The Horrors of War: Representations of Violence in European, Oriental, and “Patriotic” Wars

As military men living in a particularly belligerent period, Russian officers at the turn of the 19th century had ample opportunity to experience the manifold aspects of war. Any reader of their military diaries and memoirs knows how rarely their authors venture beyond the subjects of strategy and tactics, let alone describe the death and suffering that are common in times of war. Nevertheless, Russian war literature from the late 1700s and early 1800s contains a significant number of testimonies about the perceived transgressions of “normal” military experience. These transgressions, called here the “horrors of war,” were both unusual enough to arrest attention and unsettling enough to generate specific discursive strategies that helped the diarists and memoirists cope with their traumatic impact.

Sensitivity to the horrors of war is a variable defined, on the one hand, by the historically changing character of warfare and, on the other, by the individual’s idea of the acceptable forms of violence in war. Although war suspends the existing political and social order, it is often conducted in accordance with certain “rules”—for example, feudal warfare based on notions of aristocratic honor or 20th-century international conventions prohibiting the use of poison gas and explosive bullets. The boundary between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence is defined in different ways by different social groups and societies, often as a function of the timing of their encounters with modernity. The modern mind has an ambiguous attitude toward war. It exhibits a mounting uneasiness about the inhumanity of war, yet may succumb to the temptation of the idea of total war as a means to end all such warfare.¹ As narrating subjects become more sensitive to the “horrors of war,” they sometimes employ elaborate discursive strategies to overcome their potentially traumatic influence and to continue fighting. Whereas accounts of “horrors” reveal the increasingly unsettling character of warfare, the discursive treatment of these horrors can make the continuation of war possible.

Over the course of 18th- and early 19th-century European campaigns, tsarist officers adopted elements of the code of conduct characteristic of the ancien régime—a set of unwritten principles that channeled violence and minimized the destructive impact of war on civilian populations.² At the same time, a series of campaigns against Ottoman Turkey confronted the tsarist officers with the “barbarities” of oriental warfare, which further strengthened their commitment to the “rules” of “regular” war. The European and Turkish campaigns constituted two alternative varieties of Russian war experience that were taking shape by the time of what became known as the Patriotic War of 1812. Napoleon’s invasion was the first war in centuries to affect the Russian interior; it accordingly led to an unprecedented mobilization of society beyond the military class. It forced the rationalistic sensibilities of the educated Russians to confront the horrors of the “first total war,” which called into question the wisdom of ancien régime warfare and challenged the earlier perception of the civilian population as neutral and uninvolved.

Based on Russian memoirs and diaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the present article discusses three major aspects of contemporary war experience and analyzes discursive techniques that helped the tsarist officers deal with the horrors of war. First, I highlight the role of the European campaigns of the Russian army in the emergence of the military intelligentsia, who became committed to the “rules” of “regular” warfare and condemned transgressions of these rules by their own soldiers. Next, I analyze the construction of the Ottomans as an oriental “Other,” whose way of fighting Russian officers found both spectacular and barbarous. Finally, it explores Russian memoirs and diaries of the War of 1812, in which portrayals of unacceptable forms of violence both sustained and suspended the discourse of patriotic struggle against unprecedented foreign invasion. The article argues that the reaction of Russian officers to the horrors of European, oriental, and patriotic war was twofold. On the one hand, they denounced the “ignoble” forms of violence associated with lack of restraint in combat. On the other hand, they sought to...