Making faces at the world
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One of the books that most shaped me when I was figuring out how and why I studied history was The Face of Battle, by John Keegan. I read it in grad school at Clemson and ended up writing my own master’s thesis as a similar series of experience-focused case studies. This week I revisited it via the audiobook, which I listened to on my commute. It was great to go back to it after fifteen years of further study and growth, to see familiar passages afresh and to rediscover many, many details I had simply forgotten.
Like this, from Keegan’s chapter on Waterloo:
What else are we to make of the experience of the 40th Regiment? They had arrived at Waterloo dead tired after a march of fifty-one miles in forty-eight hours; three weeks before that they had disembarked from America, having been six weeks at sea. During the day of Waterloo, they lost nearly two hundred soldiers dead and wounded out of seven hundred, and fourteen out of thirty-nine officers. ‘The men in their tired state,’ Sergeant Lawrence wrote, began to despair during the afternoon, ‘but the officer cheered them on continuously.’ When the French cavalry encircled them ‘with fierce gesticulation and angry scowls, in which a display of incisors became very apparent’ the officers would call out, “Now men, make faces!’
“Make faces!” is precisely the kind of real-world absurdity in the face of death that can’t be invented. Not without effort, anyway. In all of my war fiction I’ve tried to include surprising or absurd notes—but only because I’ve read of so many like this.
Oddly—but in the free-association spirit of this blog—that moment from Waterloo brought to mind a favorite passage from CS Lewis. In a letter to his friend and fellow Inkling Owen Barfield, Lewis contrasted a certain materialist vision of the world with what living in it is actually like:
“Say what you like . . . the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.”
Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal’s life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity (as if all animals were Germans), but when you study any animal you know, what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.
Indeed, and even in the dark and grim moments. Perhaps especially then.
