Leo Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer in the defence of the great Russian naval base of Sevastopol against British and French invaders in the middle of the 19th century. The first of his three short stories, collected as Sevastopol Sketches, came out as the siege was still in progress. In it he spelled out as no writer had done before the way people died in shattered trenches, their bodies shredded by shell fire and left to rot in the mud; or in filthy, overcrowded hospitals, where overwhelmed doctors hacked off limbs without anaesthetic. He wrote not about the generals but about the ordinary soldiers, the men and women caught up in the fighting, the Russian people themselves. His stories were far from the traditional hymns to heroism and glory which had accompanied previous wars. They discomfited the patriots; but they made Tolstoy’s reputation as one of the greatest war writers of all time.
His efforts were mirrored on the other side of the line. William Howard Russell, the special correspondent of the London Times, was writing precisely and passionately about a war which increasingly seemed to him to have no meaning. The British soldiers, like the Russians, lived and died miserably in a sea of filth strewn with carcasses torn by dogs, starved of ammunition, clothing, food and shelter, thanks to the incompetence, negligence and corruption of their superiors. Russell may not have had Tolstoy’s literary genius. But, unlike Russia, Britain was already something of a democracy, and his writing had a more immediate effect. Backed by his editor John Delane, the two of them aroused such popular fury that the government was compelled to resign. Its successor finally began a scandalously delayed reform of Britain’s military affairs.
Gregory Carleton has written a good deal about Russia at war. His latest book makes two large claims. Between them, he believes, Tolstoy and Russell brought to an end the age-old rhetoric of what he calls the ‘heroic default’. They presented war to the reader for what it is: a matter of massive anonymous killing in which it is the ordinary people who suffer. Erich Maria Remarque, Siegfried Sassoon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Hemingway and the war poets took up the torch when they wrote about the killing grounds of the Western Front. At that time the Russians were too overwhelmed by revolution, civil war and mass terror to create a comparable literature. After the second world war, they did get a writer who could describe war with equal realism, though, unlike Tolstoy, Vasily Grossman could reasonably frame the Soviet victory as a triumphant liberation of the motherland.
Carleton goes on to argue that the Crimean War was the first of the ‘quagmire wars’ – wars of choice from which it is hard to extricate yourself. He appears to think that we have learned from the experience of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and that we are now less likely to repeat our mistakes. If so, he is too optimistic. What we have learned is that technological superiority does not guarantee victory in a world of asymmetric warfare. But, despite the shadow of the Bomb, war is a passion so deeply rooted that mankind is never likely to abandon it. The slaughter continues undiminished on and off the battlefield.
The heroic default still hovers over all. We continue to tell ourselves stories of heroism and celebrate the victories of the second world war. Young men go off to fight with enthusiasm as they did in 1914. Russell and Tolstoy themselves thought that the horrors of war were tempered by genuine courage on the battlefield. And Tolstoy helped to create another potent myth, that of the heroic city gallantly defending itself against foreign invaders from France, Britain and later from Nazi Germany. He surely believed, like most of his countrymen, that Sevastopol would and should remain forever Russian. That legend was not invented by Putin.
But Tolstoy would not have condoned Putin’s atrocious invasion of Ukraine, which has got him into his very own quagmire war. As happens with quagmire wars, Putin’s people at first supported him with enthusiasm. Whether they will eventually conclude that it was not worth the price we cannot yet know.
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