Not until I was midway through both of them did it occur to me that I’m reading two books about war. Unlike most men with an interest in history, I’m bored by the military side of things, and don’t read much about battles. (It’s hard to disguise the ghastly chaos of combat.) I came to both books from a political direction. Maurice Keen’s Chivalry has sat on my shelf for decades, unread. (Although I believed that I’d read it, I had not; I pulled it down, finally, thinking that I should re-read it.) Chivalry is interesting to me as the “mirror,” or self-regard, of the international class of hereditary thugs who eventually — long after the last battle — took on the appellation “aristocracy.” The class coalesced in the power vacuum that characterized the early Middle Ages, largely as a way of paying for expensive new ways of fighting. While it gradually acknowledged the titular superiority of sovereigns, it fought hard to retain its protection rackets. Louis XIV would find it expedient to entertain this gang to death. “Chivalry,” in any case, is an important part of medieval government, or lack thereof, and that’s why I’m interested in it.

Nick Turse’s Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam garnered a nice blurb from Frances Fitzgerald, author of the magisterial Fire in the Lake, and it was on the strength of her praise that I bought the book. The war in Vietnam was not the first American misadventure to follow the Great Interrupted War of the first half of the last century — Korea was the site of that one — but Vietnam remains this country’s biggest flop, as to both expense and polarization. Like all the others, it pitted ill-prepared soldiers against guerillas concealed in alien social systems, often with a pronounced “racial” distinctiveness. At the time, those of us who thought that the Vietnam War was a foolish mistake at best nonetheless believed that it was motivated by a morbid fear of Communist expansion, but subsquent follies in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that the problem lies closer to an American conception of self than to a fear of others. Ignorant arrogance characterizes the lot. Proudly ignorant arrogance, if you’ll pardon my redundancy.

It’s no surprise that these books have little in common, at least as reads. Turse has scoured records deposited only a few decades ago, in his own language, and he has spoken to American veterans and Vietnamese victims, all of them eyewitnesses. It is difficult to see, in this welter of detail, the seeds of a mythology. Chivalry, on the other hand, is not only a semi-mythological notion on its own (developed most lustily in the early Nineteenth Century, by bravos who dreaded democracy and industrialization), but was nurtured by mythology. At some point shortly before the call to the First Crusade, in 1095, a body of vernacular romances, paralleled by Latin chronicles, began to emerge, the subjects of which were the three great “matters” — that of France (Charlemagne), that of Britain (Arthur), and that of Rome (including everything from the Trojan War on). It is hard to say what records, if any, the early romancers had of Charlemagne’s campaigns, but Arthur was of course a fiction from the start, and the primary source for the Trojan War appears to have been the concoction of one Dares Phrygius, who wrote in the Fifth Century CE but who passed himself off as an eyewitness at Troy, and therefore, as Keen points out, even more credible than Homer, whose epics were in any case not available. As Marc Bloch and others make clear, the medieval approach to history was sincerely naive: things could only have happened as they ought to happen. Heroes must be heroic. As the chivalric romances blossomed through the following two centuries, the warriors at Roncesvalles and the Round Table were shown to behave more and more like the admirable knights of the writers’ own day, knights who of course patterned themselves on the old heroes, in a richly intensifying feedback loop. Keen handles such hard evidence as there is with care and discernment, and he finds in the slow boil of the church’s discontent with various aspects of chivalry a hold on something like objectivity.

From the start, chivalry presented itself with a great deal of glamour. (Don’t gangsters always?) It developed a peculiar air of piety that did not balk at whacking off heads. It was ostentatious, at least in part because its training maneuvers quickly developed into aristocratic entertainments — tournaments. It was also bedecked by the hardy growth of courtly love — James Bond with affect, but similarly unencumbered as to domestic arrangements. There was all that armor (the really glittering stuff in museums is, however, actually post-medieval), and all that exotic heraldry. The stories had a certain glamour, too: you can read the Queste de Graal without encountering towns and their commoners, and money — precious metal in utilitarian form — barely exists. The glamour is integral to chivalry, and it can’t be stripped away with the idea of revealing something more authentic. Chivalry was, from the start, a mild delusion. At the same time, the glamour was an ever-unrealized ideal. The blaze and the valour never matched the storied exaggerations. The “high” middle ages became “late” when knights ran out of heathens who could be murdered with the church’s blessing, and gunpowder ate away at the effectiveness of cavalry until Napoleon finally blew it up.

Nick Turse’s subject is utterly devoid of glamour, or of any kind of patina whatsoever. It is, all too literally, one damned thing after another. The first two chapters are litanies of atrocity; the third, “Overkill” details the unthinking retaliation for the Tet Offensive. Looking ahead, I gather that Turse is going to try to pin responsibility for these horrors on Washington officials, which is consoling, at least in prospect. I hope that he finds a few targets to pursue as relentlessly as Frances FitzGerald goes after Wesley Fishel.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013 at 3:25 pm.