Aslaug's Axe Shed

These days, you hear the phrase “Support the troops” thrown around a lot. In the United States, it’s practically unthinkable not to. In Europe, the phrase is gaining ground.

To many of us, over here, it seems to have a slightly different meaning than to many Americans. To many Europeans, “Support the troops” specifically means “I support the soldiers, because they’re doing their job, but I don’t support the war or the decisions made be politicians to start them. So let’s get the troops back in one piece, please!”

I leave it to you, the reader, to make out the inferred and unspoken difference between that view and that of mainstream Americana.

On that note, I have to add something. Just a few moments ago, I finished watching a movie I had never even heard of before tonight. It is something as unusual as an Italian movie about Italian WWII soldiers. Called “El Alamein – La linea del fuoco”, it’s a highly unusual piece of work, since it tells the story of men who have been ridiculed as incompetents and cowards for ever since the war ended. It tells their story in a different way, without making great heroes out of them. It tells the story of a few human beings under the most tragic and awful conditions.

When we think of horrible fronts during the Second World War, we tend to think of the Eastern Front and the dreadful Russian winters. We think of Stalingrad … the Mass Grave of the Wehrmacht. We think of Kursk, or the winter offensives. We think of images of German soldiers frozen solid in front of Moscow, laying in strange and unnatural positions where they fell, frozen solid with their arms raised as if pleading any passerby for help … for warmth … a hot blanket, a meal, a cup of coffee …

A merciful bullet in the head.

We don’t tend to think of North Africa as one of the worst places on Earth. I mean … North Africa? C’mon, people go to Tunesia for bathing vacations and go sightseeing at Karnak and the Ghiza Plateau in Egypt.

North Africa!

Sounds adventurous doesn’t it?

Try living there in a hole dug in the sand, for four months, living on canned goods, boiled in the cans before you even open them from the sheer heat.

Try drinking your own urine for days or even weeks on end, because water-rations don’t reach you and when they do, they are either hopelessly insufficient or contaminated because it’s been transported in gas-tanks (hey, where do you think the term Jerry-cans came from, folks?).

Try going six months without a bath, while flies lay their eggs in your dead comrades all around you, whom you can’t give a decent burial because the moment you stick your head out of your foxhole, someone’s going to drop twelve and a half kilos worth of high explosives on you from six or seven miles away?

And that’s not even the half of it. Try doing all that, while armed with weapons you know are insufficient to beat off an enemy determined to kill you, without artillery support, without tanks, without the merest shred of aircover … without even having something as simple as a truck to drive you across the hot desert when you need to relocate as much as a hundred miles? Try seeing your erstwhile allies driving past you in huge numbers, jeering you and taunting you, knowing that they not only have food and clean water, but that they have room in their transports for twice … maybe even three times as many people as they pack in there. And you’re still left to slog it out on foot. Knowing that they have both weapons and ammunition that you can only dream of?

Then try imagining getting an order to stand fast and die before retreating, knowing that in less than six hours, you’ll be practicing your artillery-shell-catching technique with your TEETH, knowing you haven’t even got something as simple as handgrenades to beat back tanks with. At most you’d have a few primitive Molotov Cocktails … but most often, you’d have a bolt action rifle of inferior make to that of your enemy, with a very limited supply of ammo, a knife and possibly a light machine-gun to share between thirty to fifty men. Finito. That’s it. Nothing more. No anti-tank guns, no heavy guns hiding behind the lines, no tanks.

Nothing.

Then call them cowards and incompetents … and then try to look yourself in the mirror afterwards.

Italians entered the war as allies of Nazi Germany without their country being even vaguely ready for any kind of conflict in 1939, solely because of the deranged fantasies of Empire entertained by one of world history’s most collossal buffoons, Benito Mussolini. A raving egomaniac with delusions of granduer and the idea that he “couldn’t sit at the conference table” unless he “had a few thousand dead” to show for his efforts. More than four hundred and fifty thousand Italians, military and civilian both, paid for that insanity with their lives. And yet, in retrospect, most people have looked at Italian soldiers during that war as complete wastes of space. Why? Because they were allied with Germany, who had the infrastructure to wage war, and because of the utter, incomprehensible evil of the Axis cause.

This is not an attempt at Axis appologia. I have often railed against that very thing. What I want to do is put things into perspective, and that perspective, to me, is that the Italian participation in WWII was one of the most senseless wastes of life ever, and one I often find has been overlooked.

It also underlines something I have always believed very strongly.

That there are no heroes in war.

Only desperate men, trying very hard to stay alive.

What we call heroics … those of us reading the books, watching the movies and contemplating the television documentaries … is usually a matter of very frightened people, doing whatever it takes to stay alive. Old war veterans often claim they are not heroes, and that the real heroes are “the ones who stayed behind”. Until a few years ago, I used to think it was just a trite expression. I’ve had to reevaluate my opinion since.

War is never pretty. It is never glorious to those who have to live with the consequences. It is people dying … survivors suffering … people losing their minds and their humanity.

Armchair generals and easily-impressed teenagers who speak of the greatness of this or that battle were not there. They didn’t see their friends blown to pieces. They don’t have to hold the intestines of a complete stranger in place while he screams until his vocal cords rupture, only to watch him die anyway.

They have never had to hold a weapon in their hands … and use it … and they have never had to see the light go out in the eyes of another human being, realizing only then that this creature they killed was in fact a person. Possibly with family, with people who loved him … and who wait for him to come home, only now he never will.

One of the most important military figures of the American Civil War, and in many ways in modern military history at all, was William Tecumseh Sherman, who more than anyone perfected the early concept of total war with his March to the Sea. In 1880, on April 11th, he made a speech before more than ten thousand people in Ohio, where he said something that everyone would do well to remember:

“”There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.”

As a historian, I find war to be a fascinating topic, because so much of our history as a race is bound up on this terrible state of affairs.

But I am not interested in war because I think it is cool. I admit I can be astonished when learning of something that has taken place during the course of a battle or a campaign, or even when I learn of the conduct of an entire war … I am only human. And it is easy to be dazzled or impressed.

But when that sensation leaves me, I am always left with a strange, sucking sensation in the pit of my stomach. I find it hard to sleep at night, sometimes, because what I’ve learned keeps floating around in my head. It took me years to figure out why, and what this sucking sensation was.

It was not until last year, when I was working in Randers, and I was speaking to our archivist there. She comes from a military family, and I was writing a short newspaper article about the Dragoon regiment which had been stationed in Randers for nearly two hundred years. She put words to it … and I immediately agreed.

We were talking about how military history seems to be a topic that is considered slightly dirty and not quite worthy by many historians nowadays, and how we both found that to be strange, sad and rather foolish. And then she said:

“But they think it’s because we sit there and get a kick out of reading about all the great feats of arms and the awesome destructive power of the weapons used. But that’s not it at all. Rather, we are horrified at what human beings will do to one another, and we want to describe the damage those weapons can do … from a hatchet or a sword to a tank-shell or a nuclear explosion … to warn people and tell them “This is what happens, folks. People die. It’s not glorious and it’s not a great kick like in the movies. It’s death. It’s pain. It’s ugly. And afterwards, the dead don’t stand up and go out backstage for a cup of tea before getting their makeup removed.”

The point of it is … she’s exactly right.

That’s exactly what it’s all about for me.

And yet … leaders of nations still send young men and women into war. Sometimes, their reasons are better than others. Sometimes, even I have to concede, that war may be the only recourse.

But not always. And if wars have to be fought, should at least always be fought with the specific, overriding aim of causing as little material damage as possible and with as few casualties as possible.

Its easy for politicians to beat the wardrums, after all.

They don’t have to do the actual killing.

All they have to do is make speeches and think up cool-sounding slogans to sell the idea of their wars to the public.

And afterwards, people like me … historians and archivists … have the dreadful task of collecting the information and storing it for posterity in as much detail as possible.

I support the troops, folks.

But I reserve the right not to support war.