Regarding the Pain of Others (11 page)

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I
S THERE AN ANTIDOTE
to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

Could one be mobilized actively to oppose war by an image (or a group of images) as one might be enrolled among the opponents of capital punishment by reading, say, Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
or Turgenev’s “The Execution of Troppmann,” an account by the expatriate writer, invited to be an observer in a Paris prison, of a famous criminal’s last hours before being guillotined? A narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, to feel. No photograph or portfolio of photographs can unfold, go further, and further still, as do
The Ascent
(1977), by the Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko, the most affecting film about the sadness of war I know, and an astounding Japanese documentary, Kazuo Hara’s
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On
(1987), the portrait of a “deranged” veteran of the Pacific war, whose life’s work is denouncing Japanese war crimes from a sound truck he drives through the streets of Tokyo and paying most unwelcome visits to his former superior officers, demanding that they apologize for crimes, such as the murder of American prisoners in the Philippines, which they either ordered or condoned.

Among single antiwar images, the huge photograph that Jeff Wall made in 1992 titled “Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986)” seems to me exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power. The antithesis of a document, the picture, a Cibachrome transparency seven and a half feet high and more than thirteen feet wide and mounted on a light box, shows figures posed in a landscape, a blasted hillside, that was constructed in the artist’s studio. Wall, who is Canadian, was never in Afghanistan. The ambush is a made-up event in a savage war that had been much in the news. Wall set as his task the imagining of war’s horror (he cites Goya as an inspiration), as in nineteenth-century history painting and other forms of history-as-spectacle that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—just before the invention of the camera—such as tableaux vivants, wax displays, dioramas, and panoramas, which made the past, especially the immediate past, seem astonishingly, disturbingly real.

The figures in Wall’s visionary photo-work are “realistic” but, of course, the image is not. Dead soldiers don’t talk. Here they do.

Thirteen Russian soldiers in bulky winter uniforms and high boots are scattered about a pocked, blood-splashed slope lined with loose rocks and the litter of war: shell casings, crumpled metal, a boot that holds the lower part of a leg … The scene might be a revised version of the end of Gance’s
J’accuse,
when the dead soldiers from the First World War rise from their graves, but these Russian conscripts, slaughtered in the Soviet Union’s own late folly of a colonial war, were never buried. A few still have their helmets on. The head of one kneeling figure, talking animatedly, foams with his red brain matter. The atmosphere is warm, convivial, fraternal. Some slouch, leaning on an elbow, or sit, chatting, their opened skulls and destroyed hands on view. One man bends over another who lies on his side as if asleep, perhaps encouraging him to sit up. Three men are horsing around: one with a huge wound in his belly straddles another, lying prone, who is laughing at a third man, on his knees, who playfully dangles before him a strip of flesh. One soldier, helmeted, legless, has turned to a comrade some distance away, an alert smile on his face. Below him are two who don’t seem quite up to the resurrection and lie supine, their bloodied heads hanging down the stony incline.

Engulfed by the image, which is so accusatory, one could fantasize that the soldiers might turn and talk to us. But no, no one is looking out of the picture. There’s no threat of protest. They are not about to yell at us to bring a halt to that abomination which is war. They haven’t come back to life in order to stagger off to denounce the war-makers who sent them to kill and be killed. And they are not represented as terrifying to others, for among them (far left) sits a white-garbed Afghan scavenger, entirely absorbed in going through somebody’s kit bag, of whom they take no note, and entering the picture above them (top right) on the path winding down the slope are two Afghans, perhaps soldiers themselves, who, it would seem from the Kalashnikovs collected near their feet, have already stripped the dead soldiers of their weapons. These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? “We”—this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.

Notes

Chapter 1

1
. Her condemnation of war notwithstanding, Weil sought to participate in the defense of the Spanish Republic and in the fight against Hitler’s Germany. In 1936 she went to Spain as a noncombatant volunteer in an international brigade; in 1942 and early 1943, a refugee in London and already ill, she worked at the office of the Free French and hoped to be sent on a mission in Occupied France. (She died in an English sanatorium in August 1943.)

Chapter 2

1
. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, sixty thousand British soldiers were killed or gravely wounded—thirty thousand of these in the first half-hour. At the end of four and a half months of battle, 1,300,000 casualties had been sustained by both sides, and the British and French front line had advanced by five miles.

2
. Nothing in Franco’s barbarous conduct of the war is as well remembered as these raids, mostly executed by the unit of the German air force sent by Hitler to aid Franco, the Condor Legion, and memorialized in Picasso’s
Guernica.
But they were not without precedent. During the First World War, there had been some sporadic, relatively ineffective bombing; for example, the Germans conducted raids from Zeppelins, then from planes, on a number of cities, including London, Paris, and Antwerp. Far more lethally—starting with the attack by Italian fighter planes near Tripoli in October 1911—European nations had been bombing their colonies. So-called “air control operations” were favored as an economical alternative to the costly practice of maintaining large garrisons to police Britain’s more restive possessions. One of these was Iraq, which (along with Palestine) had gone to Britain as part of the spoils of victory when the Ottoman Empire was dismembered after the First World War. Between 1920 and 1924, the recently formed Royal Air Force regularly targeted Iraqi villages, often remote settlements, where the rebellious natives might try to find shelter, with the raids “carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops, and cattle,” according to the tactics outlined by one RAF wing commander.
   What horrified public opinion in the 1930s was that the slaughter of civilians from the air was happening in Spain; these sorts of things were not supposed to happen
here.
As David Rieff has pointed out, a similar feeling drew attention to the atrocities committed by the Serbs in Bosnia in the 1990s, from the death camps such as Omarska early in the war to the massacre in Srebrenica, where most of the male inhabitants who had not been able to flee—more than eight thousand men and boys—were rounded up, gunned down, and pushed into mass graves once the town was abandoned by the Dutch battalion of the United Nations Protection Force and surrendered to General Ratko Mladić: these sorts of things are not supposed to happen here, in Europe,
any more.

3
. Capa’s already much admired picture, taken (according to the photographer) on September 5, 1936, was originally published in
Vu
on September 23, 1936, above a second photograph, taken from the same angle and in the same light, of another Republican soldier collapsing, his rifle leaving his right hand, on the same spot on the hillside; that photograph was never reprinted. The first picture also appeared soon after in a newspaper,
Paris-Soir.

Chapter 3

1
. The deflating realism of the photographs of slain soldiers lying about the battlefield is dramatized in
The Red Badge of Courage,
in which everything is seen through the bewildered, terrified consciousness of someone who could well have been one of those soldiers. Stephen Crane’s piercingly visual, mono-voiced antiwar novel—which appeared in 1895, thirty years after the war ended (Crane was born in 1871)—is a long, simplifying emotional distance from Walt Whitman’s contemporary, multiform treatment of war’s “red business.” In
Drum-Taps,
the poem cycle Whitman published in 1865 (and later folded into
Leaves of Grass
), many voices are summoned to speak. Though far from enthusiastic about this war, which he identified with fratricide, and for all his sorrow over the suffering on both sides, Whitman could not help but hear war’s epic and heroic music. His ear kept him martial, albeit in his own generous, complex, amatory way.

Chapter 4

1
. Photographing political prisoners and alleged counter-revolutionaries just before their execution was also standard practice in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, as recent research into the NKVD files in the Baltic and Ukrainian archives, as well as the central Lubyanka archives, has disclosed.

2
. Thus, thirteen years before the destruction of Guernica, Arthur Harris, later the chief of Bombing Command in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, then a young RAF squadron leader in Iraq, described the air campaign to crush the rebellious natives in this newly acquired British colony, complete with photographic proof of the success of the mission. “The Arab and the Kurd,” he wrote in 1924, “now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village (vide attached photos of Kushan-Al-Ajaza) can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.”

Chapter 5

1
. The photographs of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau taken in April and May 1945 by anonymous witnesses and military photographers seem more valid than the “better” professional images taken by two celebrated professionals, Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller. But the criticism of the professional look in war photography is not a recent view. Walker Evans, for example, detested the work of Bourke-White. But then Evans, who photographed poor American peasants for a book with the heavily ironic tide
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
would never take a picture of anybody famous.

Chapter 6

1
. Tellingly, that connoisseur of death and high priest of the delights of apathy, Andy Warhol, was drawn to news reports of a variety of violent deaths (car and plane crashes, suicides, executions). But his silk-screened transcriptions excluded death in war. A news photo of an electric chair and a tabloid’s screaming front page, “129 Die in Jet,” yes. “Hanoi Bombed,” no. The only photograph Warhol silk-screened that refers to the violence of war is one that had become iconic; that is, a cliché: the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, repeated as on a sheet of postage stamps (like the faces of Marilyn, Jackie, Mao) to illustrate its opaqueness, its fascination, its banality.

Chapter 9

1
. The evolution of the museum itself has gone far toward expanding this ambience of distraction. Once a repository for conserving and displaying the fine arts of the past, the museum has become a vast educational institution-cum-emporium, one of whose functions is the exhibition of art. The primary function is entertainment and education in various mixes, and the marketing of experiences, tastes, and simulacra. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounts an exhibition of the clothes worn by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis during her White House years, and the Imperial War Museum in London, admired for its collections of military hardware and pictures, now offers two replicated environments to visitors: from the First World War,
The Trench Experience
(the Somme in 1916), a walk-through complete with taped sounds (exploding shells, cries) but odorless (no rotting corpses, no poison gas); and from the Second World War,
The Blitz Experience,
described as a presentation of conditions during the German bombing of London in 1940, including the simulation of an air raid as experienced in an underground shelter.

Acknowledgments

A part of the argument of this book, in its earliest form, was delivered as an Amnesty Lecture at Oxford University in February 2001 and subsequently published in a collection of Amnesty Lectures titled
Human Rights, Human Wrongs
(Oxford University Press, 2003); I thank Nick Owen of New College for the invitation to give the lecture and for his hospitality. A sliver of the argument appeared as the preface to
Don McCullin,
a compendium of photographs by McCullin published in 2002 by Jonathan Cape. I am grateful to Mark Holborn, who edits photography books at Cape in London, for encouragement; to my first reader, Paolo Dilonardo, as always; to Robert Walsh for his discernment, again; and, for theirs, to Minda Rae Amiran, Peter Perrone, Benedict Yeoman, and Oliver Schwaner-Albright.

I was stimulated and moved by an article by Cornelia Brink, “Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps,” in
History & Memory
vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2000), and by Barbie Zelizer’s excellent
Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye
(University of Chicago Press, 1998), where I found the Lippmann quote. For information about the Royal Air Force’s punitive bombing war on Iraqi villages between 1920 and 1924, an article in
Aerospace Power Journal
(Winter 2000), by James S. Corum, who teaches at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, provides valuable information and analysis. Accounts of the restrictions placed on photojournalists during the Falklands War and the Gulf War are given in two important books:
Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War,
by John Taylor (Manchester University Press, 1998), and
War and Photography,
by Caroline Brothers (Routledge, 1997). Brothers sums up the case against the authenticity of the Capa photograph on pp. 178–84 of her book. For an opposing view: Richard Whelan’s article “Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier,” in
Aperture
no. 166 (Spring 2002), adduces a set of morally ambiguous circumstances at the front in the course of which, he argues, Capa did inadvertently photograph a Republican soldier being killed.