The other day I came across a very interesting scene in Olympos. Hockenberry goes to talk to Odysseus, to apologize for tricking him and basically kidnapping him. Odysseus, though, is rather drunk and is in the mood to talk and get maudlin. Among the things they talk about that I found really interesting, if only for the contrast, was the way they talk about war.
These two characters have such different experiences of war. Odysseus is from a culture that invented aristeia, the glory gained in single-combat with an enemy. Hockenberry is ostensibly from the twentieth century and had a father who fought on Okinawa during the middle of World War II–for him, war is mechanized, dehumanized, soul-killing, horrifying. For him, there is no glory in war, just killing.
So I wonder, what made that change happen? Was it the technology that made it possible to kill thousands in minutes? Was it the culture that started to realize that jingoism is horseshit, that it’s never over by Christmas, and that war is not glorious? Did these two things effect change in each other?
Given what I’ve read about World War I, the war where old tactics and strategies faced new technology, I tend to think that it’s the technology. Guns and bombs can turn anyone into a warrior, whether they are suited to it or not. No one had fought that way before, so no one was prepared for it. I don’t WWI was the first war where there was shell shock–but it was the first time we started hearing about large numbers of cases. And this certainly wasn’t the first time men were forced to march into artillery (remember Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” about the “battle” of Balakava in the Crimea?), but during WWI, it was almost a weekly occurrence. Look at what people started writing after WWI–people like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and other poets wrote about the war.
There is a subtitle on First World War.com: the war to end all wars. It didn’t do that certainly, but it did change the way that people go to war now.
Interesting how a not-so-light conversation between to men drinking Medean wine can send you into such dark thoughts.