Patriotic gore

Along with the myriad slaughters and foul-ups that run through "The Boys' Crusade" are the everyday indignities, like men eating unpalatable food in hot, stinking mess halls catching a glimpse of officers being served ice cream in dining rooms with white linen on the tables. Fussell's main concern here is to impart a knowledge of how war, from petty indignities to heinous atrocities, brutalizes its participants. In "Wartime" he devoted many pages to Cyril Connolly's editorship of Horizon magazine from 1939 to 1950, and the way Connolly acted as if civilized culture were still possible -- were more necessary than ever -- in a society preoccupied with war. To Fussell, Connolly's dedication did not represent the fussy propriety of culture but an intellectual determination to believe that something other than death and destruction still existed.

It is hard, Fussell knows, to keep that belief alive when you have been trained to kill and when casual brutalization is part and parcel of your routine. There is a scene in "With the Old Breed" where Sledge watches a buddy nonchalantly pitching coral pebbles into the open skull of an upright Japanese corpse. Fussell doesn't write of that episode here, perhaps because many others will suffice. He is, in "The Boys' Crusade," concerned with how war brutalizes not just actions but attitudes. In much of his writing on World War II, Dwight Eisenhower is something of a hero for Fussell, a man who was able to be a realist (as noted, he perceived that air power alone would not win the war) and was also able to retain something of his essential decency. In his war memoir, Eisenhower writes of the battlefield at Falaise that "it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh." Fussell adds, "And Eisenhower was gentleman enough not to offend readers ... by dwelling on the smell."

That small passage is, in a way, the key to "The Boys' Crusade." What, Fussell is asking, does it do when a man like Eisenhower, whom he describes as "brought up in Abilene's civilized church atmosphere and thoroughly indoctrinated there in the Golden Rule and simple related moral tenets," confronts that kind of reality? And, by extension, what does it do to impressionable youngsters who have no experience of battle? The title "The Boys' Crusade" may seem an ironic nod to Eisenhower's war memoir titled "Crusade in Europe," but by the end of the book any irony is burned off as Fussell discusses what the revelation of the Nazi concentration camps did to American troops.

Ultimately, "The Boys' Crusade" is about how, without giving in to the false sense of purpose that is conferred on battles after the fact, the American infantry did gain a sense of what they were fighting for. Fussell quotes Gen. James M. Gavin as saying that this sense came only at the end of the war. And he quotes a major who saw the corpses at a concentration camp and said, "Now I know why I am here." This did not mean that war suddenly became a noble act. Fussell recounts how American troops at Dachau were given the job of guarding 122 SS men who continued to make threats toward the now liberated former inmates. The troops turned their guns on the SS, killing all of them. One then gave his bayonet to a former inmate who proceeded to behead a guard. Fussell records the words of one lieutenant who, after liberating Dachau, said, "I will never take another German prisoner armed or unarmed."

It may appall some that Fussell refers to killings like this as "informal acts of justice." He is not concerned with assuring delicate sensibilities but with faithfully recording experience. Even before encountering the camps, Eisenhower, in 1944, proposed dealing with conquered German troops as follows: Exterminate the general staff, liquidate "all members of the Nazi party from mayors on up and all members of the Gestapo." The irony that someone fighting an enemy who liquidated and exterminated those it despised can come to propose something similar is not lost on Fussell. But it is not the basis for easy moral equivalency.

Sometimes, Fussell is saying, evil demands retribution if we are to retain our sense of what it means to be human. It may be useful here to recall the words of Hannah Arendt in justifying Adolph Eichmann's execution. "Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations," Arendt wrote, "we find that no one, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you."

Fussell's understanding of how inhuman means are sometimes the only way to affirm your humanity is hard to stomach for doves or those prepared to declare all war evil (which is distinct from declaring it sadistic though sometimes necessary). And it's equally hard for hawks who want to buy into the crap of boys' book adventures like "The Four Feathers," which tell us that war is a proving ground for young men to realize their nobility and bravery. It's difficult to imagine either of those groups not recoiling from the quote Fussell includes from the British captain John Tonkin who said, "I have always felt that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can't." Tonkin wasn't arguing for abusing prisoners of war. He was arguing against the cushy notion that cruelty can be finessed.

Most of all, "The Boys' Crusade" will not comfort anyone who wants to bask in the patriotic good feeling of what Fussell calls the contemporary "chatter" about "the Good War and the suggestions of special virtue among the boyish citizen soldiers." But holding that view is not, as I have argued, an attempt to dishonor the troops, but rather an attempt to accord them the respect of honoring the complexity of their experience. For civilians those experiences are unthinkable. For many who fought, they remain unspeakable.

"The Boys' Crusade" is Fussell's distillation of what he has found in memoirs like Sledge's "With the Old Breed," Robert Kotlowitz's "Before Their Time" and William Manchester's "Goodbye, Darkness" (an uncomfortably honest memoir). What unites all of these books, and what colors all of Fussell's writing about World War II, is barely disguised bitterness. Sledge and Kotlowitz, Manchester and Fussell, and presumably all the men they speak for, know the necessity of what they did. But they still resent having had to do it. They know in their guts that war always represents some basic failure -- of diplomacy, of vigilance. And these writers write as men who were forced to learn things that they would rather not have known, that no decent person could ever want to know. To drape that knowledge in glory is, for them, an insult. It's the act of people like the ones Sledge refers to, those who talk about the honor of shedding blood for your country without ever having had to see the blood themselves.

In an act of true intellectual bravery, Fussell has chosen to write "The Boys' Crusade" at a time when we are once again susceptible to the notion of the experience of combat (as distinct from the purpose it serves) as one of selfless sacrifice to a noble cause. In many quarters, we are told that to doubt that premise is to be unpatriotic. But if we can still conceive of patriotism as encompassing skepticism, ambiguity, honesty and criticism, then by any reasonable measure Paul Fussell is a patriot.

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