The ecstasy of war

I’ve been reading a lot of war memoirs for my PhD and J.Glenn Gray’s “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle” has struck me. Every page feels quotable. An American philosopher who heads to fight in Europe in 1941— his insights are into the experience of war are searing.  It’s also beautifully written.

The book explores the taboo topic of the pleasures of war. In one section, Gray unpicks the feeling of the sublime — the state of being outside of oneself, which he says happens to soldiers in the spectacle of war: “… the self is no longer important to the observer; it is absorbed into the objects with which it is concerned.”

To illustrate his point, he cites from Last letters from Stalingrad, a book which contains the anonymous letters of German soldiers trapped in the city before its horrific fall.  The German High Command never posted the letters and they were found after the war.

Gray cites one maudlin letter which was written by a meteorologist.

My life has not changed at all. Just as it was ten years ago, my life is blessed by the stars and shunned by man. I had even then no friends and you know why they avoided me. My happiness was to sit in front of the telescope and peer at the sky and the world of the stars, pleased as a child who is allowed to play with the stars.

You were my best friend, Monika. No, you read it alright; you were my best friend. The time is too serious for joking. This letter will need fourteen days to reach you. By that time, you will have read in the papers what has happened here. Don’t think too much about it. The facts will be quite different from what you read, but let other people worry about setting them straight. I have always thought in light-years and felt in seconds. Here too I am busy with recording weather conditions. Four of us are working together and if things would go on like this, we would be content. The work itself is easy. We have the task of recording temperature and humidity, reporting on cloudlines and visibility. If one of these bureaucrats were to read what I am writing, his eye would pop – violation of security!

Monika, what does our life amount to in comparison with the millions of years of the starry heavens. Andromeda and Pegasus are just over my head on this lovely night. I have been looking at them for a long time; soon I shall be near them. I can thank the stars for my contentment and serenity. You are, of course, for me the most beautiful star! The stars are immortal and the life of man is like a particle of dust in the universe.

Everything around us is collapsing, a whole army is dying, and night and day are aflame. And four people are busily recording temperatures and cloud conditions! I don’t understand much about war. No human being has ever fallen by my hand. I never even aimed a pistol at a target. But this I do know: our opponents do not demonstrate our lack of intelligence. I would have liked to have continue counting the stars for a few decades but nothing will come of it now. 

As Gray puts it: “Even in a situation where safety and life itself are at stake, this soldier holds fast to his feelings of kinship with the universe about him and loses himself in contemplating its wonders.”

I was never in such an about-to-die situation in Afghanistan. I was working for the UN. (The question of whether I was in a war zone is one I will explore another time as I delve deeper into the question of what is war.)

But I did feel this soldier’s sense of awe on a few occasions. One particularly striking episode was when I met with a large group of tribal elders in rural Ghazni. After the meeting, we went outside in the cool morning to take a group photo.  An Afghan flag fluttered in the wind against a back drop of snow-capped mountains. These men, in huge turbans, stood tall, enormous scarves draped around their shoulders.  My jaw dropped. My breathing changed. I couldn’t quite believe where I was and who I was with. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. My life had finally come to this other-worldly moment.

And then I started laughing, which is strange for me as I’m not someone who has an obvious chuckle.  I used to think the laughter was nerves— I was after all in a remote area in rural Afghanistan, so far from home.  But after reading this Gray meditation, how in these experiences “we feel rescued from the emptiness within us”, I see now I was ecstatic.