Heroism vs Victimhood

One of the stranger anomalies of the modern world, and one that sets it starkly apart from most past times, is our tendency to memorialize victims rather than heroes.

This thought is prompted by a recent article in History Cafe that notes that more civilians than soldiers die in many wars, and asks why, on Remembrance Day, we remember the deaths of soldiers and not civilians:

According to the respected Robert Schuman Centre, nearly 20 million people died in World War One. But notice this. That figure includes 9.7 soldiers and 10 million civilians.

Just more than half of those who died were not in uniform. in 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that, in modern warfare, ten civilians die for every soldier killed in battle
 
So why is it that, on Remembrance Day, we are treated to marching bands and columns of men and women in uniform? Why do war memorials up and down Britain only record military deaths?

Where are the memorials to the civilians who died? Why in fact is remembrance organised by the military at all? Wars may be fought by the military. But the dead we should be remembering are civilians and military.

To the people of most times past, the answer to this question would have been obvious. Many of them would have thought you mad for even asking it. The answer they would have given is that the memorials are for heroes, for the people who marched towards the enemy, who marched into the jaws of the beast. To die is not, in itself, a sacrifice. To be caught up in a tragedy, whether natural or man-made, is a grave misfortune, but it is not a sacrifice. The sacrifice is to pick up a sword or a spear or a rock or a gun and walk towards the enemy. It is to accept additional danger for the sake of others. Those who sacrifice their safety to protect others often die as a result, but it is the sacrifice of their safety that we memorialize, not merely the fact of their death.

An example to illustrate this point is the long campaign to memorialize the merchant marine and their contributions to the Battle of the Atlantic. This campaign was ultimately successful, for while the merchant marine were not in uniform, like the navy, they too sailed into the jaws of the beast, and in vessels less well suited to survive the rigors of battle. They sacrificed their safety to feed a beleaguered island. The people who died in the blitz are not memorialized in the same way. They did not march into the jaws of the beast. The jaws of the beast came to them.

Please note that my purpose here is not to argue whether this is right or wrong. My purpose is to point out the difference in attitudes between the past and the present where such matters are concerned. The past memorialized heroes, by which they meant those who put themselves in harm’s way, not victims, those who simply found themselves in harm’s way. If you find that distinction distasteful or irrelevant, again, my purpose is not to argue either that it should be made or that it is worthy. You may perhaps guess my opinion on this, but my purpose in this essay is simply to point out that it was made, that it is a distinction that would have been clear and meaningful to most people in the past, and that attitudes on this matter have changed in recent times — another example of the anomalous nature of our present society.

The way that the History Cafe article uses numbers is indicative of this change of attitude. Of 20 million dead in World War One, they point out, 10 million were soldiers and 10 million were civilians. This suggests that civilians suffered as much as soldiers did, that they faced as much danger as soldiers did. But, of course, this is not the case. There were far more civilians than soldiers. Even in a full general mobilization, soldiers comprise only the fit young men who can be spared from essential occupations. (Female combatants are a rarity, even today.) It excludes women, children, the old, the unfit, and those doing essential jobs. The denominator to be placed under the 10 million military deaths is much smaller than that to be placed under the 10 million civilian deaths. In percentage terms, it was far more dangerous to be a soldier than a civilian.

Similarly with the numbers for modern wars, “ten civilians die for every soldier killed in battle” does not in any way mean that it is more dangerous to be a civilian than a soldier. Modern armies mostly consist of a relatively few highly trained soldiers that represent a small proportion of the general population, and much of the fighting that goes on is either terror attacks or guerilla warfare, fought within cities. Of course, the civilian casualties are higher, particularly when you figure in deaths caused by the economic disruptions that are the side effects of war. But that is because the percentage of soldiers is lower. It is still more dangerous to be a soldier.

By using the numbers in the way it does, the History Cafe article emphasizes victimhood over heroism. It points to the Bengal famine of 1943 in which between two and three million Indian civilians died of malnutrition and malaria because scarce food resources were directed to the military rather than civilians. Whatever you may think of that policy, the victims of the Bengal famine were victims, not heroes.

I expect that some readers will object to that characterization. But such objections only illustrate my point. Most people of past times would have had no objection to that distinction or to characterizing it in those terms.

I’m not suggesting that respect for heroes, or the willingness to distinguish between heroes and victims has entirely vanished in the present day. Clearly the Remembrance Day celebrations going on as I write this show that it has not. But there is a big difference between holding an opinion unselfconsciously because everyone you know holds the same opinion, and holding it self-consciously because you are aware that in holding it you are, to one extent or another, standing out against the crowd.

This distinction between a self-conscious opinion and an unselfconscious opinion matters greatly in our understanding of the attitudes of historical peoples, and therefore of the characters in historical novels. It affects one’s attitudes, and one’s place in society, in all sorts of ways. For an example, to be a practicing Catholic in Canada today is to be self-conscious of your faith. You are aware that most of the people you meet are not practicing Catholics, even if they put Catholic in the religion box on the census, and people are often shocked to find that someone that had seemed perfectly normal to them was once a seminarian and still goes to Mass every Sunday. Some people will even stop talking to you when they find out.

My point here is not to complain of persecution or exclusion. I suffer neither of these things. My point is that my Catholicism is self-conscious because I know it is not shared by most of the people I interact with regularly, and that a fair percentage of them either think the Church is inherently evil or that believers are idiots, or both. This means that I experience, to a certain extent, a feeling of set-apartness, and I am therefore much more aware of the features of Catholic belief and practice than I would otherwise be.

All Christians in North America today are self-conscious believers. All Moslems and Jews are as well, I am sure. This would not have been the case for Christians in Christian countries for most of history, nor for Moslems in Islamic countries, though it has doubtless been true of Jews for 2000 years at least. To believe something unselfconsciously is a very different thing. Most of what we believe unselfconsciously we believe because we were brought up believing it and everyone around us believes it too. Chances are that doubt or introspection has never entered our heads about it.

This is something I have tried hard to get my head around, and to portray realistically, in The Wistful and the Good, and even more so in its sequel, St. Agnes and the Selkie, which will be coming out this month. My characters are all Christians (except the Norsk), but their faith is unselfconscious. It is simply how they grew up and how they were taught. It does not set them apart in the way it would today. In the schema of normal, wonderful, or terrible, it is normal to them, where it would be considered either wonderful or terrible by most people today.

Writers of historical fiction, if they want to portray their characters authentically, should realize that most people of the age they write about would have been unselfconsciously Christian, or unselfconsciously the religion of their particular society. And also that they would have unselfconsciously believed in the value of heroism and in the obligation to fight for their country or their king when called upon to do so.

Thus when World War I started, young men flocked to join up to do their duty. That it was their obligation to do so, most of them would never have paused to question. To serve one’s country and one’s king was an obligation most of them would have held unselfconsciously.

Contrast this to the draft for the Vietnam war (or the recent Russian draft for the Ukraine war). Some went gladly to do what they saw as their duty. Some went reluctantly. Some dodged the draft any way they could. Whichever group a man belonged to, though, he held his views about it self-consciously.

World War One was perhaps the watershed for the unselfconscious embrace of duty to king and country. Two poems are particularly remembered from that war. Both seek to speak for the dead, but they are polar opposites in how they conceive the voice of the dead. One is John McCrea’s In Flander’s Fields, which will be reprinted and read many times this Remembrance Day. It ends:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

Here the dead urge those still living to take up arms and continue the fight, declaring that they will not rest easy if the living do not do so.

Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est strikes the exact opposite note:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The concluding lines are a quote from the Roman poet Horace and translate as "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country." In quoting Horace for this sentiment, Owen is attributing the “old lie” to the whole of the civilization that has come before this moment. Owen’s “old lie” is precisely the old truth to which McCrea implicitly appeals when he has the dead urge the living to take up the fight. It is why the dead will not rest easy till the fight is won.

After World War One, many would still hold Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori to be true, but they would never do so unselfconsciously again. Each war since has chipped away at that idea, until History Cafe, with apparently unselfconscious assurance, can write as if obviously victims deserve memorializing as much as heroes. Which is perhaps to say that they no longer make any distinction between heroes and victims, a distinction the Owen implicitly rejects when he calls Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, an “old lie.”

This is not to suggest, of course, that we should not mourn victims, no matter what they are victims of, or to suggest that any past age would have thought so. Nor is it to suggest that victims are not deserving of remembrance. But the remembrance of heroes is a different matter, nonetheless, deserving of its own occasion and ceremony. The remembrance of sacrifice is qualitatively different from the remembrance of victimhood, and serves a distinct societal purpose, and every age before our own would have thought so unselfconsciously.

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