Show those generals the fallacy
(Bring 'em home, bring 'em home)
They don't have the right weaponry
(Bring 'em home, bring 'em home)
For defense you need common sense
(Bring 'em home, bring 'em home)
They don't have the right armaments
(Bring 'em home, bring 'em home)
- Pete Seeger, "Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)"
One of my all-time favorite novels is A Fable (1954) by William Faulkner. I believe the English professors would say that it really is a "fable" instead of a novel. But it's one of my favorites anyway.
The story is about an antiwar activist of a Christ-like nature - well, except he got his start as a horse-thief - who along with twelve close followers organized a French regiment during the First World War to refuse orders to charge German lines. They had also organized the Germans to respond by not charging to take advantage of the French mutiny. (Note for godless heathens: Jesus, twelve disciples, it's a Biblical reference.)
Suddenly, much to the dismay of the generals and politicians and war profiteers, the mutiny spread across the entire front. The war stopped dead. The story revolves around the desperate efforts of the generals on both sides who know they have to get the war started again, knowing that they can't allow the Jacksonian notion that ordinary people could force the warlords to stop the killing.
This wasn't entirely a fantasy, though of course nothing that extensive happened during the war. Prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, the Social Democratic parties of Europe solemnly swore to unite together in the international soldarity of the working class to prevent their respective governments from carrying out an "imperialist war." In the end, of course, the us-against-them pull of patriotism and war fever won out over working-class solidarity, and the workers' parties joined with the royalists and capitalists to slaughter the workes of the enemy countries in massive numbers.
As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992):
Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. Thestrategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related notto economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.
But the human instincts that still manage to override tribal barbarism still emerged at moments during the war. In the early days ofthe war, informal cease-fires between opposing units were not unusual. The two sides might stop shooting at each other at meal-times, for instance. The enemy troops would even socialized across the lines at times.
Something like the mutual dismay of the generals depicted in A Fable, when along a 50-kilometer stretch of the front at Ypres just stopped fighting for days around Christmas 1914 and socialized with each other across the lines. Stefan Storz describes the dismay of the generals:
The German Chief of the General Staff Erich von Flakenhayn equated the Christmas sin [of the informal cease-fires] with high treason, and ordereed that in the future any man who left the trenches to go in the direction of the enemy was to be shot immediately.
But the soldiers knew how to help each other. Instead of fraternizing completely openly, the now came to secret understandings with the enemy. The war went to sleep for weeks and months on some sections of the front. Lieutenant Wyatt of the Yorkshire Regiment noted: "The Germans notified us that in the afternoon their general would be coming. We should be aware that they would have to shoot a little bit then in order to keep up appearances."
These little flights spread great worry among the generals. Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, General Staff Chief of the 5th Army, ordered that by all means must the "danger of the combat halts under the motto, 'Don't do anything to me, and I won't do anything to you' be held down." The staff devised absurd systems of performance measurement to stop the collapse of combat morale. The company chiefs had to submit detailed situation reports up to six times per day.
- Stefan Storz, "Der Krieg gegen den Krieg," Spiegel Special 1/2004; my translation from the German
In A Fable, one British soldier explains to another the implications of the unauthorized front-wide halt in the fighting:
'Do you see now? Not for us to ask what nor why but just go down a hole in the ground and stay there until they decide what to do. No: just how to do it because they already know what. Of course they wont tell us. They wouldn't have told us anything at all if they hadn't had to ...
... Because all of us know by now that something is wrong. Dont you see? Something happened down there yesterday morning in the French front, a regiment failed—burked—mutinied, we dont know what and are not going to know what because they aren't going to tell us. Besides, it doesn't matter what happened. What matters is, what happened afterward. At dawn yesterday a French regiment did something—did or failed to do something which a regiment in a front line is not supposed to do or fail to do, and as a result of it, the entire war in Western Europe took a recess at three o'clock yesterday afternoon. Dont you see? When you are in battle and one of your units fails, the last thing you do, dare do, is quit. Instead, you snatch up everything else you've got and fling it in as quick and hard as you can, because you know that that's exactly what the enemy is going to do as soon as he discovers or even suspects you have trouble on your side.
But this didn't happen, he explains. The other French units didn't charge either after the one regiment mutinied.
'But they didn't. Instead, they took a recess, remanded: the French at noon, us and the Americans three hours later. And not nly us, but Jerry too. Dont you see? How can you remand in war, unless your enemy agrees too? And why should Jerry [the Germans] have agreed, after squatting under the sort of barrage which four years had trained him to know meant that an attack was coming, then no attack came or failed or whatever it was it did, and four years had certainly trained him to the right assumption for that; when the message, signal, request—whatever it was—came over suggesting a remand, why should he have agreed to it, unless he had a reason as good as the one we had, maybe the same reason we had? The same reason; those thirteen French soldiersapparently had no difficulty whatever going anywhere they liked in our back-areas for three years, why weren't they across yonder in Jerry's too, since we all know that, unless you've got the right properly signed paper in your hand, it's a good deal more difficult to go to Paris from here than to Berlin; any time you want to go east from here, all you need is a British or French or American uniform. Or perhaps they didn't even need to go themselves, perhaps just wind, moving air, carried it. Or perhaps not even moving air but just air, spreading by attrition from invisible and weightless molecule to molecule as disease, smallpox spreads, or fear, or hope—just enough of us, all of us in the mud here saying together, Enough of this, let's have done with this.
'Because—dont you see?—they cant have this. They cant permit this, to stop it at all yet, let alone allow it to stop itself this way— the two shells in the river and the race already under way and both crews without warning simply unshipping the oars from the locks and saying in unison: We're not going to pull any more. They cant yet. It's not finished yet, like an unfinished cricket or rugger match which started according to a set of mutually accepted rules formally and peaceably agreed on, and must finish by them, else the whole theory of arbitration, the whole tried and proven step-by-step edifice of politics and economy on which the civilised concord of nations is based becomes so much wind. More than that: that thin and tensioned girder of steel and human blood which carries its national edifice soaring glorious and threatful among the stars, in dedication to which young men are transported free of charge and even with pay, to die violently in places that even the map-makers and -dividers never saw, that a pilgrim stumbling on it a hundred or a thousand years afterward may still be able to say, Here is a spot that is (anyway was once) forever England or France or America. And not only cant, dare not: they wont...."
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