifying! ….
All alone with two million stark raving heroic madmen, armed to the
eyeballs? With and without helmets, without horses, on motorcycles,
bellowing, in cars, screeching, shooting, plotting, flying, kneeling,
digging, taking cover, bounding over trails, bombarding, shut up on
earth as if it were a loony bin, ready to demolish everything on it,
Germany, France, whole continents, everything that breathes, destroy,
destroy, madder than mad dogs, worshipping their madness (which dogs
don't), a hundred, a thousand times madder than a thousand dogs, and
a lot more vicious2!
Celine fills out his idea of bravery as a form of mental weakness in
more detail:
Walking along, I remembered the ceremony of the day before. It had
taken place in a meadow, at the foot of a hill; the colonel had
harangued the regiment in his booming voice: 'Keep your courage up!'
he had cried. 'Keep your courage up! And Vive la France!'
When you have no imagination, dying is too much. That's my opinion.
My understanding had never taken in so many things at once.
The colonel had never had any imagination. That was the source of all
his trouble, especially ours. Was I the only man in that regiment
with an imagination about death3?
The best moment comes a few pages later, when Celine describes
Captain Ortolan:
One morning when they rode in from a reconnaissance patrol,
Lieutenant de Sainte-Engence invited the other officers to confirm he
hadn't made it up. 'I sabred two of them!' he insisted, showing
everybody his sabre, and true enough, the little groove was full of
caked blood, that's what it's made for.
Captain Ortolan backed him up. 'He
was splendid! Bravo, Sainte-Engence! … Ah, messieurs,
if you'd only seen him! What a charge!'
It was in Ortolan's squadron that it happened.
'I saw every bit of it! I wasn't far away! A thrust to the right! …
Zing! The first one drops! … A thrust full in the chest! … Left!
Cross! Championship style! … Bravo again, Saint-Engence! Two
lancers! Less than a mile form here! Still lying there! In a ploughed
field! The war's over for them, eh, Sainte-Engence? … A double
thrust! Beautiful! I bet they spilled their guts like rabbits!'
Lieutenant de Sainte-Engence, whose horse had galloped a long way,
received his comrades' compliments with modesty. Now that Ortolan had
authenticated his exploit, his mind was at rest and he rode off some
distance to cool off his mare by circling slowly around the assembled
squadron as if he were just coming in from a steeplechase.
'We must send another patrol over there!' cried Captain Ortolan.
'Immediately!' He was terribly excited. 'Those two blackguards must
have been lost to comethis way, but there must be more behind them ….
Ah, Corporal Bardamu. Go take a look, you and your four men!'
[….]
The regular army men told me that in peacetime this Captain Ortolan
hardly ever showed up for duty. Now that a war was on, he made up for
it. He was indefatigable. His vigour and verve, even among all those
other lunatics, were getting more unbelievable from day to day. It
was rumoured that he sniffed cocaine. Pale, rings under his eyes,
always dashing around on his fragile legs … Whenever he set foot on
the ground, he'd stagger at first but then get hold of himself and
stride angrily over the furrowed fields in search of some new feat of
daring. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd sent us to get a light
from the muzzles of the enemies guns. He was in league with death,
I'd have sworn they had a contract together, death and Captain
Ortolan4.
For anybody who feels the need for a tonic of good old fashioned
misanthropy and black humour in the face of the mountain of
sentimental moronism awaiting us in April 2015, I heartily recommend
reading the first part of Journey.
These examples of mine do not really prove anything – it would be
easy enough to find conflicting cases where the courage on display
was not the savage animalistic frenzy Hyde describes, nor the idiotic
masculinist version lampooned by Celine. A good example might be
Maurice Shadbolt's play Once on Chunuk Bair, which basically
ticks all the correct Anzac boxes and maintains the narrative of
courage we are supplied with again and again in millions of books and
movies. Like any narrative, it has some element of truth to it, and
it's not my intention here to cynically cast doubt upon the moral
integrity of dead Anzac soldiers. Rather, if we want to actually
honour the dead, I think it's necessary to question this sort of
received view, and think critically about what courage might mean in
the context of any war, and world war one in particular.
To me, the most outstanding fact about the first world war is its
utter and complete failure to bring about a world of peace. The idea
sold to people at the time that it would be the 'war to end wars'
turned out to be absolutely false. We are still paying for the idiocy
of this war today in the middle east. It seems to me quite perverse
that we focus on the subjective bravery of the soldiers who fought in
the war, rather than the broader question of what the actual
consequences of all that courageous (or otherwise) violence were.
And for a bit of light relief from the heaviness .... here's John Goodman as Walter and his thoughts on pacifism:
References:
Celine, Louis Ferdinand. 1988 (1932). Journey to the End of the
Night. John Calder Ltd.
Hyde, Robin. 1986 (1936). Passport to Hell. Auckland
University Press
Plato, Laches.
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/plato/laches.pdf
1Hyde
(1986) p.131
2Celine
(1988) p.18 -19
3Ibid.
p. 23
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