Just War and Tragedy: A Response to Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War

In his memoir, The Brass Ring, World War II military journalist and cartoonist Bill Mauldin recalled a Memorial Day address given in May 1945 at the Anzio-Nettuno U.S. Military Cemetery by Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott. Mauldin was the creator of cartoon strips about the two poor U.S. Army infantrymen Willie and Joe and was a well-known disrespecter of military officiousness and martinets. But Truscott was not among his targets. Truscott had commanded the Third Infantry Division in North Africa and Sicily, then II Corps and Fifth Army in Italy, and as Mauldin reports, he had something to say:

Normally I am allergic to Veterans Days and Armistice Days and the like, but Truscott was somebody special. . . . The Anzio-Nettuno cemetery was a collecting point and there were about twenty thousand American graves. Families hadn’t started digging up the bodies and bringing them home. The speakers platform, covered with bunting, was arranged with its back to the endless rows of white-painted temporary wooden markers. . . . When Truscott spoke, he turned away from the visitors and addressed himself to the corpses he had commanded there. It was the most moving gesture I ever saw. It came from a hard-boiled old man who was incapable of planned dramatics. The general’s remarks were brief and extemporaneous. He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. One of the Senators’ cigars went out; he bent over to relight it, then thought better of it. Truscott said he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.

(1971, 272)¹

Having finished his remarks, Truscott turned and walked away, giving not a glance to his other, living, audience.

The shock of Truscott’s act, the frankness of his words, the directness of the emotion and judgment they convey, hold a lesson for any of us who would dare to make moral arguments in favor of war. Such words as we would use must stand up not just to the doubts of the living but also to the unanswerably reproachful silence of the dead. Was it worth this? they seem mutely to ask. It is the attempt to give an intelligible, and respectable, answer to that question that drives just war thinking, or should drive it. Biggar’s work is exemplary on these matters, not least in the rigor with which he tries to provide such an answer.

As should be clear from what I said in my blurb for this book, I think this book stands a chance to become this era’s De iure belli ac pacis (Grotius² 2005), or perhaps more modestly, Ramsey’s The Just War ([1968] 2002). Others have done crucial work on aspects of this, but no one has brought it all together in sso synoptic a way. Biggar calls this book “a series of essays” (3), but that is overly modest.² These are not simply distinct essays—diverse assaults, if you will, from different jumping-off points, on a common fortress; there is a relentless systematicity to the work. Because it extends across the whole field of topics in the ethics of war (discrimination, directing the intention, prudential counsels and first-order criteria, statecraft, etc.) and because it engages so profoundly with both theological themes and historical cases old and new, it is a uniquely systematic, powerful, and deep vision of how the Christian tradition thinks about the ethics...