Considerations on Modern War

PAOLO CEOLA LABYRINTTHE H Considerations on Modern War New edition renewed (2016) Società Italiana di Storia Militare © 2016 - Collana SISM Tutti i diritti riservati all’Autore ISBN: 978-88-941325-1-9 Nadir Media - Roma [email protected] On the cover: olive tree on the ruins of Sparta, Greece. (shot by Author. 2010) Stampa: Nadir Media - Roma Discant viventes sorte mortuorum1* A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are star- ing, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris be- fore him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.2** * [May the living people learn from the fate of the dead]: inscription placed at the entran- ce of the concentration camp of Mauthausen. ** W. Benjamin, Schriften, Frankfurt a. M., Suhkamp, 1955. 5 INTRODUCTION his book represents the greatly revised and corrected fusion of two former books written in Italian.1 T The title is easy to explain: when I am thinking about war, it calls me to mind the last sequences of The Shining, a horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick, with the father running after his son through a labyrinth made-up of snow-covered hedges in order to kill him. War is something like that, in other words fathers killing their sons, or better the humanity killing itself within a world which is both real and imaginary that we consider really hard to leave. As a consequence even this book is a bit labyrinthine: in the essays com- posing it, topics and situations, notions and explanations will come up again and again. I hope both not to bore and not to make you lose your way. And now, if I had to outline the guidelines, the main points that will emerge during this treatment, I would outline the following points: War is a combination of factors, both tangible and intangible, so complex and organized that it will disappear from the human hori- zon, and perhaps only, in the presence of decisive changes in the nature of death, both in the sense of a marked departure along time span of human beings or in its perception at the level of collective consciousness. Nuclear weapons are so radically new (a real “ultimatum to the Earth”) that it is my belief the prospect of nuclear annihilation has exercised, in the decades since Hiroshima, a sort of pedagogical function over humanity; de- spite all ideological and technical attempts to resize the historic significance of nuclear weapons’s advent, this inhibition can still do a lot to discourage a global war, if properly reinvigorated with theoretical and practical tools. International law, however, represent the main way forward, given the 1 Paolo Ceola, Il Labirinto: Saggi sulla guerra contemporanea, Napoli, Liguori, 2002 and Armi e Democrazia: Per una teoria riformista della guerra, Varallo, Istituto per la storia della Resistenza e della società contemporanea nelle province di Biella e Vercelli “Ci- no Moscatelli”,2006. I wish to thank the publishing houses for the authorization to use again these two books. 6 current state of humanity evolution, to effectively combat the phenomenon of war. Politically, democracy must consider the war, in all shapes and concep- tions not coded by international law, as a direct and immediate threat to its existence, even in times of peace. Whatever the model of interpretation of the war (maximally conservative or deeply reformist) it will face a revolution that in the coming years will jump in completely upsetting nature: the progressive and accelerated trans- fer of warfare from the human element to the robotics, and then to what it might be called post-human; the actors of history will not be the evolution- ary heirs of the genus “homo”, but new creatures, hybrids born from the un- ion between the organic and the machines. Post-humans, for which combat and death will have new meanings. I hope that these points will be adequately explained in the essays in this book. I would like to thank Sara Munari and Andrea Beccaro for their valuable help in the translation of this book. Paolo Ceola [email protected] Spring 2016 7 1 HELL’S FOUNDATIONS2 1. 1 ROOTS Some snapshots about different kind of war during 20st century... t is the picture of a First World War veteran. It is a black-and-white picture and the man, still wearing his uniform, looks in profile. From the big I website called The Great War (Murray 1996) we do not find out anything about him, neither his name. He is just a glance. Probably because under the eyes he does not have anything more. A huge black hole has taken over the space first filled by the nose, jaws, mouth and chin. In all probability a splin- ter excavated a hole where there is now only a silent scream. The man watch- es and shouts without being able to say and tell the slaughter filling his eyes. Let give him back for a moment what he lost and bring him back to his place, in the trench, with his comrades. And now we shift and raise our visual, as if we had a camera on a helicopter that is flying higher and higher. Little by little trenches and communication trenches bring together, they fill thousands square kilometres of the European territory. At last the western front appears as a whole: a scar 775 kilometres long, from the North Sea to Switzerland, that runs along the Old Continent’s side; a stinky scar, moist with rain and blood, full of louses and dead, mouse and wounded.In 1917 German troops were filling a salient – that is to say a territory’s wedge – round Ypres (Flanders), a territory that disturbed the English deployment. If English eliminated this salient, they would be able to oust German from Belgium or fill ports like Ostenda and Zeebrugge, the last one being the Bru- ges’s outport in the North Sea. The lumps of soil in these places were already sodden with the blood which shed in two battles and in Ypres, during the Second Battle in 1915, German used noxious gas on a large scale.3 The third battle of Ypres gets its name from Passchendaele, the location where most 2 I am stealing the title from a book written by G.Moorhouse, Hell’s Foundations: A So- cial History of the Town of Bury in the Aftermath of the Gallipoli Campaign, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1992. 3 “The most terrible is the slow death of the victims [ ... ] I saw several hundred poor people lying outdoors , in front of a church, so they had all the air possible, drown [in ita- lics in the text, author’s note] slowly with water in the lungs”. From the diary of Gene- ral Charteris , quoted about an attack with gas, in Gilbert , 1998, p. 184. [Translation by author, referring to the page 184 of Italian Edition] 8 THE LABYRINTH CONSIDERATIONS ON MODERN WAR of the operations took place. There are two main reasons why this battle was really terrifying: on the one hand the German defences’s strength and the English commanders’s stubborn incapacity to understand that the era of chivalry and the assaults of the “indomitable hearts” was over, and, on the other hand, the rain. Usually, in a Flanders’ summer, it rains for an average of eight millimetres; that year, in the four days straddling the beginning of the conflicts, it rained for about seventy-six millimetres. That could be a problem for the delicate dewatering system of this area, even in a peacetime. The preliminary bombardment lasted two weeks. English shot four mil- lions and a half grenades from four thousand guns (one gun every five me- tres in front). They threw nearly five tons of explosive per linear meter at the cost of one hundred and ten million dollars! The attack began on July 31. At four o’ clock pm it started raining. It rained hard for days and the nightmare began. The shaken soil melt completely down, becoming a dirty mud and blood soup. Thousands of men had the choice whether die by enemy bullets or in the quicksands. The battle, like many other in this war, extend over several weeks and had just brief breaks. In the end, for each square kilometre there were something like half million craters created by the explosions and eight thousand people dead or wounded. In three months, Passechendaele provoked 500,000 victims; 300,000 of them were English and 42,000 can not be found any more, sank and suffocated in the mud (Miller, 1997). It looks like a big black bug. It does not have any rounded line, it only has triangular surfaces soldered together. Built and painted with special and very expensive materials, it only runs at night: its belonging to the darkness is so exclusive that the inner ear of its pilots risks to suffer seriously.

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