Absurd, Unspeakable, and Unbelievable

The similarities between Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring and Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” are very apparent. If read consecutively, one might say that the Hemingway short story is an example of how a soldier might cope with experiencing the events described in Ekstein’s book.

            In Rites of Spring, a very detailed description of trench warfare during the Great War is given. The author tells of the unsanitary and gruesome conditions that the soldiers were placed in, as well as the effects those conditions had on soldiers’ minds, often driving them insane. Often, during the Great War, the soldiers faced conditions so unspeakable that they had to develop different coping mechanisms in order to survive.

            For example, there is one instance where the soldiers walked by a severed hand and jokingly shook hands with it. In order for this to occur, the amount of fragmented pieces of human beings lying around had to have been in very high amounts. For this gruesome sight to be so common that a soldier could, without hesitation, and maybe even with some comical enjoyment, walk up to the pieces of human bodies and interact with them in a lighthearted manner, the number of dead lying around exposed in and around the trenches must have been massive.

Other instances of coping with the mental burden of warfare include a soldier nonchalantly continuing to eat his meal after a soldier had fallen right next to him, and a comical-sounding letter written from a soldier to his mother describing a situation in which decomposed remains were embedded in sandbags which were used to lean on during the use of a periscope. The soldier explains to his mother that he is facing a dilemma – the remains in the sandbag are helping support the structure that the periscope is resting on, and in turn, the soldier must debate whether to get rid of it because of the awful smell or to keep it in order for the parapet to retain integrity. The soldier even nicknames the remains of the fallen German soldier “Fritz.”

In the short story by Hemingway, the main character (Krebs) is a near-perfect example of how a veteran of the Great War might have turned out after having seen the gruesome sights and experiencing the greatly disgusting living conditions. Krebs, after returning home from the Great War, finds that many of the daily activities which he had partaken in before enlisting in the military during wartime are a much different experience after coming back home from the war. For him, everything takes on a completely different perspective.

The experiences he went through in the Great War, most likely very similar to what the trench soldiers experienced in Rites of Spring, are considered so absurd, unspeakable, and unbelievable by the public that Krebs feels he has to lie in order to be believed by anyone. Krebs develops “a distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war” because he has to lie so much and, in turn, he is distanced from people.

The events described in Rites of Spring that were experienced by Krebs in “Soldier’s Home” were so intense that Krebs is no longer even capable of loving another human being. This problem presents itself when Krebs’s mother asks Krebs if he loves her, to which he replies a blatant, “No.” Realizing he has upset his mother, he has to create another lie, perhaps the most disturbing one of all – that he does love his mother.

Semantics of War

            A strange thing happens when one nation is pitted against another. Whether it is an all-out war, a small altercation, or just a disagreement over foreign policy, the respective leaders of each country, along with officers, always face the same dilemma – communication.

            The U.S. government, for example, has an entire arsenal of tactics to use in order to manipulate public opinion; they implement them by using very careful word choice in press releases, reports, etc. Very vague language is often used in order to make citizens feel as though they have actually learned something valuable and that the government is really doing its job.

            It is sometimes difficult to know what the motivating force is behind such word choice. When it comes to war, executives often make decisions that they will have to defend, that is, if they come into view of the public eye. Such vague reports (which are so often given) may make some citizens suspicious that misinformation may be being spread due to an error during a mission or foreign policy.

            This is only one type of bias, however. Even in positive situations regarding foreign relations, governments will often portray everything that may occurred as being positive; vice versa, released information may also understate failure or losses of any kind.

            However, one can only speculate as to the motives behind the word choice in public reports/press releases. In a New York Times article titled “American Soldier Killed Freeing Prisoners of ISIS in Iraq,” by Michael R. Gordon, it is stated that a U.S. soldier who was very recently killed in action was “the first American soldier killed in action in Iraq since the withdrawal in 2011.” The key word in that sentence is “withdrawal.” The reader must find this claim vague, as the evidence shows that there are definitely American soldiers currently being sent to Iraq and are still engaging in combat. It is appalling that a government can make a claim that it has withdrawn its troops from a country when there is still combat going on. The vagueness of this statement is unsettling.

            The problem of communication has still not been solved. In the article “War Communication before Modern Technology,” by Kate Kelly, the entire evolution of communication in war time is shown. For example, the combat style of the Revolutionary War was largely a result of the means of communication. The soldiers could not hear orders from their officer unless they were all very close together. Clearly this created a very difficult combat situation and made soldiers very easy targets. As for long-distance communication at that time, couriers were sent from brigade to brigade. This is also a very troublesome situation. If the enemy in the war wants to cripple an army, they know that one of the best ways to do so is take down communications. If communication isn’t happening, combat quickly becomes disorganized and, in a sense, falls apart.

            Though communication has evolved rapidly and has seen many different forms, the underlying problem persists: the message. No matter what medium one is communicating on, it is all for nothing if the proper word choice isn’t examined and critically analyzed before being sent out. Communication ultimately shapes the end result of any war or foreign policy.