A green second lieutenant from Pasadena, California, Paul Fussell was wounded while hunting Germans in the forests of Alsace during the last year of World War II. The shell fragments that “wiped away” most of his platoon punctured his legs and back, forcing him to convalesce while the European theater concluded. Alive and ashamed of it, Fussell became “fascinated and sometimes obsessed” with his wartime experience. Much as novelist and fellow veteran Joseph Heller did, Fussell noticed the echoes of war in the civilian life into which he was honorably discharged. He eventually converted his soldier’s ruminations into a scholarly vocation, becoming a literary historian who often served, through his magazine essays and interviews, as a public remembrancer of the horrors of technological warfare. Civilians and politicians were allowed to ignore and glorify the grisly details, but even they could not escape the power of war to mold human experience across generations. For Fussell, who died in 2012, postwar society was exactly that: a civilization of aftermath, reeling from a cataclysm that inaugurated a new universe of human emotion.
To us, the most recognizable of these feelings are those in the ironic register. Nearly a century later, the world wars seem so calamitous that we can only adopt an ironic cosmic view to countenance them — as though we were Kurt Vonnegut’s omniscient aliens, the Tralmafadorians, who abduct humans and study them in zoos. The suffering of these conflicts radiates through time like a fierce heat, inciting a reflex in the mind that would typically occur in the body: We distance ourselves from the death and destruction by conceptualizing humanity as just another species, crawling senselessly all over the planet, risking its extinction through frivolous squabbles over resources, national prowess, and ethnic hatred. Looking down from this imagined outer space, the heat is bearable, and it becomes possible to feel what we would otherwise describe as “unthinkable,” “unimaginable,” and “indescribable”: the regular human activity of organized killing.
The counterintuitive implication of Fussell’s most celebrated book, The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975, is that the civilian’s dependence on irony is a sign that he can appreciate the reality of 20th-century warfare because irony was the dominant reaction of the soldiers who conducted it. While investigating this wartime psychology, Fussell’s mind was drawn to a conflict that was not his own, to the Great War of 1914-1918 between the Allied and Central Powers, into the hellish trenches that inspired the memoirs, diaries, novels, and poetry of the British officers who seemed so familiar to Fussell.
Through masterly close reading, Fussell discovered that the ironic temperament arose through the brutalization of the refined British sentiments exemplified by Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and others. More recent historians have noted the weakness of Fussell’s account is its asking the writings of a handful of educated, literary, and comfortably raised officers to represent the experience of millions of regulars and conscripts who fought for Great Britain. Yet the horrid metamorphosis that Fussell so empathetically documents in these men might be better assessed by its resonance with contemporary life in Western societies. What makes The Great War so harrowing to read is its conviction that our cheap sardony and cynicism were christened in the misery and pain of people who knew and lost another way to feel. Fussell presents this patrician, romantic, and lyrical sensibility in its dying light for one last glimpse.
A trope of Great War literature that Sassoon and Blunden mastered, sometimes called the “bucolic interlude” or “pastoral oasis,” evokes a soldier’s nostalgia for the scenery of home (pretty forests, soft pastures, rolling countryside, and fox-hunting fields) when he encounters the rare sight of undisturbed wilderness or farmland while at war. But Fussell displays this pastoral imagery in competition with that of industrial war, as found in the writings of infantry who deployed a curious kind of metaphor that Fussell names “ironic vegetation”: barbed-wire “hedges,” “metal brambles,” “gun barrels split like celery,” and Brodie helmets described as “iron mushrooms.” Even the quintessential act of war made itself available to bucolic description. The veteran and statesman Oliver Lyttelton recounts discovering German soldiers huddled together in a French battlefield: “Then we killed. … I saw about ten Germans writhing like trout in a creel at the bottom of a shell-hole and our fellows firing at them from the hip.”
The traditional bardic praise of embattled male bodies was similarly challenged by the war machine’s capacity to mutilate them. Fussell argues that the soldiers of World War I displayed a “unique physical tenderness, the readiness to admire openly the bodily beauty of young men, the unapologetic recognition that men may be in love with each other.” Wartime homoeroticism had existed at least since Homer imagined Achilles and Patroclus, but the weapons introduced during the Great War (tanks, armed aircraft, heavy artillery, chemical aerosolizers, etc.) underscored the absolute vulnerability of the human body, engendering in the soldiery a sensation of “nakedness” that no armor could relieve. Manly attraction was now underwritten by a cold system of butchery.
The exemplar of this gory affection was Wilfred Owen, a second lieutenant who suffered a neurasthenic break after being confined to “a badly shelled forward position for a day looking at the scattered pieces of a fellow officer’s body.” The isolated parts and organs of young men (tongues, thighs, blood, backs, hearts, hands, lips) became the substrates of both vitality and carnage in Owen’s poetry. Tormented by the pain of younger men under his command, Owen describes “a boy’s murdered mouth” or another’s “froth-corrupted lungs” or the “sore feet” of soldiers marching “on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.”
Fussell argues that what gave the literature of the Great War its “special quality” was its “residence upon the knife-edge between” two modes of experience: one yearning, lyrical, innocent, the other anxious, guarded, and world-weary. As if studying a wasp and a fly preserved in ancient amber, it is easy to forget that one of these sensibilities was hunting the other. The first full-scale technological war would invert and empty the noble myths and chivalrous vernaculars; in Lt. Robert Graves’s famous poem, a “grey, grim” Goliath handily cuts open a “calm and brave” David. But before this sensation was registered in the stanzas of the war poets, it was felt by ordinary soldiers, by some lanky person crouched in a rain-battered trench, gripping his rifle as he prepared to “jump the bags,” the phrase infantry used to describe the act of heaving oneself over the sandbags of a trench to begin the march across the Stygian blightscape of no man’s land. Fussell believed the overbearing irony of postmodernity was born here, in this moment, because what this soldier was about to experience was worse than anything he could imagine.
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The Battle of the Somme was an enormous operation conducted by the British and French armies in northern France against the German Empire. The assault, arranged by Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, was meant to end the war. Haig ordered a pulverizing bombardment of the German position: 1,500 guns firing for over a week. After the shelling, his plan was to order an assault on foot, penetrate the German trench line, and break it with cavalry — just like the wars of old.
The Germans, however, had dug especially deep trenches and were comfortably protected during the long bombardment. When Haig ordered troops to advance, the German gunners were waiting for them.
“Out of the 110,000 who attacked, 60,000 were killed or wounded on this one day, the record so far. Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the wounded in no man’s land stopped crying out.
Fussell’s wartime irony was initially one of circumstance, where expectations were grossly violated by reality. But the resulting shock and trauma were so severe that they could only be managed and recalled through that irony. The United Kingdom, in particular, had not engaged in a major conflict in over a century, so soldiers, like civilians, were wholly unprepared, imagining that the war “would be an affair of great marches and great battles, quickly decided.”
The reality was, in every respect, the opposite. The experience of battle in the Great War was not glorious or heroic but depraved, grueling, and utterly meaningless. Infantry troops were sacrificed for marginal advances over devastated territory. (During a five-day push on the Ypres Salient, in Belgium, for every yard the British gained, they paid with 22.9 men — totaling 160,000.) The Somme would be remembered by Allied troops as “The Great Fuck-up,” a phrase that captures how most who lived through the First World War ultimately regarded it. Almost nothing about the war was quick or decisive. The popular refrain that this was the “war to end all wars” proved doubly ironic, as British soldiers eventually began to take “quite seriously that the war would literally never end and would become the permanent condition of mankind.”
The impression was understandable, as trench systems seemed designed to do nothing but prolong the conflict and immiserate infantry. Trenches are, of course, troughs, prone to collecting inches, even feet, of water in the rainy coastal regions of Europe where they were dug. The resulting mud was sometimes more dangerous than the enemy. Fussell reports that, during the Third Battle of Ypres, “thousands literally drowned in the mud.” It inevitably mixed with the blood and excrement produced by thousands of men who could remain for days in their tiny dugouts (called “funk holes” by infantry). The failure to dispose of dead bodies briskly often meant that they would be absorbed into this infernal structure: “Dead horses and dead men — and parts of both — were sometimes not buried for months and often simply became an element of parapets and trench walls. You could smell the line miles before you could see it.” Wonder of wonders that soldiers identified with the expendable creatures around them (horses, dogs, rats, lice) as the trench system of Great Britain would churn through nearly a million men.
Not incidentally did 21st-century warfare become an expert practice in placing great distances (cognitive, emotional, and geographic) between us and the living nightmares war creates. Aerial drone warfare, in which a desk-bound pilot in Nevada can kill people on another continent, remains far more palatable to the public conscience than the direct violence implied by “boots on the ground.” A refusal to feel the human consequences of war has become our preferred method for conducting it. But with his war poets and memoirists, Fussell reminds us it is possible to feel war more sincerely, to burn in its terror, agony, and rage. Oh, the feeling might well kill us — but if we survive it, it’s hard to imagine how war could ever again surprise us.
Fussell’s most ambitious argument asks us to recognize that the systems of war have established the patterns and limits of experience throughout contemporary life. “Modern society,” for Fussell, “is a continuation of the army by different means.” Living alongside other human beings (“in the trenches,” so to speak) in social and economic systems that provide for our well-being only insofar we are useful to them is to relive a pale memory of the Great War. Even the ironic detachment we use to blunt our frustration with these systems first belonged to the soldier; though we have learned that whatever the civilian population borrows from the experience of war, it will eventually return to it.
Trevor Quirk is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Point, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. He is working on a novel and a book about nihilism in American culture.
