`The characteristic of men at war is not dying, it is killing," Joanna Bourke provocatively begins her revisionist study of war this century. She contends that far from the conventional picture of suffering and mateship, men find war intensely pleasurable; and the most pleasurable part of all is that which is generally excluded from personal reminiscences. Soldiers, she maintains, enjoy killing. "This book aims to put killing back into military history."
Does it? Not really. The unanswerable reality, recorded not merely in every account of war this century, but also inescapably in her own account, is that modern war is industrialised and depersonalised murder. Few soldiers in any modern conflict ever get close to the enemy; and fewer still kill him personally. Death is the ever-present in the 20th century battlefield; personal killing an occasional and often unexpected visitor.
Let us take one statistic, which I could not find in Bourke. The first World War is, within the anglophone imagination anyway, the last great bayonet-charge war. If attacking soldiers were lucky enough to get through the enemy defences into his trenches, then the bayoneting - death at its most personal - began.
Yet only 0.03 per cent of injuries - three in 10,000 - in the Great War were inflicted by bayonet. Assuming - and one can't - that the duties of bayoneting were equally shared and nobody got to perform more than one bayoneting, and considering moreover, that only one in three of all soldiers was a casualty, we are down to this mathematical truth: at the very, very most, one man in 10,000 in the Great War ever bayoneted anyone.
The bayonet statistic is merely a symbol of the rarity of personal killing in war. Only one of the many veterans of two world wars whom I have interviewed admitted killing anyone. Most laughed at the idea, for few ever saw a live German. Their experiences of war were of confusion and terror, boredom and bullshit. Yet Bourke is unquestionably right when she in part attributes the rarity of firsthand accounts of killing to a certain narrative reticence in such matters. (She depends on anglophone accounts: Serb, Russian or all those prudently unwritten German stories might present a different picture.) Her primary war-is-bliss argument depends largely on the wholly unrepresentative American experience in Vietnam.
But even that highly selective narrative is in itself dominated by a few highly dramatised personal or even fictive stories of killing. As she herself points out, of the 2.8 million US troops who served in Vietnam, only 300,000 were in combat units; and the vast majority of those never killed anyone, not least because guerrilla war presents such few targets to the conventional soldier.
In other words, the killing experience was a relative rarity even for Americans in Vietnam. Those who did kill probably killed a lot, and unrepentently, often collecting ears and genitalia as trophies, even from murdered civilians. But again, they were the exceptions. Bourke herself, by admitting that only 10 per cent of US soldiers in Vietnam were in combat units - and even most of those would never get the opportunity to kill anyone - necessarily restricts killing to a minority experience.
Furthermore, Vietnam was a most unusual war, with a vast foreign army operating within a dispersed and unprotected civilian community, giving soldiers who wished to kill far greater opportunities for homicidal gratification than existed in the two world wars. Killing Germans or Japanese in their foxholes was altogether more difficult - often next to impossible without calling in anonymous artillery or ground attack aircraft. There might indeed have been the inclination to kill; but the common opportunity simply wasn't there.
Not merely does Bourke believe in the primacy of the male appetite for killing, but she clearly thinks that it is also a female trait which has been repressed by intense socialisation. She adds that this century women have wanted to fight. "When they were refused arms, they fought back, demanding weapons training."
This is equality-feminism at its rawest; and it is simply not true. Most women do not want to kill, not least because once in the killing business, they enter the altogether more probable dying business too. The gallant woman-warrior she idealises is no more than the obverse of the dying teenage girl with her entrails hanging out, howling for her mother in the middle of no-person's land, before some man finishes her off with a neat head-shot.
The truth remains: the experience of battle this century is overwhelmingly about depersonalised death. The words published in a Royal Dublin Fusiliers magazine at the end of the first World War contain an ineffable, unbellicose and unromantic reality about most soldiers' wars this century: "I never kissed a French girl, and I never killed a Hun."
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist