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.