Frustration

The universal experience of men at war

The Landing at Gaba Tepe and Other Poems by Private J. Ryan and Private C. Ryan

The verse here is not of very high quality, and is generally war poetry of a patriotic flavour tinged, of course, with sadness for those who died. So if I may, I’d be happy to talk in more detail about something else. Something bigger. What the poems here are, in their simplest form, really and truly about. Not just about a single operation, or campaign, or even war itself. It’s more personal than that.

In other words, the nature of being a soldier, of being sent overseas to war. It’s an experience that, over the past hundred and ten odd years, a good proportion of all males who lived to adulthood in quite a few countries experienced. The numbers who shared that experience started to tail off a little about thirty-five years ago. And then the phenomenon reignited again twelve years after that. But service, and service abroad, was still quite far away from the life led by many.

As the War on Terror American military complaint goes, ‘we went to war. America went to the mall.’ And they did. There’s a lot of truth in it.

Hence the demand for literature on the subject. And movies and songs and TV. Not only to prompt fond memories in or to commiserate those who had to go, but to inform those back home who were interested (and not bored or disgusted by what details they could find).

Even in times of mass membership of the armed forces, in times of conscription and overseas deployments under the guise of national service, there were enough people left at home who wanted to know, or thought they did know, what it was like to go over there — wherever there was — and face at the very least inconvenience and injury, and possibly death, from one cause or another.

We have an entire library of post-9/11 memoirs these days, and every scholarly institution with a military history or war studies programme has tried to construct oral histories of the same, so I won’t waste your time with recapitulation of the first quarter of this century. There are enough autobiographies (some say every book written by an American is an autobiography) and fiction and poetry and newspaper accounts. You’d read them if you were really interested.

Instead, I’ll stick a little closer to the First and Second World Wars, because this book was written about the Gallipoli campaign in the first war, and many of the books I grew up reading were about the second.

And I will tell you one or two things about the universal experience not only of foreign service, but of life on this planet. And that is frustration. Frustration that things don’t get done, that bureaucracy never seems to do what it says it will do, that people cheat you and lie and don’t keep their word. The more I read war poetry, or war literature, or war memoirs, the more this theme comes to the front.

When Siegfried Sassoon wrote criticising the generals, he didn’t just mean that they were bad because they sent men to die, or because the cause was not just. This was the British army. Both things could be assumed.

What upset Sassoon in other ways, perhaps (and its possible this was never front of his own mind mind), was the inefficiency of the machine that sent his friends forward and to their deaths. If it were a better army, better able to win, the pain and pointlessness of it all would have been less.

When Spike Milligan writes of his own war years, his frustration is endless and profound. There’s not enough food, not enough soap, not enough hot water.

And anyway, what’s it all for?

George Orwell, writing of Spain in Homage to Catalonia, combines tales of terrible material conditions and poisonous internal politics with constant complaining from the soldiers. Alexander Baron’s book From the City, from the Plough, is just the same. Often, in that book, mutiny is one or two remarks away.

In one of his own many books, and three memoirs, Maurice Collis — a British magistrate in colonial Burma — described his enlistment, training, and deployment into the Middle East theatre of the First World War. He was a relatively senior officer in regiments full of Burmese nationals under British leadership. And as they trailed through Asian seas and finally arrived in the Middle East, the force as a whole fell under a set of ill omens.

Many of the soldiers were young and very impressionable, Collis wrote. They thought evil spirits pursued them. The dry heat of Iraq and Persia was not friendly as their homes had been. They suffered from the usual things that befall armies: ill-health, the boredom of routine, the hostility of everything — environment, the locals, their officers.

Pretty soon, the suicides started. And each Burmese soldier who would kill himself would make the malaise worse. Because in death he would haunt his fellows; he would be imagined as a hungry, tragic spirit, a ghost who would pursue the rest.

Slowly, the death toll rose. The formation that Collis was part of never saw combat. All its losses were caused by sickness, or by self-inflicted intention.

Morale must have been awful, and unsalvageable. Hence frustration on Collis’s part.

His men felt frustration, too, of course. But it was of a different kind. And it was not recorded, at least in their own words, in his memoirs.