Who are ‘war heroes’?

Subscribers to Calderonia are probably unaware that the wording of the sales post below, which has been up since publication day on 7 September, has actually changed several times as we were obliged to re-target our marketing by theme and readership (see the first sentence of my previous post). With Armistice Day approaching, the question arises as to whether we should now shift to George’s participation in the War. Should the book be temporarily rebranded as the first biography of a ‘Gallipoli war hero’?

This begs the question of what, in 2018, a ‘war hero’ is. A growing number of people may believe that there can be no such thing as a ‘war hero’; that the term suggests glorification of war; that there are only victims, on both sides of a war.

I think the nuances of ‘war hero’ are complicated. The very word ‘hero’ implies, somehow, a person too superhuman to be human, a kind of one-dimensional being. Calderon and St John Hankin mocked the Edwardian hero-man in their play Thompson. I remember once when I was interpreting for theatre director Toby Robertson at the Moscow Arts during a tour to Russia by his Prospect Theatre Company, he said to his Russian counterparts: ‘We like our heroes with flaws, but I get the impression you like…your heroes.’ Soviet statues of their heroes certainly tended to be strongly featured, monolithic and intimidating.

If we recall the heroes of the Trojan War, do we think of them as superhuman mainly for their ability to kill the enemy and survive horrendous wounds? Richard Westmancott’s 1832 statue of Achilles in the Wellington Memorial at Hyde Park (above left) seems to portray him as a killing machine, and I suspect for a long time in Western culture that is what a ‘war hero’ (for instance of the Crusades) was.

Yet what seems to have fascinated the Greeks themselves about Achilles was his beauty, his friendship with Patroclus, his brilliance as a military leader, his emotional vulnerability, his feminine side, and the fact that despite having been endowed with magical invincibility he still had, well, an Achilles Heel. Many classical statues of Achilles focus on that, depicting him lying on the ground, wounded, dying, with the arrow in his tendon. He was a hero with a flaw, and since it killed him, it was a tragic flaw. There seems to be an area where the war hero and the tragic hero may merge.

In the above portrait of Nelson, by Lemuel Francis Abbot 1800, we know immediately that Nelson is a ‘hero’ because he has a stiff, monument-like torso draped with the insignia of naval achievement. Yet his face, although wearing a determined expression, looks rather soft and sensitive. He was never personally a killer like the Greek heroes, though he was a brilliant strategist of killers. As a commander, he won the crucial Battle of Trafalgar, which made him a super-hero, but he was killed winning it. Indeed, at school in 1957 our teacher, who had lost both of his legs in the First World War, told us that Nelson was shot by a sharpshooter because he insisted on going out on deck in all his regalia, which made him conspicuous. Nelson, the teacher insinuated, had a fatal flaw (‘hamartia’ in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy) and he died through hubris…

Few people, surely, would deny that Winston Churchill is a war hero, yet he never personally killed anyone, as far as I know, even when he was a professional soldier in WW1; and although he had his warts, I don’t think he had a fatal flaw. Nor was he killed in the course of leading the war effort, although he did not spare himself in that effort. What the ‘iconic’ 1941 portrait of Churchill by Karsh conveys is genial resolution, defiance, determination to win the war. Which — vital, of course, to being a war hero — he did.

Whether a war hero is a successful killer, a successful commander, has a fatal flaw, or is ‘tragically’ killed in the course of the fight, it seems that there has to be in him/her a readiness to give their all, possibly but not necessarily making the ultimate sacrifice. In this sense, Edith Cavell is undoubtedly a war hero, despite what she said about patriotism being ‘not enough’. Selfless courage, to the point of self-sacrifice, seems to be the defining feature. So, for his determination physically to defend his country from occupation and for his self-sacrifice on 4 June 1915, George Calderon certainly deserves to be called a war hero. (He could also be said to have had a tragic flaw: unflinching impetuosity.)

As we know, the vast majority of those who came back from WW1 were not thought of as war heroes. But in my view they are that because they either willingly or unwillingly exposed themselves to the ultimate sacrifice in a just cause for the rest of us. More commonly, since the 1960s at least, the ‘average Tommy’ has been regarded as a victim of war — although Peter Jackson, in his Q&A after the premiere of They Shall Not Grow Old, specifically commented that the testimonies and footage he had used disprove that.

And what of the civilian casualties of WW1? Were they just collateral ‘victims’ of war, or do they too deserve to be called ‘heroes’ because they gave their lives in the greater cause of our freedom? Or were all the ‘war heroes’ on both sides essentially ‘victims’ of war? But does ‘essentially’ just mean ‘from a certain point of view’, i.e. subjectively, and if so, what is that worth? How can someone who willingly sacrifices their life for their country be called a ‘victim’? Isn’t that patronising? Wouldn’t they be mortally offended?

I leave these questions with you…