by Richard A. Koenigsberg
Contents
- The Psychological Interpretation of Culture
- Hitler’s Ideology
- War and Genocide
- The First World War
- War as Sacrifice
- Training Soldiers to Die
- Like Sheep to Slaughter
- The Psychopathology of War
Works Cited
VII. Like Sheep to Slaughter
The Battle of Verdun (1916) was one of the most concentrated sites of mass slaughter in the history of warfare, with more than 650,000 French and German soldiers killed in a series of encounters that changed nothing. One French officer saw the battle as a contest of French and German masculinity: “The two races have put all their youth into the furnace, to test which is the strongest and most virile (in Smith, 1994, 138)." Terms like masculinity, strength, and aggression are thrown around loosely in discussions of war. These words bear little relationship to the experience of soldiers at Verdun.
For their initial attack, the Germans brought up 2.5 million shells. By June, the artillery had grown to about 2000 guns, and it was calculated that in just over four months of battle 24 million shells had been pumped into this dedicated stretch of ground, an average of 100 shells per minute. The French action to recapture the famous Fort Douaumont employed 711 guns on a front of just over three miles. A notice in the fort today informs us that 1000 shells were used for every square meter of battlefield.
Imagine the pathetic plight of the soldier in the face of this massive barrage, confined within a narrow space that glowed like an oven for miles because of the constant artillery bombing. “Fighting” consisted, essentially, of trying to shield one’s body to survive the incessant shelling. A French Lieutenant noted that before attacking, his men were either “drunk, howling out patriotic airs, or weeping with emotion or despair.” One had the temerity to remark within earshot of the company commander: “Baa, baa, I am the sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse (Smith, 1984, 138)."
The image of “sheep going to slaughter” is often used to describe Jews being transported in trains and herded to death camps. Historian Denis Winter (1979) describes the fate of German soldiers in the First World War subsequent to completing training:
"After the stint at base, the railway took the men toward the front line. To a generation with visual memories of the railway lines running into Hitler’s death camps, tense faces peering from cattle trucks, there is something disconcerting about the imagery of this journey from base camp. The soldiers went in waggons of the same type, forty of them in each waggon, kits hanging from hooks in the roof. Death was a high probability for both generations of travelers in these cattle trucks." (74)
Over two million German soldiers were killed in the First World War and millions more wounded or maimed. Rarely did they protest. Like Jews in the Holocaust, German soldiers in the First World War went “like sheep to the slaughter.” As German soldiers were transported in cattle-cars by Germany’s leaders and slaughtered at the Western Front during the First World War, so were Jews transported by Germany’s leaders and slaughtered in death camps during the Holocaust.
The posture of the soldier in the First World War, then, was one of abject passivity—as he struggled to keep his body intact in the face of an overwhelming barrage of murderous technology. The authority on war Gwynne Dyer concludes: “You offer yourself to be slain: This is the essence of being a soldier. By becoming soldiers, men agree to die when we tell them to.” Joanna Bourke observes that the most important point to be made about the male body during the Great War is that it was “intended to be mutilated” (31). Beneath concepts such as territorial expansion, conquest, defending the homeland, honor and glory, then, lays the repressed reality of warfare: the dead or maimed body of the soldier.
The soldier goes to battle at the behest of his nation and its leaders. He is at the mercy of these leaders, compelled to engage in battle with the enemy, sometimes shot if he refuses to do so. The fundamental stance of the soldier in World War I—and probably that of soldiers in most wars—is that of a pathetic, helpless victim. The soldier is obligated to be absolutely obedient to his commanders, even unto death.
Yet in spite of our knowledge of these realities, people insist upon using terms like aggression and “masculinity” to characterize the soldier’s posture, as if he is participating in a healthy, vigorous sporting event rather than an activity revolving around being killed or mutilated. The spectator, reading about battles in the newspaper or in history books, watching documentary accounts, thrills to the image of war as a magnificent display of national power and glory. What is often left out of these accounts is the maiming of young men, destruction of the male body.
WORKS CITED
Bartov, Omer. “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust.” American Historical Review 103.3 (June 1998): 771-816.
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Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.
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Gilbert, Martin. The First World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.
Haste, Cate. Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War. London: Allen Lane, 1977.
Horne, John. “Soldiers, Civilians, and the Warfare of Attrition.” In Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War. Ed. F. Coetzee and M. Shevin-Coetzee. Providence, R. I.: Berghahn Books, 1995.
Keegan, John and Richard Holmes. Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. New York: Viking, 1986.
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Koenigsberg, Richard A. Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology. New York: Library of Social Science, 1975.
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Smith, Leonard V. Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During World War I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Stein, Howard F. The Dream of Culture: Essay on Culture’s Elusiveness. New York: Psyche Press, 1994.
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Travers, Tim. The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987.
Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1979.
Winter, Jay. The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century. Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 1996.
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