“We took no prisoners and the slaughter was really terrible,” Private Horace Bruckshaw wrote of a battle during the First World War. “Even as we killed them off, fresh ones appeared . . . and so the slaughter continued. We . . . cleared the place except for sundry stragglers . . . We had killed scores, yes hundreds of the loathed enemy.”
Bruckshaw’s account seems timeless; his words could describe any battle from Thermopylae to Basra. Yet he wasn’t actually describing an encounter with enemy soldiers, but rather an attempt to eradicate lice. That’s an enemy common to all wars and a ritual familiar to every soldier.
The mundane monopolises the soldier’s life. Warriors are defined by combat, yet combat is rare. A typical British soldier in the First World War found himself in the front line, under fire, for only a few weeks in a year. Only one in nine American personnel in Vietnam were combat soldiers who shot at the enemy. As Max Hastings recognises, a book about soldiering should not concentrate on fighting, for that would give a false impression. The warrior’s life is instead a cacophony of mundanity — marching, drill, sleeping, eating, getting drunk, telling stories, getting laid, killing lice.
Hastings has spent most of his professional life researching or observing war. This book, which he has edited, is a glimpse into his junk drawer, a clutter of material that retains value but lacks obvious employment. It’s a collection of brief observations on the soldiering life from a variety of authors dating from biblical times to the present day. They are anecdotes — some profound, some silly, others rather trivial. None is definitive or earth-shattering, but together they provide a pointillist portrait of enthralling sensitivity.
“My purpose is to sound notes that ring true about the warrior’s condition,” Hastings writes. The resulting composition is more John Cage than Mozart; it’s thundering dissonance, a conglomeration of fractured melodies packed with wrong notes and missed beats. That, by the way, is not meant as criticism because discordance seems entirely appropriate. War is never a perfectly performed concerto; it’s always confusing and sometimes pointless. Like Hastings, I’ve spent most of my professional life studying soldiers and war, yet I can’t profess to understand either. The individual notes sometimes ring true, but there’s no single truth.
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Soldiers love to tell stories. Most of these can be appreciated only by other soldiers and only when drunk. Yet some are gems, and this book provides plenty of those. Robert Graves tells of two Scottish privates in the Great War who decide to murder a tyrannical sergeant. After bungling the killing, they seek out their adjutant. “We’ve come to report, sir, that we are very sorry but we’ve shot our company sergeant-major.” “Good heavens,” the adjutant replies, “how did that happen?” “It was an accident, sir.” “What do you mean? Did you mistake him for a German?” “No, sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.”
The story probably isn’t true, but then most soldier stories aren’t. They’re based on a scintilla of truth that is then elaborately embroidered. Similar stories tumble from the pages of this book like gems from a pirate’s chest. An ordnance “expert”, keen to do a favour for his commander, offers to remove a tree stump from his property. He miscalculates the amount of explosive by tenfold, blows the stump sky high and shatters every window in his commander’s stately home. Good intentions similarly go awry when a rabbit shoot organised for Napoleon turns into chaos. A thousand rabbits mistake the emperor for the man who regularly provides lettuce. On two flanks they charge, driving Bonaparte from the field of battle.
During the Peninsula War Wellington limited officers’ leave to 48 hours because, in his opinion, that was as long as any reasonable man would want to spend in bed with a woman. Love and sex figure prominently in this book, as they do in every soldier’s life. A corporal, captured in the English Civil War, writes a last letter to his wife, telling her he is to be executed at dawn. The letter is sent, but the soldier is then rescued. He writes another letter telling of his reprieve, but between those two postal deliveries his wife remarries. Betrayal by a lover is a common trope in soldiers’ stories; it’s the glue that binds a band of brothers.
That brotherhood was, for a long time, exclusively male, infiltrated only occasionally by cross-dressing women who followed a husband off to war or who were simple thrillseekers. More recently women have joined the military in pursuit of gender equality or, more prosaically, for a job. The anecdotes about female soldiers in this book are fascinating because they expose the uncomfortable gender dynamics of a profession that oozes masculinity. “When guys come back from war they can sit in bars and impress girls with their stories,” Emma Sky reflected after returning from Iraq, where she served in the Coalition Provisional Authority. “It’s a bit different for women. No guy is going to want to hear my war stories.”
Heather Paxton served in Iraq, where Hussein, a local sheikh’s son, fell hopelessly in love with her. He gave her an expensive bottle of perfume. “Women should smell like women, not men,” he explained. “You need to think of me as a soldier, not a woman,” she insisted. “Take it. You [are] a woman too.” Torn between two sides of herself, she grudgingly accepted the gift. In private, she savoured the spicy scent, her femininity clashing with her professionalism. “My heart ached for the world I left behind. I was tired of the stench of fear that clung to every pore of my body. I dreamt, just for a moment, that the fragrance of the perfume could bring me back home where I was safe.” Attacking the citadel of masculinity was a great deal more complicated than Paxton had anticipated. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she got what she expected.
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Stories, whether poignant, heroic or silly, are camouflage that hides the essential nature of soldiering. Truths are inconvenient. “Soldiers,” Hastings writes, “like to clothe their trade in a fancy dress of words that include honour and chivalry, but the history of wars is, in the last analysis, an account of humankind’s efforts to kill each other.” There’s no getting round the violence, nor the fact that, for many, violence is the job’s principal attraction. “I just kill people,” the American General James Hollingworth confessed during the Vietnam War. “There’s nothing I love better than killin’ Cong.” Was he unusual, or just honest?
War is primal. Its allure lies in the otherwise forbidden. General George Monck wrote in 1645 that honour must be the soldier’s “greatest wage”, yet he also admitted that some are attracted by a lust “to do evil”. “I do believe we are the force for good here,” an American officer in Iraq desperately asserted. “But some of the shit that happens . . . is going to stay with me for a long time.”
“For all armies in all ages,” Hastings writes, “the challenge . . . is to cherish warrior virtues, while rejecting warrior excesses.” After reading his 345 anecdotes, I’m still not sure how to feel about soldiering, or about war. That, perhaps, is as it should be. In confusion lies honesty and truth.
Soldiers: Great Stories of War and Peace, edited by Max Hastings, William Collins, 517pp; £25
