Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the CyberAge (review)

David Perlmutter, chair for political communication at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication, has written an engaging account of man's vision of warfare since prehistoric times. The strength of Perlmutter's work is his exploration of how various societies and eras have used a potpourri of methods (visions) to explain and oftentimes justify their penchant for conflict. Furthermore, he cautions the reader that the tapestry of war, whether Neolithic cave drawings, Roman monuments, Chin Empire terracotta statues, eighteenth century oil paintings, or modern photographic and film images, while no doubt revealing much about man's bellicose nature, can conversely be just as misleading as the written word.

Pelmutter emphasizes metonymy, or the fact that something can be used to represent a larger reality. In applying this concept to warfare, Perlmutter posits that the driving force behind the metonym often controls the interpretations and conclusions drawn from it. For example, the scenes on Trajan's column show Roman troops in ordinary bivouac scenes and a Roman leader who bestowed mercy and leniency in dealing with his foe, the Dacians. In contrast, the visuals on Marcus Aurelius's column depict the destruction and bloody savagery wrought on the Gothic peoples by the Roman army. Which of these images most closely represents warfare? And, why did Trajan employ routine soldiering and humane treatment of the enemy while Marcus Aurelius envisioned a theme of brutality? Perlmutter uses such contrasts to raise these and other important and complex questions that can be applied broadly across the landscape of the ancient or modern battlefield.

After a perhaps lengthy survey of warfare from earliest times through what he labels "primitive war," the heart of Perlmutter's book discusses several specific categories whose intersection reveals basic truths about the complicated nature of war. He devotes chapters to commanders, comrades, enemies, and horrors. For example, he argues that for centuries the tendency of the commander-leader was to be represented as larger than life (Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Ghengis Khan, etc.), an approach that ultimately changed with the democratization trend in the modern world. He uses Benjamin West's famous painting of The Death of General Wolfe (1770) to illustrate this point. The dying commander is depicted as almost Christ-like in a contrived setting but nonetheless became a heroic symbol for the state and a means to pay tribute to the British soldiers. Perlmutter explains that this latter aspect of the vision became more significant by the twentieth century as the previous exclusive hero worship of the war commander made a transition to trumpet also the experience of the common soldier. Perlmutter illustrates this trend by reminding the reader of the popularity of Bill Mauldin's World War II cartoons, and that most war movies extol the virtues of the grunt on the ground (Patton being an obvious exception) rather than those of the more celebrated commander.

Perlmutter's sketch of what binds soldiers together is also drawn from a variety of intriguing sources. The ancient scenes on Mycenaean vases, Civil War photographs, and films such as Triumph of the Will, Gallipoli, and Saving Private Ryan all provided a vehicle to promote the bonds of camaraderie whether out of fear, loyalty to a cause, or belonging to a band of brothers with no common link—ethnic, cultural, social—other than survival in combat. Likewise, his vision of the enemy reveals not only the obvious but also more subtle representations. He argues that the image of the enemy is complex and can be manipulated in various ways. That is to say the enemy might be described in a negative manner—the antithesis of the conqueror—so as to be useful in diverting attention from other issues. Drawing on Assyrian, Greek, and Mesoamerican architectural and artistic sources, Perlmutter shows...