Holmes Richard - I Am Soldier: War Stories, from the Ancient World to the 20th Century

WAR STORIES FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD TO THE 20TH CENTURY

EDITOR

PROFESSOR ROBERT O NEILL

INTRODUCTION BY

RICHARD HOLMES

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, said the lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson to his biographer James Boswell. Across the two millennia covered by this book all sorts and conditions of men have found themselves in uniform. Some, like the Spartan Aristodemos, killed fighting the Persians at Plataea in 479 BC , had been brought up in a society that valued military virtues and expected its young men to demonstrate them. Indeed, the 17th-century Japanese warrior Kato Kiyomasa opined that a samurai who practices dancing should be ordered to commit hara kiri. Others, like Sergeant Charles Windolph of the US 7th Cavalry, who fought at the battle of Little Bighorn, became a successful soldier in one army only after dodging conscription into another. The military career of the Serb Konstantin Mihailovic was even more unpredictable: captured by the Turks, he fought for them as a janissary, but at last gratefully returned to his own people.

Young men often found war appealing for all the wrong reasons. It was like a game for us, thought an Iranian child soldier of the 1980s, I was a little boy who wanted to play with guns. Edward Costello joined the British 95th Rifles because he was highly delighted with the smart appearance of the men, and with their green uniform. Many of historys soldiers were not ashamed to do battle for money. Sydnam Poyntz, who fought in both the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, changed sides when it suited him. He reported ruefully that he sent home often tymes Mony to my Wife, who it seems spent at home what I got abroad. In contrast, there were soldiers who fought for firmly held convictions. Nehemiah Wharton, London apprentice turned Parliamentarian sergeant, had strong Puritan beliefs, which encouraged him and his comrades to plunder houses they thought owned by Papists and to purify parish churches by smashing stained glass windows and burning altar rails.

Whatever a mans reasons for enlisting, his first experience of battle often came as a shock. US Lieutenant Alex Vernon, preparing for action in the Gulf, admitted: I cannot handle this. I am not cut out for it. All I want to do is cry. However, once the action had started he coped well. Faced with an Iraqi bunker that was too close for his tanks main armament and too well-protected for its machine gun, he told his driver: Hit the bunker, Reynolds. Crush it. We barely noticed the bump. Deneys Reitz, a Boer commando in South Africa, was struck by the emptiness of his first battlefield, and then horrified by the ashen faces and staring eyeballs of the first dead he saw. This came as a great shock, for I had pictured the dignity of death in battle, but I now saw that it was horrible to look upon.

Most soldiers found that the strain of prolonged action eventually wore them down. In March 1918, with the British Army reeling under the impact of the German spring offensive, Private Fen Noakes experienced the fatalism of sheer exhaustion. I ran for some distance with the rest, he admitted, and then, with a feeling of disgust for the whole job, I slowed down to a walk. I really didnt care which way things went. The losses get to you sooner or later, wrote John Young, an American Squad Leader in Vietnam. Sooner or later you realise that the only objective is simple survival. War burns away the veneer of what we call civilisation, and shows you that the last 10,000 years have not made much difference in what we are.

However, in war, there were those who thrived. Tom Derrick, an Australian infantry officer who won the Victoria Cross in 1943, was a natural fighter, both on the battlefield and off it. Faced with a strong Japanese position, he told his company commander, who wanted to refer the problem to the commanding officer: Bugger the CO. Just give me twenty minutes and well have the place. Later, hit by a burst of machine-gun fire, he faced death with equanimity: Ive been hit. I think its curtains. Ive copped it in the fruit and nuts [guts]. He insisted that other wounded should be evacuated first, and died the next day.

Sometimes soldiers hated their enemy. Blaise de Monluc, who fought in the French Wars of Religion, boasted that his path could be charted by bodies hanging from trees. His contemporary Franois de La Noue, abhorred war, suggesting that chivalrous acts should be remembered because those who follow the profession of arms may learn to imitate them and avoid the cruelties and base acts which many of them perpetrate because they do not know or do not wish to know how to curb their hatred. Sauk war chief Black Hawk had a good opinion of a brave and skilled opponent, and declared that it would give me pleasure to shake him by the hand.

A Second World War Russian soldier admitted that he had doubted tales of German atrocities until he reached recaptured Russian territory and discovered that they were true. Later, some of us vented our hatred on German civilians, even on some who claimed to be Communists, in ways I shudder to think of. Charles Upham, one of the only three men to win the Victoria Cross twice, acknowledged that hatred of Germany and her allies has played its part in his success: I hated Germans, he said. Donald Burgett, serving in an American parachute infantry regiment during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 194445, saw his enemies as abstract objects: it was a case of kill or be killed. Yet when he encountered a badly wounded German who was immediately shot by another American, Burgett threatened to blow the mans brains out if he ever did such a thing again, and the Germans imploring face frequently returned to haunt him.

There were moments of euphoria. Charles Windolph recalled that: You felt that you were somebody when you were on a good horse You were part of a proud outfit that had a fighting reputation, and you were ready for a fight or a frolic. Captain Cavali Mercer, commanding a Royal Horse Artillery battery at Waterloo, described the sheer euphoria of driving off a French attack: Intoxicated with success, I was singing out, Beautiful! Beautiful. Yet he was profoundly upset when one of his men was hit by a cannon ball. I shall never forget the scream the poor lad gave when struck That scream went to my very soul. For I accused myself of having caused his misfortune.

The threat of sudden death often proved less alarming than the prospect of painful wounds. Edward Costello was shot in the knee in 1810 and evacuated to a hospital in Portugal. The heat of the weather was intense and affected our wounds dreadfully, he wrote. Doctors were scarce maggots were engendered in the sores, and the bandages, when withdrawn, brought away lumps of putrid flesh and maggots. He eventually cured himself by syringing sweet oil into my wounds. Just outside Bastogne in 1944 one of Donald Burgetts comrades was hit in the stomach. The paratroopers piled the protruding entrails on a tattered raincoat, washed them as best they could, and then bound the mans abdomen with strips of coat while they waited for him to be evacuated.

Happily not all soldiers memories are of battle. Food looms large in their recollections, and there are striking similarities in the military diet across the ages. An 18th-century soldier of the British 68th Foot Regiment remembered good rations of bread, cheese, beef and pork, but far more common were things like the double baked hard-tack which formed the staple of the Byzantine Army, the corn dodgers corn-meal cooked with water of the American Civil War, the cabbage soup and buckwheat porridge of the Russian Army, and the stodgy, lumpy and tasteless K-Rations of the US Army.