The rules of engagement.
It is a joyous thing, is war . . . . You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood is fighting well, tears come to your eyes. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our creator. And then you prepare to go and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that, there arises such a delectation, that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is.
—Jean de Bueil, Le Jouvencel (ca. 1465)
It’s an odd week to be reading Theodor Meron’s Bloody Constraint: War and Chivalry in Shakespeare. There’s a cognitive dissonance in reading the tusslings of 14th century philosophers with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and the very ideas that squirm beneath our op-ed pages, of a just injustice, a moral immorality, a gross crime committed, eyes opened and resolve firmed, for the greater good: a bellum justum; a just and proper war. There’s something so terribly odd in realizing Giovanni da Legnano back in the 1300s out-Orwelled the current powers that be, making a better case for the war in Iraq than Thomas Friedman ever could: war comes itself from divine law, he argues, with a “positive allowance” from God; because, he says, the “end of war…is the peace and tranquility of the world[, war] proceeded originally and positively from God.” —You read that, the bus stops, you close the book and you stand up and off you get, your brain kicked loose and floating numbly in your skull like a Sudafed high.
“The tinsel glint of chivalry.” That’s another good line, Meron quoting Maurice Keen, and I would have liked it a lot 20 years ago, or even 10; the slap at the cheapness of chivalry, the dishonesty of honorable brutality and the hypocrisy of tarting up slaughter with a surface sheen of civilized behavior, would have appealed greatly to me. I like it a lot now, too, but because it’s one of those perversely beautiful little paradoxes; I think of Christmas lights and cheap bits of foiled plastic. I mean, you don’t want to use too much, but judiciously apply it, then turn off the lights and squint just so: you get a heart-lifting thing of beauty. Chivalry—by which I don’t so much mean opening doors for ladies, no; I mean noblesse oblige, but more specifically the obligations imposed by differences in brute power and violence, not social standing (which, of course, is based implicitly on brute power and violence); obligations imposed not by anything inherent to power, no (power corrupts, after all)—but merely because we decided they should be. —Chivalry is hypocrisy, yes, but a necessary one, one that has tempered much brutality, horror, and bloodshed; as much as if not more than it has excused and endorsed, is my gut-level reaction. (Assuming one could ever even begin to measure such a thing.) Chivalry is a concept doomed to failure from the start by semantics and human nature, but nonetheless the attempt is made (was made? has been made?); and there is sometimes nothing so beautiful as clear-eyed stubborn folly.
“Force is the weapon of the weak,” maybe, is another way of putting it, but I’m reaching well past chivalry there. (“Power to the people! Teeth for shrimp! Plato was a fascist!” —Indeed, but also: “The People! United! Provide a bigger target!” Thereby demonstrating not only why I don’t do so well at rallies and marches, but also my penchant for sticking tangents in the spokes of whatever it is I’m wheeling at the moment.)
The Navy tried (not too terribly hard) when I was in high school to get me to come to Annapolis, and I must cop to having been tempted somewhat if not sorely. (Thereby proving in at least my own particular case that it’s not so much a particular extremism that attracts adolescents as it is extremity itself. Apocalypses and utopias [utopiæ?] [“Absolute Destiny Apocalypse!”] [another tangent; I’ll try to keep them quiet. Sorry].) I never would have gone—I even think I knew that, then—but there was something about—the power of it. A power tempered with restraint, or at least the illusions of restraint: the uniforms, the tradition, the discipline, the rules of engagement, the laws of war. Might in service of right. A power bigger than any one of us working for ideals great enough for all of us. And if it doesn’t take much to blow all that up into so much glittering tinsel, well—it’s still there. An impossible ideal, honored in breach more often than not, but a deep and abiding motivation in more than some of us would sometimes like to admit; never so clear-eyed as others would like to believe, but nonetheless tempering as much brutality in this world as it excuses and condones. If not more. —This flirtation with a great and aweful crossroads (not that I ever would have, not really, no, and the idea of me-then actually doing it fills me-now with a kind of rueful, wincing glee; a folly not at all clear-eyed or deliberate, that would have been) has stayed with me. I check in on the road not taken: I read enough of Clancy, say, to know he was enough of a partisan hack to make a lousy novelist but a useful non-fiction writer (with a shaker of salt to hand); I stumbled over David Poyer and snapped up his modern naval stuff like hotcakes; I was inordinately pleased when a friend, a naval alumnus, blurted, “Jesus Christ, you actually read the Bluejacket’s Manual? Without being forced?” —To list three touchstones pretty much at random.
(I’d sketched out that much at work, on breaks. A slow day. I got on the bus, rode home. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. I went shopping. Bought catfood. Wine. Feta cheese. “The bombs are falling,” someone said. “We’re doing this, aren’t we?” I went home. Made dinner. Here I am. The bombs are falling.)
I don’t know much, then, and none of it directly. But I know enough to know that though a “fair and lucky war” is impossible (has been impossible, since 1991; is always impossible, but, but), I still hope for a war as short and as deathless as possible. I know enough to know that I support our troops, for what that’s worth; I know enough not to be surprised when I hear from a friend of a friend that some of those troops have taken to referring to their commander-in-chief as “the Antichrist.” I know enough to know that this war is that most immoral and most unjust of wars—
Unnecessary.
I know enough to know the struggle for peace isn’t over. It has just begun. Just barely begun. Embarking on a war, someone said somewhere at some point, is like entering a dark room; there’s no way of knowing what will come. So curse the darkness—repudiate it, spit in its face, drag your heels against the hands that pull you into it, curse it—but light a candle, too. (You can do both.) Light a candle. Speak out. Forgive us all our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, but write the fall of every bomb on your heart, and never forget: Never again. Swear it.
Go, gentlemen, each man unto his charge.
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law.
March on, join bravely! Let us to ’t, pell mell—
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.
Never again, goddammit.
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Well said. There is a separation between those who intitiate wars and those who fight them. To revile the former is not to dishonor the latter.
Not denied, just delayed...