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ricardienneI haven't seen anything about Remembrance/Veteran's Day today, which is a little odd, though perhaps not so, given the college I'm at. But I've been thinking about it, which is odd, because I usually don't think about this kind of thing.
A few weeks ago, I got my hands on an Angela Brazil novel: The Luckiest Girl in the School. (If you're a DWJ fan, it's essentially a Millie book). It was set during during WWI, and, I think, written then, too, although there wasn't a date anywhere. The war was not important to the story, particularly, but it was there. The boys were off in the trenches, and their sisters were knitting them socks and praying for them. That was all. But what was really absent was a sense of the purpose of the war. There wasn't even much anti-German sentiment, or any sense that it was an important war, or that anything terrible would happen if it should be lost. If it had been a fantasy novel, I would have said that the war was simply a plot device to reform our Heroine's straying brother. That's one thing.
Wilfrid Owen is the other thing. Dulce et decorum est is a poem that I've known for a long time, and has always meant a great deal for me. When we studied the poem in AP English, it was during the 2004 elections, and tensions were running high over our war. There was a girl in my class who didn't like the poem because it was "politically biased, and freedom isn't free" (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
voglia_di_notte you will remember this). I thought that this missed the point then, and I particularly think so now. There is a strong anti-war reading of the poem, but I think its most obvious position is not anti-war but anti- the kind of attitude towards war in Luckiest Girl in the School, which must have been a common attitude in Owen's era. But the point is that war is too terrible to be "just there" and provide an opportunity for girls to improve their knitting skills. Its too costly to be the means to make a generation of boys into men. Just dying for one's country isn't enough, nor is fighting for the glory of one's country. That's the message that I read: that you had better have a very powerful reason for war, because the consequences are so unpleasant.
It is interesting that is saying that the ends must justify the means. That the ends cannot justify the means is one of those truisms, up there with "you can't understand what it is to be happy until you have experienced hardship and misery" that everyone agrees is correct. But here's an example of that turned on its head. With war, the means are so horrible that the end has to justify them, because nothing else can. (Of course, one could say that the means are so horrible that no end can justify them, which is quite possible, in my opinion.)
World War I is a war that we don't like very much, now, because its ends, far from justifying its horrors, seem to only have lead to worse horrors, and another war. The problem is much older than Vietnam and Iraq, you see. So what do we do on Rememberance Day? It's hard to argue that we should't honor the sacrifice because it was a sacrifice to a wrong cause, or a mistaken cause, or an immoral cause. But honoring such a mistaken sacrifice seems to perpetuate that idea that the sacrifice is good in and of itself, even if it is a waste. Soldiers can't be blamed for fighting in an unjust war (but unjust, I mean a war where the result does not justify the life it expends), but it no longer seems right to me (if it ever seemed right) to honor them simply because they fought. That's exactly what Dulce et decorum est is about. I would pity them, but that would be condescending. Perhaps this is the point of Remembrance Day: to remember without judging. (Oh how glib that sounds!)
A few weeks ago, I got my hands on an Angela Brazil novel: The Luckiest Girl in the School. (If you're a DWJ fan, it's essentially a Millie book). It was set during during WWI, and, I think, written then, too, although there wasn't a date anywhere. The war was not important to the story, particularly, but it was there. The boys were off in the trenches, and their sisters were knitting them socks and praying for them. That was all. But what was really absent was a sense of the purpose of the war. There wasn't even much anti-German sentiment, or any sense that it was an important war, or that anything terrible would happen if it should be lost. If it had been a fantasy novel, I would have said that the war was simply a plot device to reform our Heroine's straying brother. That's one thing.
Wilfrid Owen is the other thing. Dulce et decorum est is a poem that I've known for a long time, and has always meant a great deal for me. When we studied the poem in AP English, it was during the 2004 elections, and tensions were running high over our war. There was a girl in my class who didn't like the poem because it was "politically biased, and freedom isn't free" (
voglia_di_notte you will remember this). I thought that this missed the point then, and I particularly think so now. There is a strong anti-war reading of the poem, but I think its most obvious position is not anti-war but anti- the kind of attitude towards war in Luckiest Girl in the School, which must have been a common attitude in Owen's era. But the point is that war is too terrible to be "just there" and provide an opportunity for girls to improve their knitting skills. Its too costly to be the means to make a generation of boys into men. Just dying for one's country isn't enough, nor is fighting for the glory of one's country. That's the message that I read: that you had better have a very powerful reason for war, because the consequences are so unpleasant.It is interesting that is saying that the ends must justify the means. That the ends cannot justify the means is one of those truisms, up there with "you can't understand what it is to be happy until you have experienced hardship and misery" that everyone agrees is correct. But here's an example of that turned on its head. With war, the means are so horrible that the end has to justify them, because nothing else can. (Of course, one could say that the means are so horrible that no end can justify them, which is quite possible, in my opinion.)
World War I is a war that we don't like very much, now, because its ends, far from justifying its horrors, seem to only have lead to worse horrors, and another war. The problem is much older than Vietnam and Iraq, you see. So what do we do on Rememberance Day? It's hard to argue that we should't honor the sacrifice because it was a sacrifice to a wrong cause, or a mistaken cause, or an immoral cause. But honoring such a mistaken sacrifice seems to perpetuate that idea that the sacrifice is good in and of itself, even if it is a waste. Soldiers can't be blamed for fighting in an unjust war (but unjust, I mean a war where the result does not justify the life it expends), but it no longer seems right to me (if it ever seemed right) to honor them simply because they fought. That's exactly what Dulce et decorum est is about. I would pity them, but that would be condescending. Perhaps this is the point of Remembrance Day: to remember without judging. (Oh how glib that sounds!)
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Date: 2006-11-11 08:32 pm (UTC)You know, I'm all for respecting the opinions of my students, but if anyone in my classes ever tries to argue with lame political catchphrases I will totally throw things at them.
On Election Day in 2004, I was teaching Henry V, actually, and specifically the fourth act, and we talked a lot about Henry's disguised conversation with Michael Williams:
But if the cause be not good, the King himself will have a heavy reckoning to make, when all the legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle will join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'...Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it.
I think the point is largely the same. Some of my students even got it...
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Date: 2006-11-12 01:04 am (UTC)