Wargod

What civilisation would have a one-handed god of war? The answer, of course, is the Norse.

I've always wondered about that symbolism: the Norse god Tiw, for whom Tuesday is named, is said to have surrendered his right hand to the Fenris-wolf as a pledge of good faith (which his pantheon immediately broke). The wolf bit down, the god lost his hand, but the great chain of being that would hold Fenris till the end of the age was in place.

The lesson to me, the one I think about on most Tuesdays, or Tiw's days, is that sometimes war can be seen as a needful sacrifice. A war that does not help to keep chaos at bay is a worse war than one which does, although all war has an intrinsically serious moral burden.

In Tiw's case, the loss of his master hand in Norse society would have disqualified him from leadership; indeed, it should have disqualified him from godhood. And yet... there he stands, with a silver hand, much like his Celtic counterpart Nuada.

Tiw, also known as Tyr, faded early from Norse myth. He was seen as the organised face of war, much as Athena was in comparison to Ares. Wise and self-sacrificing, Tyr apparently had little place in later Norse myth. His name is absent from the Eddaic poetry about Ragnarok, the last battle of the world.

The Tenth Year of the War

And it came to pass that on the eleventh day of the ninth month of the first year of the new millennium, which the Gregorians call September 2001, violent men stretched forth their wings and toppled the great towers of Mammon which soared from shoreline to sky. In all that came to pass that day, fewer than a myriad souls met their deaths in the flesh. But a cry went up into the heavens, and the lord of the Western hosts made ready to war against the sons of Ishmael.

And of the sons of Ishmael were slain a million, of warriors and women, of priests and children, for the lord of the West waxed wroth, and spittle flew out of his mouth, and he would that for each one dead among his people, a hundred should die from the metal locusts of the wind. So it was done, and to this day it continues.

Thus ends the Lesson.

But not yet the War. For the heart of man is desperately wicked: like a bad candle it fouls the air, but does not die; it gutters but is not put out.

Notes From A Battlefield 002

There are many names for this kind of injury. The effect is best described as 'invalided out'. Battlefield triage has determined that you can no longer be patched up enough to fight the way they want you to. This is a good ending though, one of the better ones that might possibly succeed the phase mentioned earlier.

More often, the injury is permanent. More often, the last phase involves heroic insanity such as charging a machine gun post with no grenades and only a fixed bayonet. More often, the invalidation involves long and tiresome recuperation.

Here, this is not the case. I have no physical problems. I have some exhaustion and some reorganisation to do. But I will be back in fighting condition shortly.

Notes From A Battlefield 001

Taking it easy. Watching my fellow soldiers cut down to the left and right. In the midst of the battle, everything is in slow motion. My old war wound aches. But I still think being a platoon sergeant is better than being an officer cadet promoted to a captain or major through battlefield attrition. Watching them fall is sadly amusing because the impact of the battlefield is to numb one's finer sensibilities.

After a while, everything is funny. You have become psychotic. You are suffering loss of affect.

Strange Meeting (Redux)

This isn't meant to be some sort of oral commentary wannabe on Wilfred Owen's life and works. But I realise that when I mentioned Strange Meeting a short while back, a lot of people actually clicked on the link and found little of use there. That's because I've been thinking about the poem for almost 25 years now, but never actually wrote down what I thought about it (except during the 'O'-level examinations almost that long ago).

So I suppose I should say something about it, once again cautioning people that this is my own opinion and that in no way does it express an official viewpoint, an academically-qualified exegesis, or any other form of interpretation on which careers may be built or scuttled. It isn't literary analysis.

This is what I think.

Let's begin with context. I think that Strange Meeting is largely indebted to Shelley's incredibly long (but, for its time, not unusually so) poem The Revolt of Islam. Read Canto 5, verses 10-13 (or X to XIII), if you want to see what I mean (you can even read it from verse 1, if you want). We can suspect this because a copy of Shelley's works was given to Owen for his 21st birthday by his siblings. What's telling, however, is that he stops at XIII. XIV (well, verse 14) is the beginning of the triumphal return which Owen never includes. But at this point, we are beginning to lose the thread, for Shelley's poem is about reconciliation between Christianity and Islam.

So what is the thread? Psychologically, the poem clearly contains structures which imply mirroring, reflection, the dopplegänger effect. It is obvious to most that the dead soldiers who meet here, the man and his enemy, are very alike; and also that they have discovered this likeness, this similar sadness and regret, at the immediate point of death, just before final dissolution or whatever else awaits them beyond the terminus of life and death.

This perspective is common to many forms of heroic narrative, for this kind of narrative begins with the special birth of the protagonist and ends with a special death which mirrors the birth. Here, Owen's poem actually depicts the ending of the hero's journey. The tunnels, the subterranean setting – all these are a return to the womb. The hero is completing the last stage; having done his job, he is returning to the fundamental chaos or underlying structure of eternity. It is the 'drawing-down of blinds' found at the end of Anthem for Doomed Youth.

So if this is true, why the encounter on the way home? It is clear that Owen intends to show the essential brotherhood of soldiers, that (just as in Dulce et Decorum est) all are subject to the same Lie. In effect, Anthem, Dulce et Decorum and Meeting form a triptych about death in wartime – the first lays it out formally, with the sanctity of a churchyard elegy; the second is frenzied and manic in its portrayal of vileness; the third completes the picture. And all three interrogate God implicitly, with questions about meaning and truth and the worth of a life; all three speak with the same voice, with a complicity and shared burden of experience.

In the end, Meeting is about ambiguity and the lack of answers. The poem's second voice hints at something higher than the sad condition of humanity which brought the protagonist and antagonist (are they the same person, perhaps?) to this same place of death. And yet, there is no clear vision about what it was that was greater or higher or better than this. War is a dead end – the chariot wheels are clogged and man has reversed his progress – but is there anything better? Perhaps we have to be content with the fact that there are heroes who try and, in the end though they come to grief, know that they tried for something better.

Warzone

It came to me over dinner tonight that there are, in particular, three kinds of people one finds in warzones which one ought to think of shooting. (A warzone is an area of lawlessness mixed with autocratic defeatism disguised as authority. You see them in places like Iraq and Lebanon.)

The three types are, in order of moral reprehensibility:

1. The Scavenger. This is a looter, a ghoul, a despoiler of what isn't locked up, tied down, chained together or possessed by an armed and alert owner. The scavenger is someone who realises that the environment is chaotic and makes use of the situation to hide just out of the corner of the authorities' collective eye, using his quasi-invisibility to find and appropriate that which belongs (or used to belong) to others. No respecter of property, he might make the ideal Marxist, except that even the Marxists would shoot him for taking that which he does not deserve.

2. The Profiteer. This is the misanthrope who enhances his position at the expense of the suffering of his fellow-men. Perhaps 'misanthrope' is the wrong word though, since he loves his fellow-men as a source of ready revenue. He hoards and calculates and helps others only when he can levy a tax which can bring significant gain. If there are people working under him, it isn't benign supervision they're getting, but a bootheel across the neck or a lash across their toiling backs. Some people would call him a Fascist. The Fascists might disagree - violently.

3. The Warmonger. This one is the chaosbringer, the stormcrow, the instigator of bloodletting. Unlike the other two, who benefit from the economics and sociology of the warzone, the warmonger is bent on increasing the size and intensity of the madness. Sometimes, this is deliberate; some warmongers are also profiteers - especially those of the military-industrial complex. Some are researchers looking to make their name by describing and formalising the nature of chaos. Some are politicians. All are Capitalists, some without realising it.

=====

Sometimes, warzones appear too close to home.