DYING IN VAIN
Joseph Sobran

April 2004

In Ernest Hemingway's World War I novel A Farewell to Arms, an Italian soldier says, “We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain.” This moves the American narrator-hero, Frederick Henry, who has deserted the Italian army, to a famous reflection: “I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.... I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.... Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

The passage may be taken as Hemingway's deflating answer to all official grandiloquence about war, from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the Gettysburg Address onward. The words Hemingway mocks never sound more threadbare than when President Bush assures us that hundreds of brave men and women in Iraq have not died in vain. But what else can a man in his position say?

Denying that any American soldier has ever died in vain is one of the perennial tasks of the politicians who send young men to die in the course of killing. Physical and moral horror must be transmuted into glorious sacrifice. Imagine a president saying, “All these young people died for nothing. It's all my fault.” Ever since Homer's Iliad, frank observers of war have been stunned by its sheer waste; that is, the overwhelming sense that the great majority of the dead *have* died in vain, for other men's causes.

The common soldier who challenges Shakespeare's disguised Henry V on the eve of Agincourt realizes that many (including, very possibly, himself) are about to die in agony for Henry's flimsy title to the French throne. Later, alone, Henry muses, with exquisite self-pity, that kings have a tough row to hoe: they try so hard to keep peace, then get blamed for starting wars! (This subtly ironic play is traditionally mistaken for a celebration of Henry's heroism. In his wartime film version, designed to boost English jingoism, Laurence Olivier had to invent sequences of Henry in combat that weren't in the play, where Henry is conspicuously absent from the battle scenes.)

A politician's occupation is to waste his country's resources. As he spends its wealth in vain, we should expect that he will also spend its lives in vain. What have we to show for the trillions of dollars the U.S. Government has taken from us in taxes over the last generation? But taxes arouse relatively little indignation; wars are another matter, and rulers must fend off the angry suspicion that they have caused our boys to die in vain.

Surely this suspicion underlay the fury of the McCarthy era. After countless boys had died to defeat the Axis, Americans realized that these lives had been sacrificed for a treacherous “ally,” the Soviet Union, which had now emerged as a deadlier enemy than Japan or Germany.

To put it briefly, is there any reason to suppose that our wasteful rulers spend our lives any more carefully, or scrupulously, than they spend our money? As a Shakespearean character might say, “It doth not appear.”