Never Such Innocence Again?

I spent my Memorial Day on the beach, reading John Buchan’s Greenmantle, a 1916 novel of espionage and derring-do. Buchan’s novel is pulp of the highest order and a celebration of battlefield heroics, written in the midst of the conflict that would forever change the Western world’s understanding of warfare. The bloodless combat and unbelievable heroism strike any student of WWI as hopelessly naive. As a result, many of the passages are fascinatingly cringe worthy, sure to leave contemporary audiences with a self-satisfied glow. I don’t think we’ve earned it.

Buchan wrote Greenmantlein the heat of World War One, but he never served in the trenches, instead working for the War Propaganda Bureau and later as a speechwriter for Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces in Europe for the majority of WWI. Buchan’s understanding of warfare seems strictly limited; he even ends the novel with a victorious cavalry charge. The characters are all stalwart souls, with an almost innocent appreciation of war and the manly camaraderie and self-affirmation to be found in its execution. The main character, Richard Hannay, describes himself as “happy in my soldiering” (and that’s after fighting in the Battle of Loos, in which upwards of 50,000 British men died, for almost no gain). Consider this passage from the novel’s end, where the heroes again approach the front:

“And then, above the hum of the roadside, rose the voice of the great guns….It was a sound I had not heard for five months, and it fairly crazed me….It was the old thing, the thing I had shared with so many good fellows. My proper work, and the only task for a man. At the sound of the guns I felt that I was moving in natural air once more. I felt that I was coming home.”

The modern reader can do little but roll her eyes in response to such enthusiasms. We like to think that we’ve moved beyond such simplistic, glamorous depictions of war. We know better now. But before we get too carried away with self-congratulation, consider, say, Jerry Bruckheimer, or Michael Bay as contemporary Buchans.

Both men make huge blockbuster films, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars every outing, and neither of them have ever fought in a war. Their movies are usually high octane affairs with lots of action, thrilling heroics, and input from the U.S. military. As with most pulp entertainment, the hackneyed dialogue and flat characters are afterthoughts, concessions to the fact that even the coolest stories must be burdened by such considerations. Bay’s Transformers franchise features heavy Pentagon involvement, an expenditure justified by basic propaganda purposes (each branch of the armed forces maintains an office in Hollywood in an attempt to exert some influence over the film making world). In one Variety article about Transformers 2 an Air Force spokesman admitted: “Recruiting and deterrence are secondary goals, but they’re certainly there.” And it is effective. One might think that a radical lefty and movie buff like myself would be hardwired against such messaging, but on some tribal level even my heart swelled to see the U.S. military give the Decepticons what for.

Admittedly, today we have plenty of movies that attempt to show the terrifying complexities of combat too. But how many people actually see those movies? Transformers 2 raked in close to a billion dollars. The Hurt Locker barely passed $40 million, and that was mostly due to the extended release and publicity granted any Oscar nominee. While it is undoubtedly easier to complicate the notion of war as a purely heroic endeavor than it was in Buchan’s day, I’d imagine that we still get the larger part of our understanding of warfare from Hollywood spectacle than anything else.

In fact, the military fantasies of Greenmantle could be easily undermined by the hundreds of thousands of young British men being killed every year. By contrast our military losses in Afghanistan and Iraq don’t even come close to topping 10,000, and that’s after nine years of war. The vast majority of families haven’t been directly affected. Our lives, our society haven’t been profoundly changed. In a way that makes our contemporary military fantasies far more grotesque than Buchan’s romantic imaginings, because so few of us will ever have to acknowledge the grim reality, leaving our insular soldier class to shoulder the entire burden.

Jake Blumgart is a freelance reporter-researcher living in Philadelphia and a former Campus Progress staff writer. His work has been published by the American Prospect, Alternet, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Stranger, and the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter @jblumgart.

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