War and the Primal Heart

“Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount where instinct is king” (John Keegan, The History of Warfare).

         Not a human being exists who would deny that warfare and aggression lodge deep in the seedbed of human history.  Traces of collusive violence strew like crash debris across the planet’s archaeological field; crushed bones, bent weapons, crumbling mortar ruins of cities belligerently pounded free of human life.  And even while the world effulges still with the echo of musket and cannon, we wheel in new weapons to shatter and smash the refuges of our enemies, to obliterate all the human lives that offend us  An embarrassing primordial immaturity still afflicts us even while we try to incandesce with our sentience.  Scrutiny of the human race inevitably leads to the horrified recognition of an elephant in the room, one that trumpets and ruts noisily against the sofa—it is the glaring disconnect between the posturing of our intellect and the overt reality of our brutalizing violence.  Why, after eons of evolution and centuries of civilization, do we still so easily slide into the decomposing bog of primal aggression? 

         The question naturally bifurcates its answer, as the monster of war bears two natural heads—a political head that swells with national warring anger and a military head that snaps when ordered into the real combatant flesh of war.  These are fundamentally different beasts attached to the same trunk, each writhes with its own mien and meter from the same muscled neck.  Volumes have been written on the spasmodic vagaries of the political head of war-- most war histories are in fact pathologically preoccupied with the political and strategic dynamics that feed and direct national belligerence.  John Keegan’s title-quote shifts focus back to the other monster-head of aggression, back to the deep psychological current of real combat and the propelling impetus of violence in the individual soldier.  It is an important distinction, as warfare needs both a political and military head to survive as corrosive incubus in the human experience—national pugnacity dissipates in its own vapor if no one can be found to implement its vulgar threat, a fact most elegantly expressed in the words of a bumper-sticker I saw in a still superpower-wedged Austria in the 1980’s: “Picture this-- there’s a war somewhere, and nobody goes” (Stell dir vor—es gibt krieg, und keiner geht hin). 

          So what exactly is John Keegan’s point?   His argument forms the concision of four analytical end-prongs: that warfare occludes reason in a para-rational epiphany of the self, that it feeds on the marrowbone of pride, that it expresses itself in arcs of uncorrupted emotion and that it taps into the sump-water of the primal, instinctive heart.  While the psychological truth of violence lies in its complexity outside the ambition of our understanding, Keegan’s statement circumscribes that truth in the rough focus of approxiamating comprehension.   

         One of the most frustrating concepts in warfare is that concerning the locus of the Self—where in the chaos of smoke and blood and shattered bone can the Self be found?  Does it disappear in the flood of relentless violence, in the primal movement of the human herd as it sweeps through the field in a stuttering ferocious pulse?  Or does it do the opposite, ballooning into its first real apotheosis, logarithmically magnified so that the soldier becomes in battle a monolith of self-expression and self-knowledge?  The complexity of the question peels into the complexity of its answer, because both intuitively antithetical possibilities seem to be simultaneously true—war seems to at times soaringly extrapolate the coherency of Self, and at others to perfunctorily consume it.  

History is filled with examples of self-glorification as abiding agent in a soldier’s impetus; from the swooning expostulations of bravery and the brave in the Epic of Gilgamesh to the modern  come-hither promises of heroism wrapped in the recruitment campaigns of the U.S. Marines, there is an organic understanding in human culture that war can chisel a soldier out from the tar of anonymity, can toggle him into fame, can transmute him from ephemeral, inchoate being into focused heft of Self and celebrity.  So pervasive is this phenomenon that it is accepted as understood, and is revealed in modern scholarship mostly as parenthetical aside.  In The Face of Battle for instance, Keegan anecdotally comments that in the Hundred Years War, “men-at-arms” were unwilling to “cross weapons with archers, their social inferiors, when the chance to win glory in combat with other men-at-arms presented itself” (98).  

In All Quiet on theWestern Front, Erich Maria Remarque lyrically expressed an even deeper evocation of self than that construed in the glory of battle, namely that prosecuted in the sharp, immediate and life-threatening aegis of the battlefield: “The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums.  My limbs move supply, I feel my joints strong. I breathe the air deeply.  The night lives, I live” (33). 

 The phenomenon of Self potently-evinced in the crucible of combat is an organic constituent of the human experience of war--half a century after Remarque’s meditation on the First World War, letters from Vietnam revealed an identical experience for soldiers both culturally and temporally disconnected from those described in Remarque’s book.  In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brian expounds on the burgeoning of Self wrought in the jungles of Southeast Asia in his temporally shifted memoirs:  “I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost—I’m burning away into nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am” (111).

But the combat-self is a schizophrenic self—at times effulging in leviathan self-aware contrast against the world and at others disappearing into the summed beast of a unit’s human mass.  Remarque, in alternate pages of his novel, incorporated the diametric sense of both the construction of the self (as in the previous example) and its rabid disassembly in the masses of combatant men.   “I belong to them and they to me;” he wrote, “we all share the same fear and the same life” (212).  In his essay The War of Steel and Gold, Henry Noel Brailsford also elegantly encapsulated this self-annihilating dynamic of warfare: “Men can be got to shoot at other men with whom they have no quarrel, only because they have first been taught to lay aside their own personality, their own judgment, their free choice between good and evil. They become automata which shoot at other automata as little conscious of what they do as the rifles in their hands.”

Related to the dynamic of self exercised in the pulsing vagaries of war is the dynamic of pride, or more specifically of the potential loss of that pride in the abasement of shame.  Even a cursory dissection of warfare reveals shame to be a superlatively potent and persistent aspect of combat psychology—it seems that cowardice is the scarlet letter loathed and assiduously avoided in the social dynamic of militancy.  Even men fundamentally opposed to war have found themselves suddenly (and despite everything) caught up in combat, spewing guttural screams in the sweat-frothed forward rush of violence, because ultimately they could not bear the cultural suspicion of  cowardice.  

Shame is a powerful theme throughout the annals of war history, its avoidance cogently dissected as a war-motivator from Homer to Thucydides, Sun-Tzu to Clausewitz.  John Keegan describes it as the soldier’s fear of “losing the one thing he is likely to value more highly than life—his reputation as a man among men” (73).  Remarque described the relevance of shame in the call-to-arms of World War I, his protagonist Paul Bäumer commenting that “there was one of us who hesitated, and did not want to fall into line.  But he did allow himself to be persuaded, otherwise he would have been ostracized…at that time even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward’” (11).  Tim O’Brian elongates the theme, pulling it into our century in his expostulations on the Vietnam war: “In my head I could hear people screaming at me.  Traitor! They yelled.  Turncoat! I felt myself blush.  I couldn’t tolerate it.  I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to” (59). 

The third component of  flesh-and-blood warfare refracted through Keegan’s lens is the  emotion that phosphoresces in the molted heat of combat.  Rank, disorienting, blood-pungent feeling effervesces through nearly all first-hand accounts of war.  In Keegan’s analysis, “the soldier is vouchsafed no well-ordered and clear-cut vision.  Battle, for him, takes place in a wildly unstable physical and emotional environment…for minutes or for hours, he may feel in turn boredom, exultation, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, even that sublime emotion we call courage” (46).  

Remarque describes a First World War so brimming with emotions distilled in fear, soldiers swing wildly from elation to morose despair, gasp at the beauty of a smoke-reddened sunset, than double-over in vomitus extremis at the sight of a serrated corpse.  Following are just two examples of the extremes he lyrically illustrates: “Haie laughs so much that he dislocates his jaw, and suddenly stands there helpless with his mouth wide open.  Albert has to put it back again by giving it a blow with his fist” (83)…”The guns and the wagons float past the dim landscape of the moonlit landscape, the riders in their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is strangely beautiful and arresting” (57).  

This emotional aspect, like the others drawn out in Keegan’s quote, is a constant concomitant of  war—the American experience in Vietnam revealed no less a combat-apotheosis of consuming, soul-singeing feeling.  Tim O’Brian’s “Carried“ condenses the phenomenon in the lyrical exegesis of his own Vietnam experience: “Any battle or bombing raid has…a powerful implacable beauty…after a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness…you feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self” (81).

Instinct is the final psychological aspect of war parsed by Keegan’s pen, saved until now because it encompasses a phenomenon that is simultaneously so fundamentally true and so ultimately unfathomable.  Instinct exists before consciousness, lodges in a brainstem unavailable to awareness and superordinate to language.  Any attempt to comprehend instinct, and its role in battle, is doomed to evaporate in frustration as layers can only be peeled back to recursively  reveal  their looping selves…what lies beneath lies also above and can never be adequately dissected.  

But historians and writers have to a degree managed to hedge it in; have, if not fully managing to pin-down instinct’s core, have managed to fence its understanding into the crude corral of linguistic approximation.  Keegan avers that the “sensations and emotions” of war, though dormant, are “part of every human being’s make-up…are the product of some of men’s deepest fears,” and that they “touch upon some of man’s most violent passions; hatred, rage and the urge to kill” (16).  He continues that “easy killing does seem to generate in human beings symptoms of pleasure…which zoologist Hans Kruuk has tried to relate to the compulsive behavior of certain predatory animals” (283).  

The Face of War extrapolates the point, burgeoning with examples--such as that from World War I, when “One Australian, about to bayonet a German, found that his own bayonet was not on his rifle.  While the wretched man implored him for mercy, he grimly fixed it and then bayoneted the man” (47).  Or another describing an event from the Battle of the Somme: “An officer came out of a dugout…he held his glasses out to S … and said ‘Here you are Sergeant, I surrender.’  S said ‘Thank you Sir,’ and took the glasses with his left hand.  At the same moment, he tucked the butt of his rifle under his arm, and shot the officer straight through the head” (48).      All Quiet on the Western Front reflects Remarque’s painful disillusionment with the civilizing pretension of modernity, persistently diagramming the vulgar operation of base instinct in the Great War:  “At the sound of the first of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years…We reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals” (56). “Some of our men were found whose noses were cut off and their eyes poked out with their own sawbayonets.  Their mouths and noses were stuffed with sawdust” (103).  “We have become wild beasts” (113).  “The menace of death has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct” (275).  

We can also look through the lens of Vietnam to dissect the role of instinct in the belly of our own generation in war.  The constant undercurrent of primal aggressive instinct in the primordially-reminiscent sump of the rice-paddies, for instance, is illustrated in the following O’Brian anecdote: “Strunk’s nose made a sharp snapping sound, like a firecracker, but even then Jensen kept hitting him, over and over, quick punches that did not miss” (62).   Instinct seeps through the interstices of Vietnam, becomes an accepted para-rational component of the soldier’s psychological world: “Mitchell Sanders turned and looked at me, not quite nodding, as if to warn me about something, as if he already knew” (71).  O’Brian even analyzes the compelling contagion of the dark impulses of instinct in someone like himself, who had fundamentally opposed the war before being drafted: “I’d turned mean inside.  Even a little cruel at times.  For all my education, for all my fine liberal values, I now feel a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason” (200). 

The complexities inherent in the psychological and political intersections of war may in fact exceed our ability to dissect and understand them.  While it may be impossible to completely detangle the intertwined knots of martial consciousness and aggressive instinct, we can excise some limited understanding of war in the delimited scrutiny of combat.  John Keegan’s statement embeds his ultimate comprehension of warfare--that theories on war mire and sink in the quick-loam of the battlefield, that the complex articulations of their hypothesis evaporate in the scalpel-sharp clarity of the soldier’s instinct, emotion and pride.  In battle, speeches fall short, trumpets go mute, the drum-beat of war concusses feebly back to silence.  There is sudden and breathtaking simplicity—only the raw intersecting arc of the primordial self remains to fight for glory and for survival.  In a word, the shell of civilization peels back and only the animal at the human core remains:  “In every man, of course, a beast lies hidden-the beast of rage, the beast of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the beast of lawlessness let off the chain” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 73).

     

Works Cited:

Brailsford, Henry N. “The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of Armed Peace.” 2006. BYU.edu.

         20 Nov 2006. 

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Brothers Karamazov.

Keegan, John. The History of Warfare. New York; Penguin, 1976.

O’Brian, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York; Broadway Books, 1990.

ReMarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front.  New York; Ballantine, 1928.