This war almost certainly will not end evils, but beget more of them.
This war almost certainly will not end evils, but beget more of them.
‘I suppose that war always does bring out what is highest and lowest in human nature,” said Teddy Roosevelt, writing about those who profit from war, by manufacturing and sending shoddy material to the American Army and Navy.
It’s easy to be scandalized by our attitudes toward war. Our collective memory blesses World War II as a good war, a close escape from genocidal barbarism. And it curses World War I as a senseless, fratricidal slaughter that put a cancer into Western civilization. And so it’s instructive to look at those who held precisely the opposite views of these conflicts.
“The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.” So thought Guy Crouchback, the tragic protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy of World War II novels, Sword of Honour. This buoying sentiment washes over Crouchback early in the novel and in the war, when Herr Hitler and Comrade Stalin have made their deadly non-aggression pact with one another. Traditional powers, such as the United Kingdom, would sail to the rescue of Catholic Poland, which was beset by these twin modernist ideologies — fascism and communism.
One can detect some of Crouchback’s attitude now in the war fever washing over the Western world, particularly among progressives. Having made Vladimir Putin into an avatar of their domestic culture-war opponents — religious, anti-liberal, fanatic — they have projected onto Ukraine all the virtues of their ideals. One can feel even Crouchback’s generational envy and anxiety to prove himself among today’s commentators. He descended from England’s Catholic recusants and wanted some great deed of nobility and struggle to mark his life, to prove him worthy of this inheritance.
The war, which eventually joins England to the side of Stalin, disillusions Crouchback. War became meaningless and simply barbaric, an occasion for moral compromise and turpitude. This is a view of war that I grew up in, a product of the post-Vietnam era. But when Waugh released his books in the 1950s and early 1960s, the idea that the Second World War had left the world in a worse state baffled and scandalized the public.
I had to educate myself in the opposite view, the one that embraces war as a test of manhood, a theater of nobility, and a chance to accomplish great things. I found it in the thought of Patrick Pearse, the Irish nationalist who wrote these lines in the midst of World War I:
The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. On whichever side the men who rule the peoples have marshalled them, whether with England to uphold her tyranny of the seas, or with Germany to break that tyranny, the people themselves have gone into battle because to each the old voice that speaks out of the soil of a nation has spoken anew. Each fights for the fatherland. It is policy that moves the governments; it is patriotism that stirs the peoples. Belgium defending her soil is heroic, and so is Turkey fighting with her back to Constantinople.
It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country. War is a terrible thing, and this is the most terrible of wars. But this war is not more terrible than the evils which it will end or help to end.
August homage offered to God. The line appalls us when applied to this war. And yet, Pearse’s rhetoric, while particularly high-flown, was not so uncommon in his time. One can find propaganda tracts far more bilious than this. And, credit due: Pearse walked the walk. A few months after writing these lines, he led a rebellion in Ireland against England’s rule. When the battle was lost, he handed his sword to the English and marched gaily into prison. He wrote of his immense happiness to be executed as a martyr for his country. He and his comrades were known to offer forgiveness to the members of the firing squads that shot them. “Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations,” he had prophesied. You probably wore green this week. Pearse’s sacrifice helped to make that happen.
It is foolish to have perfect certitude about the facts on the ground — the reports of unprecedented casualties and deaths. And yet, I am riveted like others to the videos, the drone footage, and the clips of carnage. Because I know that inside of these are both “what is highest and lowest in man.”
A student of Irish nationalism cannot help but see Ukrainian nationalism as a kin of sorts. And a student of Irish nationalism cannot help but anticipate the potential for civil war, for poverty, and terror at the end of an exultant struggle for a smaller nation’s sovereignty.
As I see it now, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a blunderous, murderous act of desperation and foolishness. The Kremlin is a black box, and all speculation I’ve seen on the precise mix of hubris, insecurity, or strategy at work in Putin’s mind feels unconvincing. I believe that every horror upon horror he inflicts on Ukraine is also bringing ruin to Russia and to himself in the long run. And yet, I also know that Ukrainian militias surely have inflicted horror upon horror themselves.
War is a terrible thing, and I am nearly certain that this war will not end evils, but beget more of them. I am not buoyed by it, like some commentators. I cannot possibly feel enlivened by the sudden determination of Germany to buy more weapons, or the suddenly popular conversation topics, such as tactical nuclear weapons.
The California poet Robinson Jeffers was also, like Evelyn Waugh, an artist who deplored World War II. It practically ended his career when his own publisher denounced him as an enemy of humanity. In the clips I see from Putin’s war in Ukraine, I hear the last lines of Jeffers’s poem “Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind”:
Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible magnificence of the means.
The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and shabby
Pathos of the result.