In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize recently, President Barack Obama gave a magnificent speech justifying just wars. I am sure it will be included in future anthologies of great orations.
One of the tragic, eternal facts of human life is that there will always be wars – some the hideous, misguided choice of evil men and some “wars of necessity” but war all the same since the horror and indiscriminate agony caused by war is not changed by what designation war is given.
It is equally a fact that the brutality of war has inspired some of the greatest of mankind’s works of art – paintings of battle and destruction, music to stir the soul, some of the most powerful and moving prose and poetry ever written. It has been pointed out that hawks, those fierce and warlike birds of prey, do not sing. But war-poets most eloquently do. Certainly, for instance, remarkable works of the human spirit are inspired by wars in which good legitimately confronts evil. But, sadly, great poetry and music does not flow only from battlefields where just causes prosper.
Sadly, war itself, even the cruelty and agony and violence of war, seems to hold a fascination for writers. Why this should be so I do not know. Perhaps war fascinates only male writers, I have heard that said, and if so that would be an interesting revelation of human nature. But we would still be left with the disturbing puzzle that war sets the soul of man humming with something that sometimes seems like fierce joy. Perhaps it is because war brings human beings to the very edge of precipices where nobody would want to be but which writers exult in exploring, those limits where character, for good or ill, is tested to destruction. For the poet seeking themes, where are bravery, cowardice, fear, loyalty, betrayal, anger, hate, sacrifice, love and anguish distilled to greater potency than in war?
The Iliad is one of the greatest poems ever written. It is the story of the war waged by the Achaean princes against Troy for the purpose of recovering Helen, wife of Menelaus, whom Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, had carried off. A long, cruel, bloody, brutal, senseless, violent, destructive war full of desperate battles, fearful pillaging, heroic combat and numberless tragedies – for what? But it produced the Iliad and for thousands of years the Iliad has enthralled succeeding generations of men with its plangent, seductive, noble fury and beauty.
Here is a passage from book four of the Iliad in the marvellous translation by the English poet Christopher Logue:
Go Close
Slip into the fighting.
Into a low-sky site crammed with huge men,
Attractive men, brave, loyal, fit, slab-sided men,
Men who came face to face with gods, who spoke with
gods,
Leaping onto each other like wolves,
Screaming, kicking, slicing, hacking, ripping,
Thumping their chests:
“I am full of the god!”
Blubbering with terror as they beg for their lives:
“Laid his trunk open from shoulder to hip –
Like a beauty queen’s sash.”
Falling, falling.
Top-slung steel chain gates slumped onto concrete,
Pipko, Bluefisher, Chuckerbutty, Lox:
“Left all he had to follow Greece.”
“Left all he had to follow Troy.”
Clawing the ground, calling out for their sons, for revenge.
Sparks from the bronze, lit splinters from the poles:
“I am hit.”
“Take my arm.”
“I am dying.”
“Shake my hand.”
“Don’t leave me, Don’t let me go.”
“Goodbye little fellow with the gloomy face.”
As Greece, as Troy, fought on and on.
Or are they only asleep?
They are too tired to sleep.
The tears are falling from their eyes.
The noise they make while fighting is so loud
That what you see is like a silent film.
And as the dust converges over them
The ridge is as it is when darkness falls.
Silence and light.
Mankind has not nearly ended its long love affair with war and violence. No man is more reverenced in myth or history than the warrior Achilles, famed for his fury and his bravery and his cruelty. Infinitely more music has been written for him than for all the gentlest saints combined.
The hawk dips and soars in the high air and plunges on its victim and many more have seen splendour in that sight than have seen horror.
Do not be surprised if even now the words are forming in the soul and mind of an Afghan, an Iranian, a Kurd, an American, a Palestinian, an Israeli – name indeed any nationality in the peace-conceived United Nations – which in time to come will issue in the terrible but memorable music of war poetry.
