by Richard A. Koenigsberg

Contents

1. The Psychological Interpretation of Culture
2. Hitler’s Ideology
3. War and Genocide
4. The First World War
5. War as Sacrifice
6. Training Soldiers to Die
7. Like Sheep to Slaughter
8. The Psychopathology of War
   Works Cited

V. War as Sacrifice

Great Britain’s Lloyd George observed that during the First World War every nation was “profligate of its manpower and conducted its war activities as if there were no limit to the number of young men who were fit to be thrown into the flames of war” (in Haste, 1977, 78). One may theorize that the First World War constituted a gigantic, sacrificial ritual.

Young men were thrown onto the altars of the Western front, the Eastern Front, or whatever front in order to die and be mutilated in the name of Gods called France, England, Germany, Russia, Italy, etc. Horace’s phrase, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”— “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country”—lies at the core of the Western ideology of nationalism. The First World War was apocalyptic fulfillment of this ideology.

Benedict Anderson (1983) wrote about nations as “imagined communities.” We speak of reality as a “social construction.” It is easy to say that nations are imagined communities or social constructions, but more difficult to know that they are. Deep down, most people believe nations are real. When people utter words like “France” or “Germany” or “America,” they feel that they are referring to entities that substantially exist.

Perhaps, however, at certain historical moments people do begin to sense that their nations are contingent rather than absolute realities. Elaine Scarry (1985) focuses on injuring as the essence of warfare, stating that the “massive opening of human bodies” in battle occurs in order to reconnect “disembodied beliefs with the force and power of the material world” (129). Wars are undertaken, I suggest, in order to prove that nations are more than social constructions. Surely, we feel, that which can generate the death and mutilation of human beings in massive numbers must be eminently real. Wars verify the existence of nations.

According to the 19th century German nationalist Johann Fichte, people embrace their nations as “vesture for the eternal.” One’s country represents the promise of a “life here on earth extending beyond the period of life here on earth.” Nations embody the fantasy of immortality; the idea of a realm of existence that goes on eternally, independent of concrete, human existence. Nations embody the fantasy of a self-perpetuating entity not subject to death and decay, symbolizing the idea of an immortal, body politic that will “live on.”

War is a ritual in which human bodies are sacrificed to affirm the reality of omnipotent bodies politic. Dead and maimed bodies on the field of battle constitute “proof,” testifying to the idea that there is “something else” beyond mere, day-to-day existence. This “something else” is one’s nation, the entity in the name of which dying and killing occurs.

When a nation goes to war, soldiers are called to duty, fitted with uniforms and trained. Guns, bullets, bombs, artillery shells, tanks, ships, and airplanes are manufactured. Soldiers are transported to the front where they engage in battle. Men are killed and bodies maimed, giving rise to a massive hospital industry. All this occurs in the name of “nations.”

If nations can evoke the extraordinary sound and fury of war, mobilize prodigious expenditures of energy and resources, motivate people to die and kill, then surely, people think, they must be real. Few have the effrontery or courage to say that these momentous events have occurred in the name of no thing. The conventional hypothesis is that wars occurred for some thing.

However, consider an alternative hypothesis: that war is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Watching a movie in the darkness of a theater, witnessing the chaos, absurdity, futility and destructiveness of war, a thought passes through one’s mind: “War is insane.” I do not believe I am unique in having had this thought. Perhaps hundreds of millions of people have had a similar thought as they watch a feature film or documentary about war.

Why can’t people hold onto this idea that “war is insane” once they get out of the Movie Theater? Why do social scientists and historians rarely use the word “insane” as they chronicle the bizarre events that characterize political history? Why are psychologists so willing to characterize individual forms of behavior as “disorders,” but so unwilling to apply the term disorder to collective forms of behavior?

A journalist related his encounter with a wounded Canadian soldier that took place during the First World War: “As I looked into his face and saw the look of personal victory over physical pain, I gripped him by the hand and said: ‘My good man, when you go back home to Canada, back to your home, you need not tell them that you love your country—just show them your scars’” (in Genthe, 72). Joanna Bourke (1996) observes that public rhetoric in Britain judged soldiers’ mutilations to be “badges of their courage, the hallmark of their glorious service, proof of patriotism” (56).

In the following military report, British General Reps describes what happened to his brigade in one of the battles at the Somme:

They advanced in line after line, dressed as if on parade and not a man shirked going through the extremely heavy barrage, or facing the machine gun and rifle fire that finally wiped them out. I saw the lines, which advanced in such admirable order melting away under fire. Yet not a man wavered, broke the ranks, or attempted to come back. I have never seen, indeed could never have imagined, such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination. The reports from the very few survivors of this marvelous advance bear out what I saw with my own eyes—that hardly a man of ours got to the German front. (In Travers, 146)

It is evident that Rees viewed the destruction of his troops in a positive light. The General was gratified to see that his men continued to move forward in the face of machine gun fire. The fact that there were few survivors led him to conclude that he had witnessed a “magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination.” The soldiers’ willingness to die constituted proof that they loved their country.

WORKS CITED

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Gilbert, Martin. The First World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Haste, Cate. Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War. London: Allen Lane, 1977.

Horne, John. “Soldiers, Civilians, and the Warfare of Attrition.” In Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War. Ed. F. Coetzee and M. Shevin-Coetzee. Providence, R. I.: Berghahn Books, 1995.

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Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Travers, Tim. The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987.

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