The Cost of Killing

Attack through No Man's Land

In the First World War, the most frequent cause of death was from artillery missiles aimed and fired from a distance.  French soldier Guilliaume Apollinaire captures the detachment of long-range gunners in this excerpt from his poem “Nothing Much”:

How many d’you reckon we’ve killed

Christ

It’s weird it doesn’t affect us….

Each time you say fire! the word becomes steel that explodes far off….

Captain Reginald James Young,
 winning Military Cross 1916
by Stanley L. Wood 

But what is the psychological toll for infantry soldiers who kill a man at close range? In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes, “The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must forever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt” (93).

Researchers who study Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have long understood that distance plays a key role in the trauma of taking another life: “if one does not have to look into the eyes when killing, it is much easier to deny the humanity of the victim” (Grossman, 128).  Close-quarters killing of the enemy may be one of the least understood horrors of war. 

While it is indescribably traumatic to see one’s fellow soldiers and friends die, the psychological damage that results in taking a life may be just as great. A mental health counselor from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says, “When your friends are dead, it’s a real loss. It’s a loss of your friend that you trusted and you loved in a very intense way.  When you personally take another life and you go up to that lifeless body with a hole in it and you look down on it, and you say, ‘I did that,’ I think it is a loss of yourself at the same time.”*

Frederic Manning, fighting with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, saw some of the most brutal fighting of the Great War at the Battle of the Somme in the fall of 1916.  His poem “The Face” describes a close encounter with a young German soldier. 

The Face

(Guillemont)

German soldier, WWI

Out of the smoke of men's wrath,
The red mist of anger,
Suddenly,
As a wraith of sleep,
A boy's face, white and tense,
Convulsed with terror and hate,
The lips trembling. . . .

Then a red smear, falling. . . .
I thrust aside the cloud, as it were tangible,
Blinded with a mist of blood.
The face cometh again
As a wraith of sleep:
A boy's face, delicate and blond,
The very mask of God,
Broken.

Caught up in the blood-lust of battle, the speaker of the poem blindly charges forward through the smoke of the attack. He is startled by the sudden appearance of an enemy soldier emerging out of the fog, and instinctively, the soldier shoots to kill.  Almost simultaneously, he recognizes that the “red smear, falling” is a blond boy whose face mirrors his own: angry, tense, and terrified. 

Frederic Manning

The short, fragmented lines of the poem capture the disjointed chaos of combat and the recurring horrific memory: the delicacy of the young boy’s face marred by wounds resembles that of the crucified Christ. The last line of the poem – a single word – sums up the tragedy that affects every soldier: all is forever broken. 

Frederic Manning survived the war, and in 1929 published a novel that drew heavily upon his own war experiences, The Middle Parts of Fortune (later expurgated and republished as Her Privates We).  In the book’s Prefatory Note, Manning writes, “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity.  To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.”**

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*Jim Dooley, quoted on website from American PBS Frontline documentary The Soldier’s Heart.

**Another Manning poem “Relieved” is featured on this blog at this link. 

Clockwork toys

Frederic Manning

It began in August of 1914 and was supposed to be over by Christmas of that year, but the Great War proved to be cruelly obstinate. In peacetime, the rural French village of Guillemont was home to less than one-hundred farmers and their families. By the summer of 1916,  the small hamlet was to become an object lesson on the relentless character of the conflict.

Guillemont before the war

Located in the Somme region, Guillemont was one of the key military objectives for Allied forces during the months’ long Battle of the Somme. From July to early September of 1916, repeated attacks were made on the village. The British launched 90 attacks in the area, while the Germans responded with 72 counter-attacks. Assaults were largely uncoordinated and unsupported, resulting in over 300,000 combined casualties, and heavy rains turned the area into a swamp, adding to the misery of the men.

Before the war, Australian writer Frederic Manning had emigrated to England, where he joined a literary circle that included Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, and Richard Aldington. In October of 1915, Manning enlisted in the British Army.  He served at the Somme, and his poem "Relieved" describes the exhaustion produced by a war that some now feared might never end.

Relieved
(Guillemont)

We are weary and silent;
There is only the rhythm of marching feet;

A Battery Shelled, Percy Wyndham Lewis
© IWM (Art.IWM ART 2747)

Though we move tranced we keep it,
As clockwork toys.

But each man is alone in this multitude;
We know not the world in which we move,
Seeing not the dawn, earth pale and shadowy,
Level lands of tenuous grays and greens,
For our eyeballs have been seared with fire.

Only we have our secret thoughts,
Our sense floats out from us delicately apprehensive
To the very fringes of our being,
Where light drowns.
--Frederic Manning

Like wind-up toys, soldiers exhaustedly march in a trance-like state. In this modern industrial war, the men exist in a pale world of grays and muted tones, much like that of the faded photographs by which we now remember them.

Only two flares of light illuminate this shadow world: the fire that has seared the soldiers' eyeballs and the light that drowns at the “very fringes” of their being. The war has cauterized the men's vision, and they apprehensively fumble and “delicately” grasp at reality. Like the blind, troops stumble through darkness.

Although “relieved” (the title of the poem plays on the double meaning of the word, both released from duty and freed from anxiety), each man has learned that he “is alone in this multitude.” The secret thoughts and haunted memories that each soldier harbors threaten to extinguish any brightness that the future might possibly bring.  Amos William Mayse, a Canadian soldier, wrote to his wife,  "I am sure that if spared, I shall wake often with the horror of it all before me & I shall not want to talk much about it either."

The first recorded use of the verb “soldier on” (to doggedly persevere in difficult circumstances) does not occur until 1954, but the infantrymen of the First World War lived out the sense of the idiom. In a letter written in September of 1916 after the village of Guillemont had finally been taken, British officer P.F. Story wrote, “Guillemont was blotted right out, not one brick standing on another – nothing but a sea of crump holes of all sorts and sizes.”*

And yet the war seemed no closer to ending: the Germans fell back and refortified another village, and so it began again.

*Gerald Giddon, Somme 1916: A Battlefield Companion.