The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On

Three: The Soldiers’ War: Coercion or Consent?

91 three The Soldiers’ War Coercion or Consent? John Horne, Trinity College, Dublin Len Smith, Oberlin College Winter: Welcome to everyone this evening. Today we turn to the soldiers’ war. It may be possible for us to unravel problems about why wars break out—the subject of our first scholars’ forum—but it seems to me an even more difficult task to answer the question as to why do men go through battle? In the First World War, why was it not a natural reaction to the terror of battle for a man to drop his gun and turn around and go home? What is it that kept people in uniform? And in the First World War, we’re talking about seventy million people in uniform at war for fifty months—fifty months of the most astonishing industrial , assembly-line warfare that had ever been seen on earth. We’re dealing with a puzzle that soldiers have faced from the Trojan war portrayed in the Iliad to the present, and it will go on troubling people as long as men bear arms. One reason why I think the study of the First World War is so important for us today is its modernity. It was the first fully industrialized war between countries that had, at their disposal, vast material resources as 92 John Horne and Len Smith well as the largest population of young men in the history of the world. This was a democratic war; it touched whole societies. Why those men went to war and why those men stayed at war is the question that we address this evening. In many respects, the questions that we ask are bound to remain open; they cannot be resolved for good. They have to be asked by each generation from its own perspective and with the cadences of its own language. My colleagues this evening are Len Smith and John Horne. Both are historians of France in the period of the First World War. Both have written important books on the soldiers’ war. Leonard Smith has deepened our understanding of how soldiers withstand the terrible strain of combat through applying a notion of what he terms “proportionality.” That is to say, soldiers have minds, and they have considered, reasonable objections to the orders that they have to carry out. They frequently don’t do so, and in fact if you looked at a military map with an arrow on it, you’ll have to conclude that soldiers go in every direction except where the arrow points. How is it that soldiers follow orders? And in what ways do they engage in negotiation with their officers about how much territory is worth how many lives? These are questions which Len Smith has made his own. John Horne has gone in another direction. His research has enabled us to talk in an informed way about what is in the minds of soldiers when they are in the battlefield, and how they bring with them, among the things they carried, to use Tim O’Brien’s phrase, the history of the last war. The last war before 1914 is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870– 71, in which soldiers faced guerrilla warfare. In 1914 they and their sons and nephews believed that the same thing was happening. They were wrong about that, but one can understand, thanks to the work of John Horne and his colleague in Dublin, Alan Kramer, their false perception . What the late British historian James Joll termed “unspoken assumptions” in the minds of soldiers about this war can be the tragically misconstrued interpretations of the last one.1 In both cases, John Horne and Len Smith have entered into the question of what was in the minds of soldiers when they went to war? And is it the case that they consented to carnage? That question sounds to me like asking someone if he “consents” to bubonic plague. Can a soldier consent to a war in which the greatest concentration of artillery fire in history was arrayed against him? The Soldiers’ War 93 Ernst Jünger put it this way: standing in a field of battle is like watching a giant swing a hammer and missing your head by a quarter of an inch.2 How did men endure this? Do they consent to war of this kind or are they coerced into accepting it? Was the key...