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The War Environment

When do we begin to call this World War III?

The War Environment
by Bryan Brickner

www.newtopiamagazine.net/content/issue17/bureaus/chicago.php
Newtopia Magazine: Chicago Bureau

The war environment
Bryan Brickner

When do you begin to call this World War III? It’s not like we haven’t thought of this. Nobody called World War I a world war until we got to World War II. This triple feature of world events in less than 90 years is unnerving even to ex-military types like me.

To see what a war environment looks like we can peruse two great writers situated in that time of war to end all wars. Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) and George Bernard Shaw’s play Heartbreak House (1919) deliciously frame the war environment of World War I prior to World War II. What is a nation of individuals to do during the craziness we call war? One of the cruelest lessons of the war environment is that you can never get back to the reasons for going to war. War changes everything. All the rules and all the forms of discussion are in play. Once the killing starts, there’s a different perspective.

It’s hard to look back, but try to recall the drumbeats for war during the Congressional elections in 2002, and you just might be able to picture what Shaw had in mind when he wrote Heartbreak House. And Hemingway, well he had a trench-busting field artillery bomb land on his position, that’s what inspired him and changed his perspective. But then, that’s what trench-busting artillery shells were designed to do.

The war environment is a state of nature: the rules of reason and logic can be abandoned for sloganeering, a favorite of all causes, both left and right. There can be no war without the accompanying justifications. But if one subscribes to the theory that war is part of what we call human all too human, as I do, and that it isn’t something you can use pre-emptively in a moral way, then you begin to see what is really never different: humans make war.

The Midwest is more like Heartbreak House than it is A Farewell to Arms. In Hemingway’s tale, the main character, Lieutenant Henry, is severely injured by a trench-busting artillery shell. He goes on in the story to make a full recovery while also falling in love and procreating with his caretaker, a British nurse named Catherine Barkley.

After being sent back to the front, Hemingway’s Henry lose’s his interest in the war during a full retreat in 1918. Finally near freedom after escaping from the advancing Germans, Henry was to be shot for, doing of all things, retreating. After his escape from the executioner, Henry realizes everything is different. He went from volunteer to deserter, and in doing so, he let go of a debt. He didn’t feel he owed the military his service/duty after what he’d been through. He was even and the debt was paid.

The Midwest isn’t there yet. It still feels the debt. I don’t, as I got rid of my debt July 4th, 1991 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The battalion executive officer told me it was normal – like buyer’s remorse. By the time my tour was up five months later, the debt was old news.

We find a fair degree of the opposite in Shaw’s Heartbreak House. In this tale, no one feels they owe anyone anything. It is their absorption into their own consciousness that makes the story timely. There is a passage in the play where Shaw takes on hope, and, in good form, takes it on at its strongest point – want.

Captain Shotover. Heartbreak? Are you one of those who are so sufficient to themselves that they are only happy when they are stripped of everything, even of hope?

Ellie [gripping his hand] It seems so; for I feel now as if there was nothing I could not do, because I want nothing.

Captain Shotover. That’s the only real strength. That’s genius. That’s better than rum.

In the war environment there is no necessity for hope. Hope makes time abide: it says be a certain way – “I’ll hope for that” – when time will just as likely abide by nothing.

Karl Marx wrote “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” But what comes third? Or, as one of the characters in Heartbreak House might muse – “Are there only two choices?”
 
 

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