War From the Ground Up (33 page)

The unity of the rational and the emotional is today widely accepted at the tactical level. Recruit training seeks to instil a sense of ethos that will drive a soldier's combat motivation, regardless of how far the individual
subscribes to the war's rationale. Clausewitz posited that: ‘truth [the rational argument] is in itself rarely sufficient to make men act … the most powerful springs of action in man lie in his emotions'.
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Emotions in war ‘act as the essential breath which animates the inert mass'.
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This argument applied beyond just the tactical domain. The political object of war had to have purchase on people's emotions for it to be successful:

The political object—the original motive for war—will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires. The political object cannot, however,
in itself
[italics original] provide the standard of measurement. Since we are dealing with realities, not with abstractions, it can do so in the context only of the two states at war. The same political object can elicit differing reactions from different peoples, and even from the same people at different times. We can therefore take the political object as a standard only if we think of the influence it can exert on the forces it is meant to move.
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Any political rationale is interpreted through the prism of emotion, which varies depending on the audience. Plans cannot therefore be made in the abstract without consideration of how they will be interpreted by their intended human audience.

The unity of emotional and rational understanding is fundamentally articulated in the dialectic which informs legitimacy. This is legitimacy in the broad sense rather than any particular moral or legal definition. The synthesis between the rational and the emotional informs action. Thus it can apply to a soldier genuinely fighting for ‘king and country' as much as to a mercenary who fights for money. In terms of audiences in general, it determines how far people subscribe to a strategic narrative, be it out of genuine ideological attachment, self-interest, ‘subscribe' in the interest of self-preservation, or endless other reasons why people agree with a proposition.

The legitimisation of the rational narrative by emotional response is an idea already present in fields outside war. The American historian Bernard Bailyn has argued that memory's relation to the past ‘is not a critical, sceptical reconstruction of what happened: It is the spontaneous, unquestioned, experience of the past … it is expressed in signs and symbols, images and mnemonic clues of all sorts. It shapes our awareness whether we like it or not, and it is ultimately emotional, not intellectual'.

As Gordon Wood writes in the
New York Review of Books
, Bailyn made remarks about history and memory at the conclusion of a 1998
conference on the Atlantic slave trade that had threatened to fall apart. Many black scholars and others had reacted to the presentations of the cold and statistically grounded papers dealing with the slave trade. Bailyn distinguished between history and memory to calm the conference. He argued that statistics helped, but that: ‘memory of the slave trade cannot be reduced to an alien context; and it is not a critical, rational reconstruction; it is for us a living, immediate, if vicarious, experience'. While meaning may be shaped by history, ‘so too may critical history be kept alive, made vivid, and constantly relevant and cogent by the living memory we have of it'. The point Bailyn eloquently made is this: a rational narrative that does not have purchase on the emotional substance of what it seeks to describe cannot claim legitimacy.
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The rational and emotional are of course rarely perfectly aligned. Irony tends to identify the gap between them, which is, to my mind, why it is so prominent in soldiers' humour. In
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
(1930), Siegfried Sassoon starts with his withdrawal from the front to attend a course at an army school: ‘my personal grievance against the Germans was interrupted for at least four weeks'. The lecturer on gas from general headquarters tells the audience of soldiers who have come from the front that gas is still in its infancy: ‘most of us were either dead or disabled before gas had had time to grow up'. Another lecturer addresses them on ‘the spirit of the bayonet': ‘he spoke with homicidal eloquence'. Sassoon excoriates the lecturer with irony, noting how, as a colonel who had never fought, he was actually awarded a Distinguished Service Order ‘for lecturing' (the DSO is properly awarded for exceptional leadership of a unit on operations).

Irony gives way to deep cynicism as the emotional and the rational are increasingly misaligned. One of Sassoon's men and a German sniper kill each other at the same time: ‘he and Kendle had cancelled each other out in the process known as “the attrition of manpower”'. While ‘a certain Prelate' states that every man who kills a German ‘is performing a Christian Act', Sassoon talks of ‘the silly stunt which the Bishops call the Great Adventure'. At one point he sees a dead English soldier and writes ‘at the risk of being thought squeamish or even un-soldierly,
I still maintain that an ordinary human being has a right to be momentarily horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk'.

Now back in Britain training recruits in 1917: ‘the War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman. What in earlier days were droves of volunteers were now droves of victims. I was just beginning to become aware of this'. The emotional overturning of the rational is clear in his letter to his commanding officer, in which he refuses to take further part in the war (even though he was wounded and undeployable in any case): ‘I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong the sufferings for ends which I believe to be unjust'.

The distancing of the rational and emotional interpretations is clear when Sassoon deals with the issue of narrative itself with scathing irony: ‘let the Staff write their own books about the Great War, say I. The Infantry were biased against them, and their authentic story will be read with interest'. ‘The War' for Sassoon does not correspond with his experience of it. He agrees with another infantry officer that ‘the front line is the only place where one can get away from “the War” because in the trenches “it is just one thing after another”'. A failed attack by his unit on 23 April 1917 results in four officers killed, nine wounded and forty other ranks killed: ‘an episode typical of uncountable others, some of which now fill the pages of Regimental Histories. Such stories now look straightforward enough in print, twelve years later; but their reality remains hidden; even in the minds of old soldiers the harsh horror mellows and recedes'.

The process that Sassoon associates with the divergence of narratives is the abstraction of the pure experience, the ‘emotional reality' into a rational narrative. ‘The Second Battalion were wiped out 10 days ago because the Division General had ordered an impossible attack on a local objective. The phrase “local objective” sounded good and made me feel that I knew a hell of a lot about it'. Here Sassoon is highlighting the use of the word ‘objective' precisely because it objectifies combat and sucks out the emotional component. He turns on newspapers for avoiding horror, and ‘assuming that the dead are gloriously happy'.

However, Sassoon is more subtle in his treatment of abstraction than just using it to blame generals and journalists. He goes much further than that when he describes a man whose sons are fighting, who has no agenda in his desire to understand what is going on:

‘the Gommecourt show had been nothing but a massacre of good troops. Probably he kept a war map with little flags on it; when Mametz Wood was reported as captured he moved a little flag on a map forward after breakfast. For him the Wood was a small green patch on a piece of paper. For the Welsh Division it had been a bloody nightmare'.

Sassoon is acknowledging here that abstraction is not necessarily malicious; it is a necessary function of rationality. The key point is that Sassoon is not saying that rationality is wrong in itself; that would be nonsense. He is saying that if a rational narrative is not underwritten by its associated emotional experience, the rational becomes divorced from reality. The legitimacy of the rational narrative is underwritten by its emotional basis.

The central importance of the rational-emotional tension is when their functional relationship is reversed. Strategic narrative has to align the rational and the emotional to persuade its audiences. Siegfried Sassoon's refusal to soldier had no significant impact on the British war effort at the time. However, the widespread mutinies in the French army in 1917 were a major threat to French strategy; they came after the Nivelle offensive, following from the battle of Verdun in 1916, in which the French sustained over 300,000 casualties. In such circumstances strategy has lost control of a strategic audience because the rational strategic narrative no longer has emotional legitimacy; the emotional response now produces a new rationale.

The illegitimate abstraction of emotional experience in the Vietnam War caused a loss of legitimacy in the rational narrative for large tranches of the US domestic population. Neil Sheehan's
Bright Shining Lie
(1989), an account of the war based on his extensive time as a journalist in Vietnam, cites such examples of illegitimate abstraction. For instance, the US air force in Vietnam when under General Anthis used to refer to all targets as ‘structures', which implied some kind of Viet Cong installation.
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The number of ‘structures' destroyed by aerial bombing was used as a key metric of success. Many on the ground saw that most of these structures were just shacks and barns used by civilians, and their bombing was causing huge animosity among the peasantry, who had to witness the destruction of their villages and deaths of their relatives. Yet this emotion is not communicated by a set of statistics about structures. Sheehan also mentions that the refugees caused by the bombing were abstracted as ‘long-term assets' by the US Embassy and
military command, as they were under Saigon's ‘control' in terms of their dependence on the South Vietnamese state.
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When rational abstraction does not correspond to its underlying emotional basis it becomes a denial, not a distillation, of reality.

The photographs and television footage of the war contributed very significantly to shocking the US domestic population into recognition of the bombing campaign for what it was. These new mediums communicated the emotional dimension of war to the domestic population in a far more direct way than had previously been the case. In terms of US casualties, military strategy before Vietnam had generally been justified as an area of professional expertise which inevitably involved casualties. However, after the Tet Offensive and the 1968 Presidential election, the military logic of war started to become even more detached from the emotional response for large swathes of the US domestic public.

The Battle of Hamburger Hill in May 1969, for example, killed eighty-four and wounded 480 US soldiers for an objective that was evacuated days after it was taken.
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The argument proposed by General Creighton Abrams, General Westmoreland's successor, was that ‘we are not fighting for terrain as such. We are going after the enemy'. The 101
^st
Airborne Division's commander, Major General Melvin Zais, argued along the same lines: ‘that was where the enemy was, and that was where I attacked him'.
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The rational military argument may well have made sense from a military perspective; at least 633 North Vietnamese troops were killed in the battle. However, this logic struggled to gain purchase with much of the US domestic population.

Neil Sheehan notes that, while more attritional battles earlier in the war had not caused such a political reaction, the fact that more US soldiers were dying per month in 1969 than in previous years created a particularly intense anti-war reaction to the battle. The US army itself by 1969 faced widespread ill-discipline and loss of belief among the ranks. Sheehan also remarks that it was at this stage that the notion that troops were not killed but were ‘wasted' or ‘blown away' became common US army slang.
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Clausewitz writes that ‘feelings' can ‘act as a higher judgement': the emotional can trump the rational, and proposes a new rationale.
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This
distinction often serves more purpose as an analytical tool, since to distinguish between the two in actuality—to dissect an individual's sources of motivation for subscription to a given position—would be incredibly complicated. There is no clear distinction between rational and emotional sources of motivation at an individual level. Hence existential motivation for participation in war is often intertwined with, rather than distinct from, the war's political rationale. The endemic association of war with glory has meant that at some level most wars have an element of the existential. A similar argument might be made about armed humanitarian interventions, which are often justified in terms that satisfy an ‘existential' emotive requirement, that are mixed in with geopolitical considerations.
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A primarily emotive rationale can, for instance, be an organising idea which sees war as the ultimate expression of national values, which could occur even in defeat. This has been termed ‘existential' war. Hew Strachan identifies how the younger Clausewitz expresses this almost as a creed in manifestos he wrote in 1812. Here he extols the duty to defend the nation's liberty and values to the last drop of its blood:

Even the destruction of liberty after a bloody and honourable struggle assures the people's rebirth. It is the seed of life, which one day will bring forth a new, securely rooted tree.
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