War in literature

War is surprisingly inconspicuous among the topics of early Western literature. Most of the wars and battles featured in literature before 1800—including the Siege of Troy in Homer’s Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.; English translation, 1616), the First Crusade in Gerusalemme liberata (1581; Jerusalem Delivered, 1600) by Torquato Tasso, and the Battle of Agincourt in William Shakespeare’s Henry V (produced c. 1598–1599)—were historically distant to their authors and approached legendary status.

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen was the one of the first writers to incorporate his own war experience—he was press-ganged into the Thirty Years’ War at the age of thirteen—into a major literary work, the satirical novel Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669; The Adventurous Simplicissimus, 1912). In one of the supplements to this work, Bertolt Brecht found the story that inspired the bitter and brutal Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (pr. 1941; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1941); however, Grimmelshausen’s demolition by mockery of the guiding myths of aristocratic warfare—duty, chivalry and heroism—stood alone for more than a century.

Such retrospective analyses became common only when the era of political warfare began, and the slow spread of democratic responsibility began to engage whole populations—at least tacitly—in matters of diplomatic propriety. That was the context in which Napoleon Bonaparte became a legend in his own lifetime; his charisma rubbed off on everyone who fought for and against him.

The Napoleonic and Crimean Wars

Although it was the Russian winter of 1812 rather than Lord Nelson or the duke of Wellington that ruined Napoleon’s ambitions, the English never stopped congratulating themselves for their role in his downfall. The celebratory note struck by Thomas Campbell in such poems as “Hohenlinden” (1803) and “Ye Mariners of England” (1809) recurs in countless nineteenth century works that exult in the expansion of the British Empire. The same tone permeates popular romances of the twentieth century by such writers as C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian, which nostalgically regard the Napoleonic era to be the most recent into which a contemporary writer can plausibly insert an authentic military hero—a contention deftly subverted by the subtle comedies of George MacDonald Fraser. The most notable dramatic account of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo—La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma, 1895)—was, however, written by Stendhal, a Frenchman.

The business and representation of war were irrevocably altered by the Crimean War of 1853–1856, which was the first to be extensively reported. The highly critical running commentary provided by the London Times mobilized popular opinion so successfully that the public became intoxicated by its newly discovered right of censure and laid virtual siege to Parliament. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote the popular poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) in response to a newspaper account of the Battle of Balaklava. The combatants in the Crimea included Russian Leo Tolstoy, who preferred to look back to a conflict in which his own side had emerged victorious in compiling his massive pseudosociological study Voyna i mir (1865–1869; War and Peace, 1886), and British writer G. A. Henty, who became the archetypal author of jingoistic British “boys’ books.”

The delusions entertained and promoted by celebratory accounts of war received little opposition in Britain until the end of the century, when they were lampooned in such works as George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (produced 1894). Even the significant subgenre of future war stories, launched in 1871 by George T. Chesney’s ingeniously alarmist The Battle of Dorking (1871), was dominated by saber-rattling imperialist fantasies such as Louis Tracy’s The Final War (1896).

The American Civil War

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was reported even more conscientiously than the Crimean War, with the additional luxury of illustrative photography. Such reportage provided the imaginative kindling for the genre of contemporary war poetry, although the vast majority of the works subsequently collected in such volumes as Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) and William Gilmore Simms’s anthology War Poetry of the South (1867) were written by civilians reacting to the news rather than by combatants. The first novel representing battle as a uniquely challenging and self-revealing species of personal experience, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), has a Civil War setting, but its author was born in 1871. It was not until the Civil War was safely and distantly embedded within the United States’ creation mythology—carefully bracketed by the American Revolution and World War I—that literary analysis of its epochal significance could be pioneered by works such as Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem John Brown’s Body (1928), MacKinlay Kantor’s trilogy of novels begun with The Jaybird (1932), and Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling Gone with the Wind (1936).

The Civil War provided one of the most significant stimuli to the development of modern alternative history fiction, which had been pioneered in France with novels of a victorious Napoleon. Many writers explored the possible consequences of Southern victory in their novels. A similar phenomenon would occur after World War II, when numerous writers penned accounts of worlds that might have developed following a German-Japanese victory.

World War I

World War I (1914–1918) was the first war to have been loudly and lavishly written about in advance of its occurrence. The future war subgenre had suggested that some kind of settlement between the British Empire and German imperialistic ambitions was inevitable and that the world would be its stage. The slogans by which World War I was marketed to the men who had to fight it emerged from this futuristic fiction, most notoriously its representation as “the war to end war.” The avidity with which poets responded to the war’s outbreak was amazing; the British poet laureate, William Watson, published sixteen war poems in the first three weeks. A bibliography compiled by Catherine Reilly lists 2,225 British war poets, although only 417 of them were on active service. The number of war poems produced by German writers in the first six months of hostilities is said to have run into the millions. Novelists were, of necessity, slower off the mark, but the first classic account of trench warfare, Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu: Journal d’une esconade (1916; Under Fire: The Story of a Squad, 1917), appeared two years after war broke out.

The impact that new technology would have on the fighting of World War I was anticipated by works such as Wilhelm Lamszus’s Menschenschlachthaus (1912; The Human Slaughterhouse, 1913) but not fully understood. Once experience of the new high-tech warfare and such side-effects as battle neurosis had been fully digested, however, the response to its horrors was extreme. Although there was a marked hiatus for a decade, the war was still fairly raw in living memory when Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, 1968; All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929, 1969) were published and R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End (1930) was first produced.

The United States’ reluctance to get involved in World War I is reflected in the American literary response, whose most notable rapid product came from members of the ambulance corps such as Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings. Dos Passos published Three Soldiers in 1921, and Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922) was a study of valiant individual struggle against insane but relentless authority, a theme that would recur in American literary accounts of war.

World War I was the first conflict in which literary writers were consulted as to how enemy propaganda might be countered. Within weeks of the outbreak, the British government had convened an assembly including Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and J. M. Barrie. In the beginning, the overwhelming mass of published war poetry was intended to boost morale. However, the tide of antiwar sentiment could not be stemmed by censorship once Siegfried Sassoon had made a public appeal for the war to be ended in 1917. Sassoon’s gesture proved a key inspiration to many contemporary writers, including Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, and continues to haunt the imagination in the work of such writers as Pat Barker. The war left behind an exceedingly bitter legacy among the survivors on both sides, many of whom felt that their dead comrades and relatives had been betrayed by politicians and generals who had botched its termination as badly as its strategy. That acute sense of betrayal became both the cause and context of its sequel.

World War II

Like its predecessor, World War II was widely anticipated in Europe even before the outbreak of its prelude, the Spanish Civil War. British futuristic war fiction of the 1930’s was frankly apocalyptic, insisting that air fleets armed with poison gas, high explosives, and incendiaries could obliterate civilization. Such representations probably encouraged Adolf Hitler’s belief that blitzkrieg would demolish British morale, as well as his reluctance to introduce poison gas into the arena.

The immediate literary response to the war was relatively muted. The necessity of maintaining morale was generally accepted, and the literary legacy of World War I was seen as an obstacle rather than a model—an attitude that persisted in Europe after 1945. The United States was not so heavily burdened, and the attack on Pearl Harbor licensed an indignation that was soon plowed back into retrospective literary analyses. The influence of such works was exaggerated by the facility with which James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947) was converted into a Broadway musical hit and such novels as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951) became successful Hollywood movies. From a more distant retrospect, however, the war came to seem like an absurd waste, and continuing preoccupation with the tension between the individual and military authority was exaggerated to surreal extremes in such acrid black comedies as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death (1969), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). It is no coincidence that these novels became popular while the United States’ long-term military involvement in Southeast Asia was becoming deeply problematic.

The manner of World War II’s ending reanimated the future war genre, which was dominated by lurid depictions of nuclear holocaust for the next half-century. The horrible plausibility of such accounts was fed by the Cold War confrontation of the United States and the Soviet Union, which also fueled the further development of the spy novel and the technothriller—popular subgenres that had made their first appearances as spinoffs of pre-World War I future war fiction.

Vietnam and Beyond

Television made every American a spectator in the Vietnam Conflict, and this immediacy was reflected in the literary response. So prompt was the recognition that the war was something requiring literary interpretation that it was the subject of fourteen novels published in 1966 and twenty-two in 1967. The Green Berets (1965), written by advertising executive Robin Moore, set the commercial pace, launching a new subgenre of machismo-soaked novels about elite forces. Many correspondents delegated to cover the Vietnam War—some of them, such as Gustav Hasford, author of The Short Timers (1967; filmed as Full Metal Jacket, 1987) seconded from military units—subsequently wrote novels based on their reportage. In addition, soldiers who fought in the war wrote fictionalized accounts of their experiences. Tim O’Brien, an infantryman in the Vietnam War, established his reputation as one of the foremost fiction writers about the war with the highly acclaimed The Things They Carried (1990), a linked group of stories about soldiers in Vietnam.

Twenty Classics of War in Literature

Bibliography

Beidler, Philip D. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Clarke, I. F. Voices Prophesying War, 1763–1984. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Ferguson, John. War and the Creative Arts: An Anthology. London: Macmillan, 1972.

Franklin, H. Bruce. War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Harvey, A. D. A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art, and War. London: Hambledon Press, 1998.

Miller, Wayne Charles. An Armed America: A History of the American Military Novel. New York: New York University Press, 1970.