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Literary Review
The slaughterhouse of war
RAVI VYAS
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky
THUCYDIDES (c.460-c.395 B.C.), the Athenian historian who wrote the monumental, though unfinished, history of the 27-year-old Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) between Athens and Sparta that left the Athenian empire and the entire culture of the Greek city-state in ruins knew nothing about peace studies, conflict resolution, God's will or the United Nations. But he declared for all time to come that people go to war over "honour, fear and self-interest". Period. So we accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations, "provoking or justifying war".
But if you have seen what went on last month in Iraq, the reasons why the U.S. and U.K. went to war were off-centre, and faintly unreal because here we were given a new set of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons which in this case did not cohere or even overlap. So we have new casus belli now which has nothing to do with reason or commonsense; it is a natural ramification of brute power. "We've got it, so we flaunt it. Manifest destiny made manifest, for the good of all. Take it or lump it." Atrocities celebrate meaninglessness and nothing brings this out better than Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade, A Duty Dance with Death, one of the most original anti-war novels since Catch-22, and a minor classic of all times.
A little background. As prisoner of war in Germany, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, a small town on the Elbe, in February and March 1945. Churchill, who was a strong advocate of area bombing (what we now call carpet-bombing) had the city reduced to dust and ashes by the firebombs that followed. As Vonnegut puts it, "the city was systematically burned up and down." But military historians looking back on the bombing and the enormous destruction that followed have described it as a pointless exercise for two reasons.
First, the war was nearly over as Germany was attacked from both east and west and was on the point of total collapse — the formal surrender took place a month later. Second, Dresden had no strategic importance whatsoever; in fact, it was described as "the Florence of the Elbe", an artistic and cultural centre. All it demonstrated was British vindictiveness and the capacity of human beings for destroying each other and themselves. And the weapons of mass destruction brought the threat of unlimited disaster nearer home and that did not preclude the possibility of miscalculation. And once started, it would spread like a pox, like the Dresden fires, until, by its end the whole world would be infected. Slaughterhouse-Five describes this madness, albeit with a sense of dark humour, compassion and wisdom. For instance, take this case of one of the main characters in the novel: "I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad."
Before getting into the little cameos that are strung together to constitute the novel, we need to keep two factors in mind. First, war reporters are people who do not get into harm's way but merely close enough to record the fate of those who did. Second, in these remembered wars, the time that separates events from writing about them is clearly an important shaping factor. Memory plays tricks and for most reporters the temptation to improve is too great and the end result is that the "truth" of the work is compromised further than it was already bound to be by the subjective eye and ear and the writing "voice", or style of the journalist. The trouble with the publication, over and over again, of improved and shaded and "jazzed up" versions is that eventually the reader can't tell the difference between truth and barefaced lies. Or we get something totally worn-out: four-letter words, that is common parlance in wartime situations, come to mean no more than three-letter words like "the" and "and". What suits memory best is a war life that is lived close to the action, but at some distance from the values, lived by a man who is by nature or circumstances, an outsider. Vonnegut, a biochemist who gets caught up in the war by accident, is a total outsider.
Memory must also have a style, a plain way of telling that leaves the emotions and the drama to emerge from the events themselves. There is an aesthetic of war-writing that Vonnegut captures to a "T". There is no plot, no climax, no happy ending to the book. It is a narrative, plain, unvarnished, without heroics which makes it appear authentic. It is what Vonnegut had seen as nearly as memory had preserved it and Vonnegut had put it down as a picture of war with no comment.
The main character, Billy Pilgrim, hero of this latter-day Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress tells us what lies in our sub-conscious: that war consists of actions that no man would otherwise perform because you have lost the measure of all things in "this abode of madness... War turns the natural world into evil, indescribable spaces, and everything in it into broken, useless, unidentifiable rubbish — including human beings." Billy tells us that the first postulate of the theorem of war is death.
The problem set by the theorem about World War II — in particular for a witness turned impromptu war correspondent, writing soon after an action on the basis of raw experience — was how to arrive at the "truth" about what was going on. The key word in the last sentence is in quotation marks because, as Tolstoy made clear in War and Peace, there are as many truths about a given battle, after it, as there were participants in it.
In any case, a man doesn't see much of the world looking down the barrel of a gun. Vonnegut was only one of them — and a peripheral one at that as a prisoner of war, and the military discipline under which he operated left him little room to move around and see things for himself.
For most men, understanding comes slowly; and imagination must wait upon memory to reveal itself. When it does, it picks its favourites who are usually not war's favourites. Heroes are by and large no good for war memoirs; they stand too close to war's values. Vonnegut wrote this novel more than 20 years after he returned as a POW and all this while he let his experiences of the whirl and muddle of war simmer in his mind till he found the right mood to put it all. And the heroes that emerge are ordinary folk, whose antics fill the pages very simply because they do not understand what was going on around them and find their peace in little acts of high farce that see them through.
"So it goes," is Vonnegut's favourite phrase that winds up one mad, inexplicable situation after another. Slaughterhouse-Five, which is really a metaphor for madness, can also be extended to our day-to-day life today. This is how Vonnegut winds up his little book:
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
So it goes.
The world does not progress; it merely changes. But the more it changes, the more it remains the same. Perhaps, what Vonnegut wants to say is that man is more irrational than rational. He is governed by his emotions rather than his understanding. And politics, which is an extension of war by other means, exploits that. You can't be too far from war; you may not want it, but it will catch up with you.
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, first published 1969, Vintage edition, special Indian price, £3.95.
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