Paul Fussell (1924–2012)

Paul Fussell's WARTIME (1989) worked well as an "in-between-books" reader for me this past week. I've admired Fussell's work since seeing him (along with his late friend, Sam Hynes) in Ken Burns' PBS special, THE WAR, some years back. I enjoyed his memoir, DOING BATTLE, immensely, and this collection of essays were nearly as good. They don't really have to be read in order either. I skipped around sampling the ones with the most intriguing titles, e.g. "Chickenshit: an Anatomy," and show more "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Too Little," or "Reading in Wartime" and others. None of these pieces disappoint. Because Fussell was there, a combat lieutenant in the European theater, who was seriously wounded, so he knows about the filth and fear, the mud and blood, as well as the boredom interspersed with utter terror. And after the war, like Hynes, he became a writer, professor and knowledgeable historian of his own and other wars. Many of these hard-edged and clear-eyed pieces could be prose companions to Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" or Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, because Fussell draws many apt comparisons here, of his war to the Great War. Fussell aims to explode the myths and patriotic nonsense often glorifying war, and he succeeds to the nth degree. WARTIME deserves to stick around and be read for a long, long time. If more national leaders and politicians read books like this, and took them to heart, there would be fewer wars. Fussell is gone now, but his books will live on - I hope. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

While it's true that Fussell prefers later memoirs to more immediate accounts of the war and doesn't conclusively prove that the First World War was history's first or most ironic war, "The Great War and Modern Memory" remains a wonderfully engaging and useful example of intellectual history. Fussell does a very good, very thorough, and very thoughtful job of examining the mindset of those who fought in the war and describing that era's intellectual climate. Though relatively free of show more statistics and accounts of wartime strategizing, the book is serves as a subtle portrait of the war's multitudinous horrors, which made death more mechanical and, in a sense, less traditionally dramatic than it had ever been before. Fussell writes convincingly about the breach that the book opened up between civilian and military life, homoeroticism before and after the war, how experiences of the war changed our ideas about wartime honor and heroism, and, perhaps most interestingly, examines how soldiers used ironic and theatrical motifs to process experiences that simply couldn't be put into words. Fussell's assertion that the Great War had an extensive influence on how civilian life during the rest of the twenty-first century is probably more controversial, but he ably shows how many of the institutions of modern life (the form letter, for one) were field-tested, so to speak, during that conflict. What I personally enjoyed most about this book is the sense of importance that Fussell lends to his ideas: he makes the poems that soldiers wrote and the self-conceptions their societies had seem as critical as any piece of armament you could name. "The Great War and Modern Memory" does exactly what any academic treatise should: make ideas seem vital and alive. This one should be required reading for students of all things Modernist. show less

An exceptional book, especially for those of us who appreciate the interconnections Fussell makes between literature and war. With a deft hand, he pulls together literary tradition right into the middle of the fray and opens the very heart of the wound. This is the first time I've truly understood war, and I see how it had to be done through literature. This will be a very personal book -- there will be lovers and haters. I can't imagine sitting on the fence on this one.

Fussell's preparation for war was limited. ROTC was “a wonderland” of marching and snappy uniforms. Nothing was mentioned of “tree bursts and Graves Registration” or trench foot, nor that first-aid kits were adequate for bullet holes but hardly for a “foot blown off by a Schumine.” They soon realized that they were being trained as lieutenants to replace dead ones. In France, their first operation was to perform a night relief of another battalion. Hopelessly lost, they were show more ordered to lie down and sleep. At dawn they discovered they were lying in a field of dead Germans. A sobering sight. “My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just.” It wasn’t just the sight of the dead. Many were mere children. Two, no older than 14, had been shot in the head, one with brains dripping from his nostrils. The realization sets in that he has been trained to commit like murders. Nor had training prepared him for other indignities: the gut-twisting cramps of instant diarrhea, ruining layers of clothing, and having no place to wash. Often half the platoon might disappear frantically into the woods.

He soon learned what a marine sergeant told Philip Caputo many years later during the Vietnam War: “Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” The “Great Turkey Shoot” bore mute witness to that. The men in F Company came upon a trench holding two squads of German infantry wishing to surrender. The Americans gleefully shot all of them dead.

Fussell soon realized that most army documents were intricately prepared falsehoods, that cowards are maimed and injured with the same regularity as heroes, that heroes are often invented post-death to make the survivors feel good, that “the Good War,” when it ended, did not lead to riotous celebrations by the troops, rather a feeling of bitterness at the appalling destruction and death. As Kay Summersby (Eisenhower’s British mistress) said, “No one laughed., No one smiled. It was all over. We had won, but the victory was not anything like what I thought it would be. . . So many deaths. So much destruction. And everybody was very, very tired.”

Finally, a bitter Fussell, having been shunted around after the war to various camps doing all sorts of make-work, mind-numbing activities, came face-to-face with the terrible reality of the way we conduct war. He realized the truth behind military historian Russell Weigley’s comment: “The American army of World War II habitually filled the ranks of its combat infantry with its least promising recruits, the uneducated, the unskilled, the unenthusiastic.” Fussell speculated as to why no one seemed to care terribly that those remaining after the marines, air corps and navy got their pick, were expected to bear the brunt of sustained battle: “Perhaps the reason is that the bulk of those killed by bullets and shells were the ones normally killed in peacetime in mine disasters, industrial and construction accidents, lumbering, and fire and police work. . . . Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, a form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males? Killed in the tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcome or not, of improving the breed. Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.” (Deborah Shapeley in her biography of Robert McNamara [b:Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara|677540|Promise and Power The Life and Times of Robert McNamara|Deborah Shapley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1227972721s/677540.jpg|663539] records his program to enlist thousands of men who formerly had not been able to pass the minimal entrance tests for the army. They were allowed to enter on his assumption the army would raise their skill levels. Most were killed in Vietnam.)
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