Experience Needed

“Experience” is a fuzzy but essential concept that is as difficult to pin down as it is to avoid. It is in this light that Clifford Geertz once referred to it as an “asses’ bridge that all must cross.”Footnote ⁴ Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Michael Oakeshott, I take experience to encompass the broad domain of how humans encounter the world and assign meaning to it.Footnote ⁵ As such, it refers to both the trials and tribulations that people live through and the particular forms of knowledge that they thus acquire.Footnote ⁶ In the context of the argument that follows, then, I use the term experience to denote the mode of insight that is derived from first-hand participation in war. My concern in this section is to examine how experience, thus defined, has been engaged by just war theorists. This task requires careful treatment, catering to different approaches to just war theory.

Our first port of call is the orthodox account of just war as it is set out in Michael Walzer’s landmark text, Just and Unjust Wars. Footnote ⁷ A remarkable work for many reasons, the aspect of this work that I want to highlight here is the commitment it displays to placing the experience of war at the heart of the ethics of war. Walzer prefaces the text with the statement that ethics of war scholarship should be rooted in and responsive to the on-the-ground lived realities of combat. Just war theory must, he argues, take as its starting point how “ordinary people” encounter warfare.Footnote ⁸ In line with this, Walzer structures his analysis around a series of “historical illustrations” designed to capture for closer inspection the “judgements” that soldiers and civilians caught in the crossfire make in the heat of combat. Walzer is forthright that this way of approaching just war theory is designed to, among other things, ensure that it remains aligned with the real-world experience of warfare, especially as it bears on the men and women who are tasked to do the fighting. His interest, he tells us, lies, not in obtuse legal and philosophical debates about war, but in how regular people who have had war thrust upon them think about it. In his own words:

This ambition informs the sources Walzer employs, which include not only academic texts on the ethics of war but also testimonial accounts by former soldiers such as Frank Richards, Emilio Lussu, and George Orwell that discuss “the experience of fighting.”Footnote ¹⁰ These non-traditional texts are essential to his purpose, Walzer writes, not only because they grant him (and us) insight into “the experience of war,” but also because they help him to develop his theory so that it speaks to the men and women who have endured combat in their lives.Footnote ¹¹

Walzer is very clear, however, that the testimonial accounts of war he engages do not, as it were, speak for themselves. Rather, they require some form of distillation or interpretation. This is where the theorist enters the picture. It is the task of the philosopher, as an ethics of war scholar, Walzer writes, to stand back from the experience of war as narrated by its participants so that he or she might discern the rules that structure it and hence impose some normative order upon it. There is an echo here, arguably, of Bishop Butler’s notion of the “cool hour,” the idea that the task of theorizing is best conducted at some remove from the hurly-burly of the practice it ostensibly addresses.Footnote ¹² Critical distance (albeit “measured in inches not yards”) is of paramount important in this respect.Footnote ¹³ The just war theorist, Walzer avers, “is like Wordsworth’s poet who reflects in tranquility upon past experience (or other peoples’ experience), thinking about political and moral choices already made.”Footnote ¹⁴ Consequently, while Walzer places the recollections of soldiers such as Richards, Lussu, and Orwell at the center of his work, he does not interrogate how these men sought to make sense of their own experiences, preferring instead to interpose his own framework of meaning upon them.Footnote ¹⁵ In effect, he repurposes their experiences as a starting-point for his own theoretical reflections.

While the experience of war lays at the heart of Walzer’s account of the ethics of war, it is largely absent from the further scholarship his work inspired. While every just war theorist has presumably read Just and Unjust Wars, and many have expressed their admiration for the way Walzer weaves the lived experience of combat into his analysis, few have followed him down this particular track.Footnote ¹⁶ Although virtually every aspect of his theorizing has been raked over by critics and followers alike, Walzer’s commitment to centering the experience of war in ethical thinking about war has been curiously neglected.

The second approach we must consider, traditionalism, supposes that thinking ethically about war necessarily involves thinking historically about ethics. It centers the lessons of historical experience even as it neglects the lived experience of warfare. There are many exponents of this approach—among them, Christian Braun, Daniel Brunstetter, Rory Cox, Pablo Kalmanovitz, Gregory Reichberg, and Valerie Morkevicius—but most scholars would nominate James Turner Johnson as its principal architect.Footnote ¹⁷ As he frames it, just war theorizing is best approached as an engagement with the deeper historical tradition of thought from which this theorizing derives and in which it partakes. This tradition, the roots of which can be traced to classical antiquity, reflects “a fund of practical wisdom, based not on abstract speculation or theorization, but in reflection on actual problems encountered in war as these have presented themselves in different historical circumstances.”Footnote ¹⁸ Engaging with tradition, then, entails familiarizing oneself with its origins and its variegated evolution, entering into a continuing dialogue with the writings of the thinkers who shaped it, extrapolating action-guiding principles from it, and adapting its insights to address contemporary challenges. Work that adheres to this template has been known to exasperate the uninitiated, who naturally want to know what the dusty texts of dead white western males, such as Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius, have to do with the task of thinking through the ethical challenges posed by contemporary warfare. However, for Johnson and those who follow him, thinking with and through this tradition is vital.Footnote ¹⁹ An awareness of past just war theorizing, they posit, is a prerequisite to just war theorizing in the present. What I want to draw attention to here, however, is a particular omission from this literature. Scholars associated with the historical approach to just war theory have devoted scant attention to the lived experience of war, emphasizing instead the one-step-removed work of medieval canonists, Dominican theologians, and early modern lawyers over the lived realities of men and women on the frontlines.Footnote ²⁰

This brings us to our third and final approach. Mainstream contemporary just war theory is predominated by the revisionist approach, which treats experience as irrelevant to (and a distraction from) the task of thinking ethically about war.Footnote ²¹ Revisionism, as developed by scholars such as Jeff McMahan, Cécile Fabre, Seth Lazar, and Helen Frowe, is typically framed in contradistinction to Walzer’s orthodox just war theory. It rejects many of the axiomatic commitments of orthodox just war theory, including, for example, the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants. Revisionists are committed to the view that a theory of just war can be constructed from first principles in a Kantian or Rawlsian style.Footnote ²² Detachment, abstraction, universalism, the presumption of sub specie aeternitas , and the liberal use of (occasionally ludicrous) thought experiments are the main techniques involved, and analytical rigor and argumentative precision the watchwords. Underpinning the revisionist approach is a determination to “filter out” the tendentiousness of experience.Footnote ²³ It supposes that just war theorists should extricate themselves from the parochialism of their beliefs, values, and customs so that they might rise above the particularity of their circumstances and thereby acquire a more general and indeed objective understanding of the rights and wrongs of war.Footnote ²⁴ Thus configured, revisionism reflects (and indeed is driven by) a desire to turn away from the messiness of the experience of war and toward more abstract and universal modes of knowledge. The rise of revisionism to dominance in the field is indicative of the trend toward detachment and abstraction in just war theory (and analytical political theory and moral philosophy) more generally.

The picture that thus emerges of the role played by the experience of war in contemporary just war theory is an intriguing one. While the neglect of experience may be consistent with the prevailing mode of analytical moral philosophy, it runs against the grain of recent trends in cognate domains of inquiry. Around roughly the same time that revisionist just war theorists turned their backs on the lived reality of warfare, the broader fields of War Studies and International Relations (IR) have entertained what some scholars have called “an experiential turn.” Military historians such as John Keegan, Eric Leed, John Ellis, and John Lynn, not to mention Critical Security Studies scholars such as Christine Sylvester, Swati Parashar, Thomas Gregory, and Tarak Barkawi, have established the human dimension of armed conflict as a central concern within their fields of inquiry. The point to take from this is that, where experience is concerned, just war theory, so far as it is under the sway of revisionism, appears to be out of step with developments in IR and War Studies.Footnote ²⁵

The revisionist turn away from experience has elicited a critical response from a wide range of scholars who share the concern that its disconnection from the lived realities of war will be detrimental to just war theory in the long run. Walzer, for example, writes that much of what passes for contemporary just war theory can be described as more about theory than war. Footnote ²⁶ By this he means that it has become an increasingly abstruse enterprise. While acknowledging the intellectual value of the refined form of scholarly labor that contemporary just war theorizing involves, he cautions that it forsakes the very people “for whom war is a primary subject and a personal experience.”Footnote ²⁷ Chris Brown also worries that contemporary just war theorizing has lost “contact with the realities of war,” while A. J. Coates judges that the field is in danger of becoming “too theoretical or abstract.”Footnote ²⁸ This will result, Brown and Coates agree, in the blunting of its practical edge. Likewise, Kimberly Hutchings warns that “the normative evaluation of war cannot be adequate if it lacks any understanding of the flesh-and-blood experience of war.”Footnote ²⁹ Informing these points of view is the shared apprehension that the more remote just war theory grows from the lived experience of war, the less practical salience it will have.Footnote ³⁰ This will be deleterious to its role as an action-guiding theory.

The observation arising from this brief survey is that, to the degree that just war theory engages the lived experience of war at all, it engages with it in a very distilled form. Experience is treated either as something to be filtered through the theorist’s interpretative lens (Walzer, for one), filed under the umbrella category of tradition (as in Johnson’s work), or detached from entirely (following McMahan and colleagues). In all of these cases, experience is reduced to a given, to something that has been lived through and is now available for retrospective analysis. What these approaches do not account for is the fact that experience is also something that must be lived with, and, as such, is necessarily incomplete, open-ended, and polyphemous. When we incorporate this more expansive account of experience, it alerts us to the messiness of the ethical dimension of warfare. What counts as the right thing to do in combat may be viewed one way by the soldier in the heat of the moment, and in a wholly different light after the fact or from afar. Indeed, the same soldier might simultaneously hold their actions to be both right and wrong, depending on the perspective from which they view them. Adopting a detached “God’s eye view” on their own decisions and actions will likely yield a very different set of moral judgements than an evaluation conducted from a more “subjective” position.Footnote ³¹ Both perspectives, while mutually contradictory, can nevertheless be perfectly reasonable on their own register. Thus, a former soldier can look back on the things he or she did in their career and creditably believe them to be both wholly right and wholly wrong—at the same time.Footnote ³²

What is at stake here is illustrated by the exchange of views that Walzer and Paul Fussell traded in The New Republic in late 1981.Footnote ³³ The exchange was in response to the publication of Fussell’s controversial essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” in which he expressed the relief he had felt at the time of the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, as it had spared him and his division of the obligation to risk their lives in the invasion of Japan that would otherwise have followed.Footnote ³⁴ Walzer expressed the view that Fussell’s moral compass must be skewed: the only right response to the dropping of nuclear bombs on cities, Walzer avers, was condemnation. Where soldiers like the young Fussell had signed up for the fight, Japanese civilians had not, and therefore should never be the targets of annihilation. Fussell, however, repudiates Walzer’s critique. Walzer, he writes, is seduced by his preference for moral tidiness into judging that actions must be either right or wrong, just or unjust, occasions for regret or celebration, but never both at the same time. Fussell, by contrast, grants himself permission to be both “horrified about the bombing of Hiroshima and forever happy because the event saved my life.”Footnote ³⁵

Fussell’s position, I want to contend, is one we must heed. While just war theorists may prefer to avoid moral confusion and perplexity by either abstracting away from experience or parlaying into a more legible, manageable form, soldiers in the field do not have this luxury. They are compelled by circumstances to not only find a way to live with but also to make good decisions in the context of the kind of ambiguity that Fussell himself endured in the August of 1945. Just war theory that does not take this challenge seriously has no claim, we might surmise, to itself be taken seriously by soldiers.

Seeking Experience

How can we build experience into just war theorizing? This section addresses this question. It proposes that we take Walzer’s commitment to centering testimonial accounts of war as our starting point. However, where Walzer allocates the task of making sense of what these testimonial accounts tell us about the ethics of war to the theorist, the argument developed in this section is that we should instead consider how the authors of these testimonial accounts assign meaning to their own experiences. This subtle shift in emphasis, inspired by the work of Martha Nussbaum, will, it is hoped, allow us to move beyond “simple representative anecdotes” cherry-picked from soldier’s testimonial accounts of combat, toward a more sustained engagement with the testimonial accounts themselves.Footnote ³⁶ My purpose in the discussion that follows is to unpack this proposal by working through three questions. First, why should we prioritize the experience of soldiers at the expense of other types of actors, such as, for instance, civilians caught up in the crossfire? Second, why should we privilege testimonial accounts of combat as our preferred form of text? And third, how should we approach these texts analytically?

Opening with our first question, why should we prioritize the experience of soldiers? There is a case, which has been made quite forcefully by, among others, Lynne Hanley, Swati Parashar, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, that we should cease placing soldiers at the center of our understanding of warfare. War, they argue, is “not something experienced only by men with guns on the battlefield.”Footnote ³⁷ War affects and indeed involves a wide swathe of civilian life in a range of ways, often quite acutely. Our efforts to represent the experience of war should, we are advised, reflect this fact. To do otherwise risks perpetuating a very traditional masculinist and combat-centric account of war that “transforms the soldier into the face and body of war, when in truth he is only its appendage.”Footnote ³⁸ This line of reasoning has been picked up by other contributors to this special section—see, for example, the article by Jessica Wolfendale.Footnote ³⁹ While admitting the power of this position, I nevertheless want to argue that there are compelling reasons for focusing on the experience of soldiers. Foremost among them, while actual combat is far less central to the practice of warfare than most people might assume, it is still the domain in which the moral questions arising from armed conflict present themselves most sharply—and the aspect of warfare to which just war theory ostensibly speaks. It is in combat that people are confronted with the stark choice to kill or be killed.Footnote ⁴⁰ Soldiers, by which I mean active members of an armed belligerent group, are central to this dynamic. They are its prime movers. As such, they occupy an interesting positionality. Soldiers both “do war and have it done to them”; they are simultaneously the “victims” and “vectors” of armed conflict; the “executioners” and the executed.Footnote ⁴¹ They are also—and this is perhaps the crucial point—the agents commissioned to enact just war theory, the people expected to live, die, and kill by the principles it enshrines. Moreover, they perform this role, not as freelancing individuals, but as public functionaries acting on behalf of their communities. Finally, soldiers know war inside-out. To quote Sara Ruddick: “Soldiers know war, they have been there. They return from the land of the dying, speak from privileged knowledge of war’s horrors and mysterious appeals, bearing witness to what most of us have not seen.”Footnote ⁴²

This brings us to our second question: Why should we center testimonial accounts of combat as our preferred form of text? Testimonial accounts of combat can take many forms, including letters, diaries, poems, blog posts, and novels. My focus here will be upon war memoirs. War memoirs present a soldier’s personal recollections of combat as an authentic record of events.Footnote ⁴³ They offer an eye-witness account that trades on the guarantee: You can believe it because I was there and I saw it happen. Footnote ⁴⁴ The problem, of course, is that the version of events that they present is often partial and skewed. Authorial ignorance, exaggeration, obfuscation, and prejudice are a standard feature of the genre; false testimony and faulty recall are commonplace.Footnote ⁴⁵ War memoirs do not present a raw, unvarnished account of the events they ostensibly report, but, rather, offer a highly bounded, mediated, and often stylized account of the lived realities of warfare.Footnote ⁴⁶ These concerns should not, however, be over-determined. The intention here is not, after all, to draw on war memoirs as reliable historical sources, but rather to engage them for the insight they offer into how former soldiers attempt to relate (that is, account for, explain, and justify) their experience of combat to a general audience.Footnote ⁴⁷ The focus, accordingly, is upon the stories soldiers tell about their wars, not the wars they actually fought. Rationalizations, euphemisms, embellishments, cliches, factual discrepancies, and silences are not so much a problem to be circumvented as grist to the mill.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Frances Houghton has put it, the “inconsistencies of recall and evident subjectivities of veteran war stories are precisely what make them a fascinating and rich source of evidence about the experience of war as it is lived.”Footnote ⁴⁹ They operate as “disclosures,” which reveal how both the former soldier and his or her wider society seeks to impose meaning upon the experience of armed conflict.Footnote ⁵⁰

With all of this in mind, I want to suggest that war memoirs offer a complex and uniquely valuable form of insight into the experience of war. Although they are narrated from the point of view of the soldier-turned-author, this can take different forms. Combat can be recounted from the perspective of the soldier as he or she experienced it in the moment, for instance, or from an after-the-fact point of view. The former involves an active and engaged present-tense style of reportage, which contrives to recount the soldier’s encounter with war as he or she experienced it in real time, without recourse to any further knowledge of the war that the narrator might later have accrued. The latter relates the experience of war in a more retrospective light, from an ostensibly older and wiser perspective, and often in an explicitly ruminative tone. This difference in perspective maps onto what literary scholars sometimes call “mimesis and diegesis”—or, more simply, scene and summary.Footnote ⁵¹ In practice, most war memoirs bounce back and forth between these narrative positions, alternating from one to the other. Via this movement back and forth in time, closer to and further from the action itself, the war memoir mines the looping interplay between the soldier’s experience of war and his or her later reflections upon their earlier experiences.Footnote ⁵² They combine, as it were, what Clifford Geertz would call “experience-near” and “experience-far” perspectives within the same narrative frame.Footnote ⁵³ The richest memoirs exploit this “double vantage point” to explore the predicament soldiers find themselves in as they confront the duality of being, on the one hand, the agent whose experiences are being narrated, and, on the other, the agent performing that narration.Footnote ⁵⁴ The point to take from this is that war memoirs are a more sophisticated form of text than we might have hitherto credited: they “toggle” between experience and reflection in a manner that permits each to illuminate but also problematize the other.Footnote ⁵⁵

Our third question bears on how we should approach these texts. I argue that just war theorists might enlist war memoirs for their analysis of the ethics of war in much the same way that Martha Nussbaum argues moral philosophers should engage the literary works of writers such as Henry James and Charles Dickens. Nussbaum initially developed her position via an argument bearing on the merits of Greek tragedy as a resource for philosophers interested in the question of what it means to live a good life. She contends that tragic plays have the capacity to augment how philosophers think about human flourishing by inducing them to account for, rather than shy away from, what Nussbaum calls “the complexity and indeterminacy of the lived practical situation.”Footnote ⁵⁶ She expresses no doubt, moreover, that they perform this function on account of, rather than despite, their aesthetic form.Footnote ⁵⁷ Precisely because of how they are staged and structured, tragedies invite us to reflect on the limitations of the human condition and the perverse outcomes that trying to do the right thing in our everyday lives can sometimes produce. We should not, however, carry this argument too far. Nussbaum cautions that Greek tragedy could never be an adequate substitute for philosophical analysis. Rather, she regards it as a supplement to more standard philosophical theorizing; a vehicle or venue for both working through the precepts that philosophy produces and calibrating them to the messy realm of practice.Footnote ⁵⁸ For instance, if, as she suggests, we want to understand the concrete implications of the Aristotelian view of ethics for how we should approach our everyday affairs, we will find this not in the flat and pallid prose of philosophical texts but in dramatic works that seek not only to bring these questions to life but to involve us in them and thus illuminate them for us.Footnote ⁵⁹ Here we come to the nub of the matter. Nussbaum extends this argument to also encompass literary works. She claims that, similar to classical Greek tragedy, novels such as those by James and Dickens can be very helpful in terms of inviting their readers to confront and work through precisely the kind of dilemmas that philosophers write about in glib, theoretical terms.Footnote ⁶⁰ Key to this is the “play back and forth between the general and the concrete” that is built into the fabric of works.Footnote ⁶¹ Literary works, she concludes, should interest philosophers because they model “a style of ethical reasoning that is context-specific without being relativistic, in which we get potentially universalizable concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through the imagination.”Footnote ⁶²

While I am submitting that just war theorists might enlist war memoirs for their analysis of the ethics of war in much the same way that Nussbaum argues moral philosophers should draw on novels, I am not blind to the significant differences between the war memoirs I propose to discuss and the kind of novels that concern Nussbaum. Principally, the former is non-fiction while the latter is fiction.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, and perhaps even more obviously, the great novels treated by Nussbaum have an aesthetic and cultural cache that is generally lacking in military memoirs. These distinctions should, however, be no bar to doing the kind of work for which I am advocating. Just as a Henry James novel can lead its readers to both envisage themselves leading a different way of life, remote from their own, and to connect in a holistic way with the plight of the characters they encounter there, so too can war memoirs transport us imaginatively to the violent exigencies of life in a forward operating base. We do not have to recognize them as timeless works of literature to admit that they have the power to put us inside this world, so that we might experience the moral challenges it presents from the inside-out—and all of this without us ever having to leave home. Where there is a significant difference, however, is with respect to the specific work war memoirs might be expected to do for just war theorists. Nussbaum selects the works of James and Dickens because she believes that they demonstrate the power of her preferred ethical framework.Footnote ⁶⁴ Her engagement with these carefully chosen novels is designed to showcase the acuity of the Aristotelian approach to ethical theorizing. This is an essentially affirmative enterprise, then, not a critical one. By contrast, the just war theorist who engages war memoirs will find them to be a messier and arguably less amenable form of literary product with which to work. War memoirs come in many forms and have served a wide range of political agendas; some lament the wretchedness of the battlefield, while others celebrate it as a crucible that inspires men to perform noble deeds.Footnote ⁶⁵ Crucially, they are as likely to ironize, subvert, or undercut our prevailing ethical frameworks as they are to endorse them. By virtue of this, any project taken on by the just war theorist that involves drawing on war memoirs will have a subtly but significantly different character—less affirmatory, more interrogatory—than the one developed by Nussbaum.

Nussbaum’s approach nevertheless supplies three helpful cues regarding the techniques just war theorists should employ when reading war memoirs. The first is that one should not read a text with a view toward isolating and analyzing certain phrases or scenes taken out of context. Nussbaum counsels against zeroing in on select passages or, in this case, instances where the terminology of just war theory is invoked. Against this, she advises the reader to focus on the ethos of a text. This can be achieved by asking “What sense of life is expressed in this work as a whole?”Footnote ⁶⁶ This in turn enjoins paying attention to the way the work in question brings together the general and the particular, the issues it chooses to report upon and those it opts to exclude or gloss over, the style of writing it showcases, its narrative tempo and sequencing, the different forms of focalization it employs, and the interrelationship of its parts.Footnote ⁶⁷ This is no easy task, to be sure, but just war theorists can look for inspiration to how literary critics approach it.

This brings us to Nussbaum’s second cue, which bears on how to catalogue and evaluate the ethical claims developed in a literary text, or, as in this case, a war memoir. Nussbaum commends the method of “coduction,” formalized by Wayne Booth.Footnote ⁶⁸ The term “coduction” is a neologism which fuses co (the Latin term for “together”) with ducere (meaning “to draw out, to bring out”).Footnote ⁶⁹ Booth, and subsequently Nussbaum, use it to denote the comparative, intertextual, iterative, dialogical, and indeed communal nature of interpreting and evaluating texts on an ethical register.Footnote ⁷⁰ A “coductive” reading of a text is, it follows, never intended to be final nor definitive; rather it is offered as a platform for, and invitation to, other coductive readings, which we can then place in conversation with one another. Underpinning this way of proceeding is a pedagogical commitment to treating texts as friends with whom we can think and from whom we can learn about the world without necessarily agreeing with everything they say.Footnote ⁷¹

The third cue bears on the selection of texts. There should be no assumption that a given memoir will offer a window onto a generalizable or representative account of the experience of war. Rather, insofar as we engage them, it can only be to glean a sense of the particularized and concrete individual experience that they narrate. War memoirs, we must keep in mind, will not grant us access to some putative universal experience of war, but they can help us understand, one story at a time, how different soldiers have both encountered and made sense of their own war-time service.

Returning, then, to where we started, we appear to have a preliminary sketch of what an experientially grounded approach to just war theorizing might look like. Building on the foundations laid by Walzer, I have argued that the next step is for just war theorists to consider how soldiers make meaning of their own experience in the firing line. The proposal developed in this section is that this can be achieved by reading war memoirs in a manner similar to how Nussbaum engages the literary works of writers such as Henry James and Charles Dickens. The next section will put it into practice by “thinking with,” that is, developing a coductive reading of, a sample war memoir. Frank Richards’s war memoir Old Soldiers Never Die is cited by Walzer as “one of the few accounts [of World War I] by a man from the ranks.”Footnote ⁷² It is also one of the many testimonial accounts of war from which Walzer draws historical anecdotes without ever engaging it on its own terms. Walzer extracts from Richards’s text a vignette concerning the bombing of a cellar where non-combatants had been sheltering and uses it as a platform for reformulating the doctrine of double effect.Footnote ⁷³ Walzer’s argumentation on this matter is characteristically sensible and incisive. It does, however, have the effect of occluding Richards’s reflections on his own experience, which he develops over the course of Old Soldiers Never Die. This makes it a suitable foil for the discussion that follows.

Experiencing the Ethics of War

Born in 1883, Frank Richards was raised in the coal-mining region of Monmouthshire, Wales. He joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1901, served in India and Burma as well as the First World War as a rifleman and signaler, and was decorated for valor, but never rose above the rank of private. He was encouraged to write by Robert Graves, who, as the officer responsible for censoring Richards’s letters home, had been struck by his ability to convey the horrors of the frontline in stout but unpolished prose.Footnote ⁷⁴ His postwar years were characterized by ill health and bitterness regarding the lack of medical support he received from the state for ailments he accrued during his service. He published Old Soldiers Never Die in 1933, fifteen years after the Armistice, and died in 1961.Footnote ⁷⁵

Old Soldiers Never Die details Richards’s participation in World War I, which spanned 1914–1919. Right from the start, it strikes a different note to other, comparable texts—such as, for example, those by Orwell and Lussu, which Walzer also cites. Richards does not, for instance, spend any time detailing his childhood, upbringing, or even his initial decision to join the military. Instead, he cuts straight to the moment on August 4, 1914, when he received the news that he was to be mobilized and deployed to France.Footnote ⁷⁶ The reader is thus launched straight into the guts of the narrative. The nature of the narrative is also distinctive. Old Soldiers Never Die is not a bildungsroman. It does not present a tale of personal growth, and it pays no attention to the rites of passage Richards may have endured on his course to becoming a soldier and a man. Nor is it in any way inflected by the “innocence lost” trope often identified as the leitmotif of World War I writing.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rather, what we have right from the start is the tale of a self-fashioned “old soldier,” who is already accustomed to the hardships of military life. The text reflects this. It imparts the story of Richards’s war in a no-nonsense style that is structured around the major actions involving his unit. Chapters record their maneuvers and chart the battles in which they partook. In this respect, the text follows the format of a standard campaign history of the First World War. The writing style follows suit. Richards refrains from the use of literary devices, high diction, and interior focalization in favor of straightforward reportage on the events that he witnessed firsthand. His focus is on the unit’s war, not his own subjectivity. He writes in terms of “we” rather than “I,” and he does not overtly indulge in any kind of reflective analysis. This results in a perfunctory exposition of events that might have otherwise been expected to elicit a more pensive treatment. Consider, for example, how Richards records a skirmish in which he and his comrades apparently killed several enemy soldiers. “We spotted some of the enemy making their way up the rising ground and opened out with rapid fire which we kept up until we could see no-one to fire at,” he writes. “We had some excellent shooting practice for about five minutes and saw a lot of men fall.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Instead of taking this as an opportunity to ponder the rights and wrongs of taking another man’s life, Richards simply (and characteristically) moves on to discuss the victuals he enjoyed that evening.Footnote ⁷⁹

Reflection enters the picture in the form of freighted asides. Richards expresses anger at the suffering that the German army had visited upon the French population; advocates for the summary execution of men who display cowardice in the line; offers muddled ruminations on the propriety of the use of expanding bullets; laments poorly planned attacks that lead to the “slaughter” of good men; and acerbically confirms that, while he is keen to serve his country, he would prefer to do so from the comfort of his own home.Footnote ⁸⁰ All the while, the picture Richards is conveying of life at the front is becoming ever gloomier. References to battlefield gothic (such as mangled corpses and destroyed landscapes) grow both more frequent and more graphic over the course of the narrative, as do allusions to flagrant violations of the laws of war.Footnote ⁸¹ References to Richards’s private thoughts are also dotted across the text. “We got into a small village,” Richards remarks in one case, before adding “I had long since lost interest in the names of places we came to.”Footnote ⁸² The shift from “we” to “I” is meaningful here, as is the lurch from factual commentary to retrospective editorializing. Later, Richards offers a dryly factual account of the losses his unit suffered from a single bombardment during the Battle of the Somme only to digress into charged political commentary: “I could only see heads and legs and mangled bodies. I have often wondered since then if all the leading statesmen and generals of the warring parties had been threatened to be put under that barrage on the day of the 20th July, 1916 … whether they would all have met together and signed a peace treaty before the week was up.”Footnote ⁸³ Offhand though they may seem, comments such as these tell us much, not only about Richards’s state of mind at the time of the events being narrated but also about how he had since come to understand that period of his life. They alert us to the fact that what Richards is presenting in Old Soldiers Never Die is not just an account of his experiences at the front but also his own subsequent reflections on these experiences.

Reinforcing this impression, and effectively holding the book together, is Richards’s use of anecdotes to capture archetypal incidents.Footnote ⁸⁴ Some chapters, such as the one treating Richards’s time at Bois Grenier, comprise little more than a series of anecdotes strung together with opening remarks that belie their loose emplotment—for instance, “One night …”; “We always …”; and “We had a sergeant ….”Footnote ⁸⁵ The anecdotes themselves generally take one of two forms, both equally interesting. The first set take the form of an extended digression that provides a detailed report of a particular action—for example, an act of bravery—only to immediately follow it with a postscript noting the (usually tragic) fate that later befell the characters involved. Richards’s account of a minor incident that took place in June 1916 is typical in this regard: “During the day one of the men of the 5th Scottish rifles on our right noticed a wounded man of ours lying out in front who was trying to crawl back to the trench. He jumped over the parapet and ran toward him and under heavy fire of rifle bullets safely brought him back to the trench. He was awarded the VC for this but was killed on the Arras Front in 1917.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This pattern is repeated across Richards’s tales.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is especially conspicuous in Richards’s reminiscences on the dog that his company adopted as a mascot. Richards devotes three pages to recounting the adventures that they enjoyed with the dog while in the line before abruptly disclosing: “I may as well tell his whole story now and get it over. […] In the autumn of 1917, when we were around the Ypres Sector, he was killed by a shell splinter … He had survived four or five months in a front-line trench but was killed miles behind one.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Tales such as these derive their sardonic quality, and indeed their force, from the juxtaposition of the immediacy of the experience itself and how that experience appears when viewed in retrospect. The use of prolepsis to cast the story forward (beyond what would have been apparent to the narrator at the time of the events in question) so that we, the reader, can see how things would subsequently transpire for the key characters, has the effect of jolting the reader to take a wider, more cynical perspective on stories that at first blush appear exciting and heroic.

The second set includes anecdotes that take the form of near misses Richards experienced while on the firing line.Footnote ⁸⁹ Viewed on a superficial level, these stories of close shaves tell us something about the role of luck and the constant risk of death on the battlefield. Examined closely, they reveal something more complex. Take, for example, Richards’s account of the time in February 1915 that he and a comrade, Bolton, were assigned to a work party tasked to fetch rations from the rear and bring them to the front.Footnote ⁹⁰ When the party came under heavy fire, Richards and Bolton sought cover in the nearest crater only to discover it was a latrine. There they lay until the danger passed. The rest of the party was less fortunate: they were killed at the scene. Stinking but alive, and still in possession of the rations, Richards and Bolton made their way to the line where they were greeted by the officer in charge. “We explained to him what had happened,” Richards comments, “but that anyway we had saved the bread.” This story can be read in two different ways. On one reading, it is a celebration of Richards’s unlikely survival. He could easily have been killed, but instead he has miraculously lived to tell the tale. Wrapped in the kind of narcissism that tempts us to believe that everyone is expendable but ourselves, this story evokes the preciousness of life while also revealing the all-encompassing nature of our own subjective experience. On the other reading, it exposes not the preciousness of life at the front but its cheapness. It records the death of several men as incidental to the safe passage of a few loaves of bread. Moreover, these are not just any men; they were Richards’s immediate comrades. So far as their lives might reasonably be traded in for a few sliced pans, Richards must know that so too could his. The same tension is evident in the story Richards tells of the death of a fellow signaler, Green, in the Givenchy trenches. Green, we are told, had refused to swap posts with Richards, only for a shell to land directly on his dugout just a few hours later. How easily it could have been me, writes Richards.Footnote ⁹¹

Viewed as a whole, Richards’s story lends weight to Anthony Swofford’s observation that “the men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return, the bad news about the way the war is fought and why, and by whom for whom.”Footnote ⁹² While Richards refrains from preaching the rights and the wrongs of the war he waged, the narrative arc that he traces leaves the reader in no doubt about the moral perplexities of armed conflict. Richards’s account of the part he played in the First World War charts the mounting difficulty of maintaining a grip on one’s own ethical reasoning over the course of a protracted campaign. The more brutalized he and his comrades were by the war, the more their sense of self as ethical actors frayed. Indicative of this is Richards’s recollection of an April 1917 morning on the Arras Front when he and some colleagues passed by a mound of between 300–400 corpses laid out for burial: “I told some of the newly-joined, who turned a bit queer at the sight, that if we were alive in a month’s time, they would take no more notice of a dead man than they would of a dead cow.”Footnote ⁹³ He later describes men stooping to commit murderous acts that they had resisted perpetrating earlier in the war.Footnote ⁹⁴ Again and again, he complains that the most honest soldiers were always the first to die, while the dodgers were rewarded with medals and parades.Footnote ⁹⁵ And in those rare instances where worthy soldiers were acknowledged for their deeds, they were often killed in action before they had a chance to enjoy whatever glory they had earned.Footnote ⁹⁶ The impression that Richards thus imparts is of a man who cares deeply about the line between right and wrong but who is worried that he no longer knows where it is located. This is of a piece with the portrait he paints of a moral vocabulary that is being turned on its head and emptied of value. By the end of the war, men are praying for the death, not of enemy soldiers, but of their own officers, and trampling their fallen comrades into the ground rather than burying them.Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet Richards never repudiates the ultimate rightness of the war or his role in it; instead, he continues to take their basic justness as a given throughout the text. His account of the war accommodates both these perspectives at the same time, even as they pull in opposite directions.

What we might take from Richards’s text, it follows, is a sense of how war memoirs can provide former soldiers with an opportunity, not just to narrate their own frontline experiences, but also to reflect on them. It makes it clear, too, that soldiers are on the hook to make decisions that are both responsive to the immediate context and likely to withstand retrospective consideration. Richards’s text accomplishes this by setting his up-close-and-personal account of combat in back-and-forth dialogue with the wider, more removed perspective that hindsight now affords him. This approach reveals substantive issues that ethics of war scholars have so far swerved around but really ought to confront. It highlights the fact that soldiers do not have the luxury of viewing war from only one perspective, whether that be experience-near or experience-far. Rather, they are obliged to engage it in the round, by approaching the ethical challenges it presents both in the moment but also with an eye on how they will be judged both from afar and in posterity. This is an ethically fraught positionality to occupy, rife with moral hazards. It requires soldiers to grapple with the ambiguity of their dual existence as, on the one hand, men with guns who make war, and, on the other, mere cannon fodder who have war made upon them. Yet, because contemporary just war theory has turned its back on the lived experience of war, it occludes rather than engages this fundamental aspect of what makes soldiering such an ethically demanding activity in the first place. If we as just war theorists are serious about producing action-guiding theory, we must take this issue seriously.