Paths of Glory
A. What you notice first about the two figures in Christopher Nevinson"s painting Paths of Glory is the ordinariness of their death, their commonplace, unremarkable fate. They lie face down in the blasted earth, two men in British military uniforms, their helmets and rifles lying in the mud beside them. They are indistinguishable from each other, stripped of individual identity. Nothing marks them out as the unique human beings they must once have been with names, and families, and remembered childhoods, and desire and love and hope and ambition.
B. From the bottom left of the composition, where the corpse in the foreground lies with the soles of his boots facing you, your eye moves diagonally upwards and to the right, to the second dead man, who has fallen forwards towards you, and you see the top of his dark head but Nevinson denies you a glimpse of his face. He has no face, no personality, no story of his own.
C. In my time as a war reporter for the BBC I have come across scenes like this. You cannot mistake the recently dead for the sleeping, for there is something bloodless, something shockingly, arrestingly lifeless about them. I have found myself transfixed by odd detail—a bootlace tied just a few hours ago, by fingers that will now never move again. What talents lie locked into the muscle memory of those fingers Could they, as recently as this morning, have picked out a melody on a piano With the death of each individual, an entire universe vanishes.
D. Nevinson"s painting shocked the authorities of the day. They had sent him to the Western Front as an official war artist commissioned by the War Propaganda Department. His earlier work had pleased them. They"d deemed it good for British morale (士气). He"d produced a series of drawings for an exhibition called Britain"s Efforts and Ideals. His work depicted stages in the construction of an aircraft, all good, morale-boosting stuff.
E. He"d come to their attention because of a series of paintings he"d produced early in the war, drawn from his time as a volunteer ambulance driver in 1914-15. They are strikingly modernist in composition. In one, called La Mitrailleuse, or the machine gun, four soldiers—one dead, three living—are depicted at a machine gun post. It is a portrait of this first experience of truly modern war—rooted, as it now was, in mass production and the mobilization of organized industrial process. In the painting the men are drawn with the same hard, angular, rigid lines as the gleaming silver-grey gun they are operating—they are complementary parts of a co-ordinated destructive enterprise, humanity absorbed into the killing machine.
F. "All artists should go to the front," the hawkish Nevinson wrote of this early war experience, "to strengthen their art, by a worship of physical and moral courage, and a fearless desire of adventure, risk and daring." You see this still in modern warfare—men made of vulnerable flesh and blood, whose living fingers hold in their muscle memory infinite talents and skills absorbed into a vast, implacable, mechanised force of nature.
G. One day in the spring of 2003, a few days after the American-led invasion of Iraq and the symbolic toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, I came back to my room in the Hotel Palestine, a concrete tower block that looks out over the broad green-brown sweep of the Tigris River and the crashing teeming life of the crowded city beyond.
H. An American arms dump had just exploded in a residential suburb. Nearby houses that had withstood weeks of allied bombardment were destroyed. Families were wiped out. But what was striking was how quickly public anger was directed. Within an hour there was a demonstration of Iraqis—hundreds, perhaps thousands, strong—already with printed placards and leaflets blaming the Americans for deliberately endangering the lives of Iraqis.
I. I said in my report for that night"s news on BBC One: "The explosion has caused an anti-American fury. Within hours that fury was organised. It hasn"t taken long for this to turn into a demonstration of rage against the Americans. Today, nothing the Americans can say will be heard amid the din—the organised and carefully arranged chorus—of anti-American sentiment."
J. And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures standing against the white glare of the sun. As I approached I saw that they were soldiers, their uniforms stained with the mud of the Tigris valley, Americans, for they were holding US Army assault rifles in their arms.
K. They were a frightening presence. Until they spoke. "Sir," one of them said, and there was a quiet, shy respect in his voice. I saw that they were young, achingly young, perhaps 19 years old, fresh faces above long, lean, loose-limbed frames. "Sir," he went on, "we heard that there was a satellite phone in this room. We haven"t been able to call home in four months."
L. They were the first in a little group of young US servicemen who would come to my room for this purpose in the weeks that lay ahead. What struck me with great bitterness was this—that almost always they phoned their mothers. From the other side of the room you would hear the phone sound in some far place in Kentucky or Idaho. The boy would say "Hi Mom!" and then you would hear the excited, disbelieving scream of delight echoing down the line.
M. This vast military machine that we had watched assembles itself in Kuwait with its hardware and its discipline and its resolution and unshakeable belief in the virtue of its mission. It was composed, in part at least, of boys who—more than anything—missed their mothers.
N. I think of those two young men whose names I never learned when I look at Nevinso"s Paths of Glory . Its title is taken from Thomas Gray"s Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard . "The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
O. Government censors did not like Paths of Glory . They judged it bad for morale and refused to pay Nevinson for it. But he included it anyway in the first exhibition of his war paintings in London early in 1918, with a brown paper strip across the canvas canning the word "censored". He was rebuked both for exhibiting a censored painting and, bizarrely, for unauthorised use of the word "censored" in a public place. But the painting was bought, during that exhibition, by the Imperial War Museum, where it remains.This huge military machine in Kuwait is not only composed of hardware, discipline, resolution and belief but of boys who missed their mothers.