“As long as there has been war,” says journalist Joe Woodward, “there have been writers trying to understand it, turning battlefield horrors into narrative, trying to make something useful out of its debris.” The literature of war is written by soldiers and civilians, journalists and nurses, authors who are eyewitnesses to battles and those who know it only through veterans and historians. From Homer to Hemmingway, soldiers from the American Civil War to the fields of World War I, Henry V to Jarhead, writers have struggled to articulate the complex experience of combat to civilians who have never seen it and their comrades who have.
With its seemingly first-hand knowledge of the anticipation of battle, the bonds between soldiers, the brutality of combat, and the uncanny juxtapositions of combat and civil life, Homer’s Iliad is the first example of war literature that has made its way into recorded history. Here are excerpts from Richard Fagles’s translation of Homer, and other examples of war literature:
Hungry as wolves that rend and bolt raw flesh,
hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies—
they gorge on the kill till all their jaws drip red with blood,
belching bloody meat, but the fury, never shaken,
builds inside their chests though their glutted bellies burst.
—Homer, the Iliad, Trojan War
“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” —Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried , Vietnam War
“And while my imagination is like the weaver's shuttle, playing backward and forward through these two decades of time, I ask myself, Are these things real? did they happen? are they being enacted today? …Surely these are just the vagaries of my own imagination. Surely my fancies are running wild tonight. But, hush! I now hear the approach of battle. That low, rumbling sound in the west is the roar of cannon in the distance. That rushing sound is the tread of soldiers. That quick, lurid glare is the flash that precedes the cannon's roar. And, listen! that loud report that makes the earth tremble and jar and sway, is but the bursting of a shell, as it screams through the dark, tempestuous night. That black, ebon cloud, where the lurid lightning flickers and flares, that is rolling through the heavens, is the smoke of battle; beneath is being enacted a carnage of blood and death. Listen! the soldiers are charging now. The flashes and roaring now are blended with the shouts of soldiers and the confusion of battle. . .” —Sam Watkins, Company Aytch: Or, a Side Show of the Big Show, American Civil War
Three deliberate shots
fire this quiet town,
scatter sparrows from
the willow-oak, touch
the scar where over thirty
years ago the mortar
fragment hit: I know
once more how good it is
to live. Thinking of the
boy struck down beside
me by that shell, I see
him sink into slow jungle
green, shock burned forever
in his eyes. Again I
crawl to comfort his last
breath. Even now there's
nothing I can do but,
as the bugle fades, remember
—Lucien Stryk, “Memorial Day”, World War II
No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're 'longing to go out again,'--
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,--
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
—Siegfried Sassoon, “The Survivors”, World War I
“On the banks of the Ya Crong Poco River, on the northern flank of the B3 battlefield in the Central Highlands, the Missing In Action body-collecting team awaits the dry season of 1976.”
—Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, Vietnam War