Well, I could argue that it’s fairly vital for defending yourself against an aggressor, but that’s not an argument I want to get into at this time. From a writer’s point of view the thing it’s best for anyway is as a background and setting for fiction.
It’s easy to see why this should be the case. Put your heroes in uniform and send them off to fight, and immediately the stakes are raised – people are actively trying to kill them all day long. If the war is a total war like WW2, they will be facing the risk of death from bombardment even in their places of safety.
The author has the benefit of characters who are already facing the horrors of death and the worst that humanity can do to itself. If those characters are heroic, or even simply decent, if they can manage the smallest acts of kindness, then those things will stand out against the darkness of the background like lights, and love will blaze like a star.
War too has its own strange fascination. I will admit to being in love with my great war machines. I began writing Age of Sail fiction because of two vivid moments in the cinema – the appearance of the two-decker HMS Dauntless out of the fog in Pirates of the Caribbean, and the magnificent, heart stirring sound of a cannon ball fired from the Acheron at the frigate HMS Surprise in Master and Commander.
A line of battle ship was the greatest weapon of mass destruction the 18th Century knew. Its broadside of cannon fire could level citadels and forts on the shore line from a mile away, and I won’t deny that that stirs my heart. There is definitely a part of me that would love to have the power to sail up to my problems and literally blow them out of the water.
I got into World War Two the same way. I thought it was too modern for me to feel any poetry in it, too much like real life. But then I discovered the Lancaster bomber, and once more I fell in love with a machine of war, and by extension with the men who flew it. As with the crew of a tall ship, the men of a bomber crew suffered great hardship, endured terrifying experiences, kept going through situations where you would expect frail human flesh to fail. And in both what resulted was friendships and loyalty more intense than could have been created by the strains of normal life.
I’ve been reading a book called Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two by Daniel Swift, and he obviously doesn’t share my slightly worrisome ability to rejoice in destruction, because he says that one may write poetry about a sword, but that there is something too obscene about the killing power of a heavy bomber to permit a person to feel the same awe and admiration for it as one would feel for a blade.
I think that’s rubbish, for a sword too is a thing designed with only one purpose in mind – to kill people. A Lancaster merely does it on a larger scale. If a sword can be admired for its beauty, despite being created to deal death, so can a Lancaster. Both are implements for the exercise of force – the same power that we admire in an alpha hero taken to its logical extreme. The power to stop what you don’t like, obliterate it, burn it to the ground; to run terrible risks, face and conquer fear and adversity, and to triumph.
But of course, what comes arm in arm with this heady, glorious violence, (or what should come with it) is an awareness of the horror of it. Of how -yes- how obscene is the ability to rain fire on old men and women and children sleeping in their beds. On how the men you can’t help admire for their courage and their self-sacrifice, their kindness to their friends and their willingness to die to ensure that we, their descendants, could live in freedom, are the same men who bombed towns until the pavements melted and the fleeing inhabitants sank into the liquid tarmac and were horribly burned to death.
War is not simple, and it is hard to separate out the good from the bad. There’s much talk about there being no glory in war, but to my mind that’s as false as saying that it’s all glory and no horror. A man climbing out of his plane while it’s under attack by fighters, clawing his way along the wing without a parachute in order to put out a fire in the engine and save his mates’ lives… Don’t tell me that’s not glorious or heroic. The Germans offering to safely escort a plane flying a replacement artificial leg to Douglas Bader – even though they must have known he’d try to escape the moment he got it. Don’t tell me that’s not so humane and chivalrous it warms your heart.
It’s like every day life turned up to the maximum volume, confusing and morally gray, full of ugly things and also full of some beautiful ones.
And that – although I hesitate to say it, because it seems disrespectful – is another good reason why it is such a blessing for a writer. It is full of emotions and all of them are cranked up to an intensity unavailable in peace time.
I am grateful that it’s there to be written about. But I’m even more grateful that it’s something I haven’t had to live through. I have the armies that have protected my country from invasion for a thousand years to thank for that. And that’s another good reason to write about them as heroes. But for Nelson’s navy, but for Harris’s bombers, I might not have the freedom to write at all. The moral ambiguity of war is a gift for a writer, but a degree of fannishness helps too. And it’s far safer for everyone involved if I spend my time imagining what it would be like in a gun turret with four Browning machine guns at my command than it would be if anyone actually provided me with them in real life!
February 7, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Great post. I admit that other than watching Yesterday and documentaries I didn’t involve myself too deeply involved in it–it wasn’t really until I was doing the research for Transgressions and reading the first hand accounts of the battles that it really struck home what a cannon ball could do, fired into a line of men and horses.
A war is a great backdrop to any historical, I have to say, because insta-conflict!
February 7, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Thanks! I guess that I’m not as odd as all that, or the kind of action film that involved people running about shooting guns and things exploding would not be as popular as they are. All the same, I’m sure things are (and were) a lot different in real life. We’ve got to somehow harness the energy of the “woohoo! things exploding!” kind, while not falsifying the reality too much.
February 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm
oops – that was me, obviously.
February 7, 2011 at 5:03 pm
*g* I thought it might be when I saw the reference to Transgressions 🙂
February 7, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Great post Alex. It is a fascinating subject and like you I love war machines, everything from castles to nuclear subs and starships and they all feature in my work, and I have a particular fondness for the mighty Mark II Vulcan.
Since I grew up with the professionals, I think I have a slightly different attitude to the dangers, I think it makes more difference to the civilians, to the professionals it’s what they do. It’s the cameraderie, that nonchalence in the face of clear and present danger that intrigues me and makes me want to explore it. The other thing that I love about it is the dead pan humour and the crackle of wit – always very sexy and usually politically incorrect. I don’t think that this phenomenon exists only in the services, you see it in the police and the medical profession, which are both at the forefront of dealing with horror. And then there are the uniforms…so much sexier than civvies. What’s not to like?
The other thing is the conflict between personal life and work, when work has an overwhelming importance. Service wives used to come in two kinds, pack and follow and a bundle of trouble back home. And the Navy and RAF used to have long separations as standard – a year’s unaccompanied in Belize, anyone? How does that dynamic change when it’s two men, who both have jobs, careers and both subconsciously expect to the be the providers?
I’ve had a sudden rush of blood to the head with my current work – off sick from the day job for three weeks I have nearly finished a novel that combines some of these themes, set in LA, involving a sexy ex military FBI agent, a nasty drug war, a film actor, violence, mayhem, good sex and dealing with the difficulties of being outed. It wasn’t till I read your post that I realised what I had done. I thought this was a new departure – a fit of total SIL (steroid induced lunacy)but it actually comes back to my favourite themes again so maybe there is nothing new under the sun after all. Are there Beta Readers out there?
February 7, 2011 at 5:14 pm
I know what you mean about danger being merely a hazard of work for the career military characters. One of the things I love about the 18th Century navy is the way that the officers were supposed to behave on the quarterdeck while enemy sharpshooters were taking pot shots at them – ie with extreme nonchalance. That kind of cool under fire is very attractive. (And it has to figure into your characters relationship with their homosexuality. These are not the kind of men for whom a small risk of being hanged is going to mean much. Though the risk of a stain to their honour will weigh much more.)
Having said that, it seems clear that different people react differently to the strains of being at war. You’ve got a continuum of possible reactions from “I’ll do anything I can to keep flying because I love the excitement,” through “I’m shitting blue lights with terror, but I’m determined not to let the boys down,” to “I just can’t do it any more, and I don’t care if they discharge me for cowardice.” All of which are reactions I’ve read from real airmen during the war.
*G* I think we all have themes and preoccupations that we return to again and again in different guises. At least you’d disguised them enough this time for their presence to take you by surprise 🙂
February 7, 2011 at 10:38 pm
There is a difference between the regulars and hostilities only I think. One huge war makes a great impression, that followed by lots of other nasties, like Palestine, Korea, Suez,Borneo, Aden etc, with Vietnam in the background means that it becomes normalised and that is one of the things I really like to play with.
It is one of the things that is coming out in my current book that I have the last 7-8000 words to do on. How do you live with fighting the hydra, when every time you cut off a head more grow in its place?
Thanks for such a thought provoking piece and response,it so so good to connect with other people who examine some of the same things. Now, where was I with those nasty people traffickers/drug traders???
February 7, 2011 at 2:54 pm
This is a contradiction, isn’t it? Like being a vegetarian and keeping obligate carnivores (my cats). I’m not so much fascinated with the destructive power of the tall ships, but the astonishing coordination required to work them — miles of ropes and the sheer volume of the sail, all manipulated by humans and very primitive machinery. It boggles my mind that the things sailed at all, much less in fleets that could do coordinated maneuvers. When you add other people shooting thirty-pound lumps of metal at them, it’s even more surprising.
Writer Andy Rooney did a D-day anniversary column once–he was in the Normandy invasion–and he observed that if men didn’t get something out of war, we’d have stopped indulging in it. What they get, he suggested, is an experience of living 100% aware, every sense working at maximum and no worry about whether the bills were paid or the trash set out for pickup. (Right, that’s left to the wives left at home…) I think he has a point. My dad was in WWII, and I think that was the single most significant event of his life, even if he did spend most of it in a POW camp. After you’ve helped save the world from Hitler, what do you do for an encore?
February 7, 2011 at 9:32 pm
Yes, tall ships aren’t as purely military entities as warplanes. With them, I also get the romance of exploration and discovery, and the sense of a little social world complete unto itself isolated in the middle of the ocean for months. They have quite a Star Trek feel, boldly going where no Westerner has been before 🙂
My dad said almost exactly the same thing – that the war was the most important thing that had happened in his life. It was slightly annoying, as one of his children, to have to play second fiddle to that, but it certainly brings it home.