A Memorial Day Tale Of A Woman Who Hated War - Just Wars, Civil Wars, Existential Wars, All Wars

Brenda Elderberry shuddered at the thought of war. Ever since she read The Red Badge of Courage, a novel about the American Civil War, she was a pacifist.  It wasn't just that story, but combined with her grandfather's tales of trench warfare in World War I and her father's accounts of facing withering fire as he stormed the beach at Normandy, the history of violence was so brutal, untamed, and savage that she vowed never to consider war - even as Clausewitz argued that war, 'diplomacy by other means' - was a viable option. 

 

The Red Badge of Courage described the carnage and horror of the war, a conflict where more men died than in any other war (as a function of population).

The regiment bled extravagantly. Grunting bundles of blue began to drop. The orderly sergeant of the youth's company was shot through the cheeks. Its supports being injured, his jaw hung afar down, disclosing in the wide cavern of his mouth a pulsing mass of blood and teeth. And with it all he made attempts to cry out. In his endeavor there was a dreadful earnestness, as if he conceived that one great shriek would make him well. 

World War I seemed the most brutal and senseless.  No one was exactly sure how it began, something about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, but that was just the straw that broke the camel's back, a casus belli. Europe was itching for a war and got one that decimated the continent. 

She couldn't imagine hearing the officer's whistle, scrambling up the cold, muddy sides of a trench, and charging across an open field to face withering machine gun fire, an assault which would lead to certain death. 

Nor could she imagine her lungs ripped apart by mustard gas and dying on the frozen fields of Flanders, gasping for breath, choking, strangling; or dying a long painful death from infection, pneumonia, or tetanus.  How her grandfather managed to survive was one thing, how he dealt with the misery was entirely another. 

Erich Maria Remarque wrote eloquently about WWI:

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.

Earth!--Earth!—Earth!

Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!

 

Brenda admitted that World War II was a just war - England and the United States had to destroy the armies of Hitler whose panzers had wreaked havoc from Czechoslovakia to the English Channel and who threated the very survival of Great Britain; but war was still war, a horrible and horrific event that seemed to recur every generation despite the best efforts of pacifists like her. 

Enshrined in the principles of the Geneva Convention, just wars must adhere to certain principles:

In most presentations of the theory of the just war there are six principles of jus ad bellum [undertaking just wars], each with its own label: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, necessity or last resort, proportionality and reasonable hope of success. Jus in bello [conduct in just wars]comprises three principles: discrimination, necessity or minimal force, and, again, proportionality. These principles articulate in a compressed form an understanding of the morality of war that is, in its fundamental structure, much the same as it was 300 years ago.

Philosophers and theologians have always been concerned about the concept and nature of a just war.  Most believed that there was such a thing, and tried to fit conflict within larger religious and ethical constructs. In Ancient Rome, war was always potentially nefas ("wrong, forbidden") and risked religious pollution and divine disfavor.  

A just war (bellum iustum) thus required a ritualized declaration by the fetial priests More broadly, conventions of war and treaty-making were part of the ius gentium, the "law of nations", the customary moral obligations regarded as innate and universal to human beings. 

Augustine, perhaps Christianity’s most influential theologian was one of the first to assert that a Christian could be a soldier and serve God and country honorably. He claimed that, while individuals should not resort immediately to violence, God has given the sword to government for good reason (based upon Romans 13:4).

 In Contra Faustum Manichaeum book 22 sections 69-76, Augustine argues that Christians as part of government should not be ashamed to protect peace and punish wickedness.

Nine hundred years later, another influential theologian, Thomas Aquinas set forth the conditions under which just wars should be fought:

• First, just war must be waged by a properly instituted authority such as the state. (Proper Authority is first: represents the common good: which is peace for the sake of man's true end—God.)
• Second, war must occur for a good and just purpose rather than for self-gain (for example, "in the nation's interest" is not just) or as an exercise of power. (Just Cause: for the sake of restoring some good that has been denied. i.e., lost territory, lost goods, punishment for an evil perpetrated by a government, army, or even the civilian populace.)
• Third, peace must be a central motive even in the midst of violence. (Right Intention: an authority must fight for the just reasons it has expressly claimed for declaring war in the first place. Soldiers must also fight for this intention.) 

These principles have rarely adhered to, even in the more innocent age of World War II.  America’s firebombing of Dresden, or the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could hardly be called proportional; but obviously the generals who planned these attacks certainly thought so.  

Curtis LeMay, a senior officer in the Air Force who advocated annihilation of the enemy through massive air bombing, said it best.  War is hell, he averred, saving American lives was the only priority, and all calculations and equations of Japanese dead had no relevance whatsoever.  

Bombing the Japanese back to the Stone Age was perfectly right and acceptable because it would shorten the war and stop the killing of American soldiers.  His argument, indifferent to the numbers of Japanese dead, was only focused on the morality of victory and lives of the victor saved.

The Civil War might not have been fought at all.  The Southern agrarian, slave-based economy would collapse on itself, said economists, given the fallacy of the economic principles which underlay it and the increasing dominance of a rapidly industrializing North.  The South had no industry, no shipbuilding, no fleet of merchant ships.  

The Quakers, outspoken abolitionists, argued for restraint.  Yes, slavery was an ignoble enterprise, but was the toppling of a slave-owning regime worth the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in battle?

 

The pitched battles of Shiloh, Gettysburg, Antietam, and Bull Run were slaughters - warfare was still armies facing each other, firing volley after volley across the line of demarcation, and soldiers falling in the thousands in each battle. 

There are no flags on Confederate soldiers' graves now that liberal American governments have been determined to erase all memories of slavery.  To fly a Confederate flag in any venue was tantamount to racism, a statement meant to signal the righteousness of the defeated cause, the honor of the South, its manorial traditions, and its defiling, brutal treatment of the black man. 

This is not true. The boys who fought under the Confederate flag were not traitors or heroes; but young men thrown into battle thanks to no wish of their own.  They did not die for a cause but because they had the misfortune of being men in 1863 sent to be slaughtered in a war which may or may not have been foreordained.  Historians debate to this day whether slavery would have collapsed under its own weight, buried by the North’s industry and enterprise. 

The Confederate flags that fly and the Confederate statues erected in most Southern cemeteries belong there, for they honor those young men who died not for a cause but who simply died young.  They died heroically because they were forced to fight.  They had no preeminent will or purpose to fight, but fought nobly; and it is this sacrifice – the sacrifice of youth in unwilling but obedient service.   They are as much veterans of the Civil War as their Northern brothers. 

History has shown that war is perhaps the most common and the most predictable expression of human society.  War has been the rule since the first human settlements, and every century has been characterized them. Although idealists have insisted that we as a race are progressing towards a peaceful, congenial, harmonious place, the facts show anything but.  

The Twentieth Century was one of the most bloodies in a history which included The Hundred Years War, the interminable War of the Roses, and a thousand other conflicts in Imperial China and Japan, tribal and colonial Africa, and the Americas. 

If violent human conflict is not hardwired as part of a Darwinian imperative, then what is?  Conflicts over territory, power, money, and influence are endemic in individuals, families, clans, tribes, and nations.  Why should anyone ever assume that they will ever disappear? 

So are the Brenda Elderberrys of the world just pie-in-the-sky dreamers? Idealists, Utopians, One World optimists, harmlessly ingenuous people? Peace - i.e. a world without war - comes in two forms.  A Pax Romana where one nation has universal supremacy; and a Cold War, a standoff between two powerful nations neither of which wishes to risk annihilation.  Both are rare; but the second is derived from natural human competitiveness.  Human nature dictates competition, the survival of the fittest, and nations will always fight for territorial or economic dominance.  Two countries when equally matched in terms of resources, will, and ambition arrive at a stalemate, peace is the result. 

We need Brenda Elderberry to remind us of the horrors of war and the desire for peace, but it will be geopolitics which will always rule and hopefully will result in more standoffs. 

No Country For Old Men, The Last Roundup - How A Reasonable Man Believed He Could Cheat Death

Not all old people get the picture - life is not endless and theirs is coming quickly to an end. Instead of facts we all were given a willing suspension of disbelief.  Death is supposed to happen to us, but maybe it won't. 

 

L. Peter Barnes was a rugged old coot, born and raised on a ranch.  He learned how to ride the back forty before he was ten, rode herd on the hundred head rustled from Texas, and managed the tribe of Utes who worked the crops in harvest season to pick strawberries and rhubarb, fish for salmon on the Columbia river, then head south to California for the big pick in the Sacramento Valley. 

Petey could fix anything - tractors, backhoes, small motors, and diesel engines.  His ranch was an Indian burial ground of fenders, brakes, wheels, and pistons.  Nothing went to waste, not a screw, nail, or grommet.  He was a parsimonious man and  carried his spare practicality with him when he left the ranch and the West for greener pastures.  He got a an appointment to West Point, graduated, and was commissioned; but was retired in the final year of the war when the Navy did not need any more Second Lieutenants. 

 

Petey's life was unremarkable, but successful - a Fulbright to London where he studied physics at Kings College, Cambridge; was deployed during the first years of the Marshall Plan to North Africa, and with his practical and academic engineering he was able to set himself up in business.  Pacific Tool and Die grew by leaps and bounds as American industry turned civilian, and before long he was secure enough to sell the business, join the faculty of the University of Virginia, and settle down to a good, quiet life in suburban Charlottesville. 

He had four children, three girls and a boy, all of whom followed in their father's practical, sedate, mature, and honest footsteps.  Petey never had to worry about them or their future.  He could rest assured that the life he had built for them would carry them through. 

As he grew older, Petey became more and more preoccupied with his health, and took extreme measures to assure that he would live well beyond his allotted four-score-and-ten.  He stripped his meals of all fat, bulked up on raw vegetables, whole grains, unfiltered molasses, and organic spices.  Thanks to his engineering background, he installed industrial-strength air filters, triple-filtered water purifiers, and the most efficient electric stoves. 

He ran ten miles a day, worked out at the gym, kept trim and to fighting weight, and consulted medical advice for every aberration of the norm.  His calendar was filled with dermatologists, cardiologists, neurologists, and orthopods.  

Now, Petey Barnes was not a stupid man, and knew that when the Grim Reaper came calling, one had to invite him in; but still there must be, there had to be a way for delaying his visit, deferring the inevitable, for even...denying him. 

Petey so believed in mens sana in corpore sano not simply as a credo for healthy living but as a firewall against death.  If he tried hard enough; if he willed body and soul into defiance of death, if he showed God his determination to stay on earth, and do whatever was was asked of him in exchange, then he might be granted deferment or even exoneration. A death-defying bargain with Mephistopheles.

    

Accordingly, his life became a hamster wheel of revolving intent.  He cleansed his body of foul pollutants, filled it with the stuff of organic life, tempered it with proper weights and measures,  aligned his mind with purity and good will.  If anyone was going to live to one hundred and beyond, it was he 

To an outsider Petey had become an unhinged, emotional mountebank loony.  'There he goes, poor man', said Mavis Purdy to her next door neighbor as the watched neurasthenic, stringy, gaunt Petey Barnes do another lap around the neighborhood.  

Mavis' husband Alphonse had been on a similar punishing treadmill until she pulled him off it, yanked him back to the here-and-now, and told him to fire up the grill and not be late for dinner.

Petey had no Mavis in the wings, no hook to pull him off stage when his routine got tiresome; and so he banged on about clean air, proper and correct blood levels, and a good outlook without restraint.  His jousting with Death went from a medieval event to a fight to the finish.  He woke at night seeing images of nothingness, that vast, immeasurable void that we are told awaits us. 

Most men of Petey's age deal with the forthcoming end of existence with equanimity, poise, or cavalier bonhomie.  The bell curve fits all.  Harvey Flint drew down the last of his IRA and offshore accounts, threw his grandchildren's inheritance to the four winds, signed off in Floriana on his way to the Marquesas with just this note in the log. 'Sold the house, sold the car, liquidated the accounts, and soon will be far from you all'. A last gasp but one full of rich, tropical breezes.  

Billings Philby, long widowed, said goodbye to family and friends, bought a young Filipino wife and lived out his days in East Timor.  

 

Petey had neither the gumption nor the will for such extravagant behavior, and could only continue counting calories and joules of energy.  He looked around him and saw only treadmills, shelves of organic vegetables, bins of frozen, inedible innards, cases of almond milk and not a beer in sight. 

The clock was ticking.  He had far fewer years on earth than had gone by.  His life was cluttered with the tools of longevity, but without warranty. He would soon be gone, and the machinery of exercise and promised happy aging would be sold at auction. 

Yet he could not help himself - up at 4, on the treadmill by 4:15, tiger's milk, beet and radish juice by 4:45, a cored pear, melba toast, and a fermented sardine by 5, and the long day had barely begun. 

Yet each day was one of victory, one with lungs-full enterprise.  He had squeezed another 24 hours from The Reaper, but was at sixes and sevens to know what to do with them. Oh, for a yacht in Rimini or a Filipina concubine. 

'But I could have had both' he said, and so he could have; but therein lies the lesson of Petey Barnes.  Life has a way of cheating you out of your birthright, snookering you into corners you never would have chosen, dragging you down paths leading nowhere, tidying up odds and ends in later years, but never completely fulfilling. 

Petey had enough insight to know that his life of grouting, 1/4" screws, old washers, brake jobs, resurfacing, tiling, and recalibrating was not exactly what he would have wished.  Where did this dutiful obligation to physical righteousness and order come from?  Why hadn't her been born with some dolce vita?  

All his figuring, his calculations of omega-3, hem-iron, saturated fat, purification, and determination to live forever amounted to nothing.  He sat at his workbench surrounded by cannibalized motors, pieces of sheeting, coils of wire, piles of gypsum, wanted desperately to go into the kitchen and cook himself a big, rare, ribeye steak, but couldn't. Too many years at the grindstone, too many hours taking care of things, righting them, and not enough....

Here he was stumped, for he like everyone, the inevitable product of genetic imperative and a tampered environment could do nothing else.  And the thought that he had spent so many hours trying to extend his prescribed, determined life was the worst of all. 

The Savagery Within - Our Hardwired Violent Nature And The Fairy Tale Dreams That Deny It

Violence is a feature of the human condition; and given this 10,000 year history of murder, slaughter, and mayhem, we are unlikely to change. Despite hopeful  claims to the contrary, violence is a permanent, ineluctable, predictable expression of human nature

The same genes that gave us Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot; the same savagery that Mungo Park witnessed in tribal forests of Africa, the same headhunters of Melanesia, and the same absolute terror of White Wolf, the Comanche chief who to send a message to Union troops invading sacred Indian ground, raped, mutilated, and defiled white men, women, and children are within us. 

Professor Steven Pinker has argued that the world is indeed progressing toward a more peaceful, collegial and less contentious place.  However most reviewers conclude that  there is  no evidence that violence – or the proclivity for it – has decreased. 

In fact, the 21st Century seems a far more dangerous and potentially violent place than the one that preceded it, one of the most violent in history. Pinker’s vision of coming world peace is fancy.  Opinion is divided on questions of human nature and history.  There are many who still put great faith in the civilizing nature of Man, his ultimate goodness, and his ability – through the State – to accomplish civilized ends. 

There are just as many others who believe that we are still (until truly radical changes in our DNA are made) like Shakespeare’s kings – aggressive, acquisitive, self-interested, and capable of anything to achieve our ends.  Society and its institutions have provided us with an architecture within which we are reasonably and temporarily safe; but that architecture is only as strong as those human beings who built it…..And that is why it seems that it will fall and rise again in recurring cycles of violence.

Josef Conrad was always concerned about the nature of violence.  In The Heart of Darkness Kurtz's dying words are 'the horror...the horror...'. a realization that he and all humanity were like the tribal savages around him - violent, inconscient, brutal, murderous, and pagan.  It is Kurtz's dalliance with tribal power that leads to his undoing, and at the moment of death realizes the true nature of the life he is leaving. 

 

Joseph Conrad in Victory created Ricardo a man of ‘feral’ violence, a man whose every instinct propels him to rape and murder.  He is a man without a moral compass, without reflection, and without a scintilla of humanity.  He is brutal, without contrition, and as willful as a savage, hungry animal.

Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the modern writer most attuned to the nature of violence writes about it consistently. In the case of the Trilogy as well as No Country for Old Men, McCarthy answers his own urgent question. Violence is primal.  It may be repressed and hidden from view, but it is prone to spasm from time to time and will torment our illusions.

So what to make of the One Worlders, the unreconstructed pacifists who see hope for the human race, a decrease even elimination of violence, and the coming of a verdant, collaborative, congenial utopia? There have always been such idealists, but the belief in such progress is remarkable, almost impossible to understand.  Wars have been a feature of society since the first human settlements. 

Genghis Khan and his Turkic-Mongol army swept out of the steppes and slaughtered tens of millions from Japan to Europe. The Hundred Year War and the War of the Roses were but two of the more well known; but there were over 100 major world conflicts in the 16th century alone including among others the Portuguese-Mamluk, Friulan Muscovite-Lithuanian, Polish-Teutonic wars.   

There were no fewer in the 18th century, and the Age of Enlightenment did nothing to prevent or deter violence. The 20th century had fewer wars but more devastating and comprehensive ones. 

In World War II  there were 70–85 million fatalities  In World War I, 20 million.  In the Russian Civil War, 7–10 million; the Chinese Civil War, 4–9 million; the Second Congo War, 2.5–5.4 million; the Crusades, 1–9 million; the Vietnam War, 1.3–3.9 million; the Korean War, 1.2–3 million and in the American Civil War, 600,000–1 million. 

So what to make of the pacifists, the One Worlders who believe that with faith, hope, charity and an undeterred progressivism, violence can be overcome and that a peaceful, verdant, compassionate, and harmonious world can be in our future?

It is remarkable if not impossible that faced with this recorded history, there are those who still believe that violence and the tendency to war is not innate in human nature.  That the survival instinct has not changed in millennia, and that there has been no progress, not even a tentative movement towards world peace since the first human settlements.

It is equally surprising that people choose to ignore childhood - the aggressive, territorial, self-defensive and self-promoting instincts of children. Cooperation, consideration and collaboration have to be beaten into the two-year old, and even with consistent training and education, fights over property, women, causes resurface and persist. 

Bob Muzelle was one of these heady idealists.  He was first converted back in college where the Reverend William Bard Coughlin, chaplain at his Ivy League university, and leader of the campus peace movement of the Sixties, took him in.  What changed him from a patrician, Boston Brahmin, steeped in Revolutionary War pride and a lineage that went back to George Washington and the knights of England to an advocate for nuclear disarmament, world peace, and communal harmony was a mystery. 

All agreed that Rev. Coughlin was a charismatic leader, a man with passion, a soaring oratory, and the weight of Christian tradition behind him; but still, there must have been something in Bob's past that flipped the switch - perhaps his cousin Tom's torturing of the frogs he caught in their summer home on the Vineyard. 

Tom had an electric Lionel railroad set and realized that if he hooked the transformer to frogs' legs he could electrocute them.  'Watch this!', said Tommy as a pinioned frog convulsed as the volts and amps surged through him. 

Or the Wild West shoot-'em-ups on early television and at Saturday matinees; or his grandfather's tales of The Great War, the barbed wire, the Gatling guns, and the trenches.  Something did it, and Bob went from a descendant of Lexington and Concord, Gettysburg, the Marne, and Iwo Jima to a peacenik and defiant advocate for disarmament. 

Nothing deterred him.  Even the drumbeat of war and its constant presence - Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and minor wars of his generation - could not disabuse him of the notion of human kindess. 

The election of Donald Trump, especially in his second term, threw Bob into a renewed frenzy of protest.  When most of his colleagues had retired to Florida and were spending time with their grandchildren, Bob was still at the barricades when Trump and Israel took it upon themselves to bomb Gaza to smithereens, denying the Palestinian people their right of return; or when Trump and Israel invaded Iran, killing thousands in a so-called war for freedom and justice; or when the US marines and Special Forces invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. 

Once again and true to his progressive roots, Bob discounted the innate, inherent, ineluctable violent human acquisitiveness ever since Neanderthalic tribes bashed each other with rocks and jawbones and rather than promote mitigation - or even the policies of countervailing force that at least gave the world a tentative peace during the Cold War - he shouted 'Stop this war...Stop the killing...Stop the murder...'. 

Of course the world was on tenterhooks because never before - even in the Soviet period - had there been two such balanced, equal, and determined adversaries, America and China.  As long as parity remained and as long there was mutual economic benefit to peace, the missiles would remain in their silos, but eventually they would be fired. 

The American defense budget - or rather, as Bob liked to put it, the offense budget given America's first-strike ambitions - was staggering, eating up trillions in revenue that could be used to house the homeless, help the poor, and stop global warming.  China and Russia were no different, and what was the point of a huge armory if you don't use the weapons therein housed?

'Please, Bob, relax', said his wife Corinne herself a committed liberal but with some give in her, an occasional piece of foie gras, a glass of Moet & Chandon, or smelling the roses.  Her pleas went nowhere.  Bob would die in his traces, topple over at a protest, or pass away during one of his famous incendiary calls to action.  There was no way to stop him. As former National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston famously said when asked if he would give up his right to bear arms, 'I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands'.

Bob was as defiant.  From Corinne's point of view Bob was not showing his best - his inner compassion for the world's victims of violence.  He was becoming a sour, nasty old man who wouldn't shut up. 'There, I've said it', said Corinne to no one in particular.  It was a marital betrayal, but God help her, it was true.  Her beloved, admired husband was going off the rails. 

There are two givens in life - one, idealists never give up, and two, there will always be wars.  Of course most of us live within the bookends, reasonably happy, taking what comes and tending to the burgers on the grill, nothing wrong in that, stoicism has never gone entirely out of favor.