PART II

THE HORROR OF WAR: THE HELL OF TOTAL WAR

The Second World War outdid the nightmare of the first in terms of scope and size. The nightmare of No Man's Land was soon swallowed by the macabre associated with names like Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, and Auschwitz. Anyone who has watched the opening sequence of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a fictionalized account of the horrors of D-Day, is usually stunned by the meat grinder of modern combat. As critical and brutal as the opening of the Second Front in Europe was, it was unlike the industrial cauldron of hell that raged in the East.

The memoir of German soldier Guy Sajer is a long ode to death. While fighting on the Eastern Front, Sajer's entire existence became enmeshed in the presence of the dead.

Clouds of smoke were rising all along the battered front. We felt as if we could smell the presence of death--and by that I don't mean the process of decomposition, but the smell that emanates from death when its proportions have reached a certain magnitude. Anyone who has been on a battlefield knows what I mean.

By the final days of the war, with the Russians clearly marching toward victory, witnessing death becomes banal. During the winter fighting north of Boporoeivska, 1944-1945, Sajer recounts the vast numbers of Mongol soldiers employed on a minefield.

Their function was to knock out the minefield, by crossing it. As the Russians preferred to economize on tanks, and as their human stockpile was enormous, they usually sent out their men for jobs of this kind...The minefield exploded under the howling mob, and we sent out a curtain of yellow and white fire to obliterate anyone who survived. The fragmented cadavers froze very quickly, sparing us the stench which would otherwise have polluted the air over a vast area.

Writer and veteran Paul Fussell has argued that most history books fail to portray this gruesome reality of war. He accuses the most popular American and British pictorial works of the Second World War of showing only whole bodies, be they dead or wounded, and turning a blind eye to the harder reality of combat:

In these [works], no matter how severely wounded, Allied troops are never shown suffering what was termed, in the Vietnam War, traumatic amputation: everyone has all of his limbs, hands and feet and digits, not to mention expressions of courage and cheer. And recalling Shakespeare and Goya, it would be a mistake to assume that dismembering was more common when warfare was largely a matter of cutting weapons, like swords and sabers. Their results are nothing compared to the work of bombs, machine guns, pieces of shell, and high explosives in general.

CONCLUSION

Stephen King argued in Danse Macabre that most horror fiction (primarily, though not exclusively, the bottomless amount of crap made in his wake) is conservative in nature. Whatever "horror" is unleashed, whatever agent of change upsets the balance, be it supernatural or psychopathic, it is up to the heroes to beat it, to restore order.

If that's true, and I'm not convinced it is, than much war fiction is a darker form of horror. So many novels, from A Farewell to Arms to The Thin Red Line , end with crushed senses of humanity. Heroes die without honour. Those that live are wracked with guilt; survival came from luck, not courage, against the faceless enemy. Worse, the war left them hollow, returning to civility void of the humanity four years of war ripped from them.

For many veterans of the both World Wars, the return to normalcy, that order King mentioned, was another difficult journey. Creating these novels of experience, however, may have provided them the first step towards a sense of balance. Reading them may disturb us, but it can also enlighten our understanding of our fellow man, increase our awareness of worlds not our own, and challenge the way we think of the events around us.

And shouldn't that be the goal of modern horror literature?

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Works Cited:

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

---, Wartime

Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Frederick Manning, Her Private's We

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier