When did war stop being considered glorious and noble?

Great Debates
1

This may not have a hard and fast answer because doubtless it happened at different times in different places. But I would say that in the Napoleonic era it was considered grand and majestic, while by World War One (after the brief burst of enthusiasm at the very start) it was condemned as murderous and jingoistic.

Obviously the industrial revolution had a lot to do with it. Not only did war become more destructive and impersonal, but with increased wealth nations had more to lose. Moreover the replacement of land (the object of conquest) with industry and commerce as the measure of wealth reduced the value of territory.

But at least in the case of the French, the initial enthusiasm with which they spoiled for a rematch with Germany in 1914 suggests that the Franco-Prussian war was seen as a “Grande Affaire”

2

It’s still considered glorious and noble by some, and it’s always been considered horrible by some. Some times the same person has held both views at different points in life.

3

In the U.S., probably every war since the end of WWII, with the exception of the First Gulf War.

In some other nations, it’s still perfectly glorious.

4

Pretty much the whole world was revulsed by the meat grinder that was WW I. Sadly that revulsion didn’t last, as a new generation arose who didn’t recall those details.

And of course General Sherman said of war back in the Civil War days:

5

AIUI, many remembered the devastation of WWI perfectly well. It’s the reason why Europe kept trying to appease Hitler and the Nazis, caving in and caving, anything to avoid war, until it became clear that there *had *to be war.

6

This was my first thought. I think Obama certainly felt the bombing campaign he ordered in Libya was “noble” if not exactly “glorious”. Here are some of his remarks on the subject:

Who could possibly object to bringing “the bright light of freedom and dignity” to more of mankind, even if it’s delivered in the form of JDAMs?

7

World War I. This picture from 1887 is quite similar to how the French dressed in 1914. That didn’t last. There were also some bloody wars before then, especially in the China region, but the bloodiness started a steady ramp up. In 1914-1918, something like 4.5x as many people died as all 12 years of the Napoleonic wars.

8

It also doesn’t because it didn’t happen all at once in a lump. (And, as has been pointed out, it hasn’t happened entirely yet.)

My guess is it started when people with swords started going up against armies armed with rifles with predictable results. Hard to argue that their individual bravery made much difference to the outcome. But there was certainly some of the ‘glorious and noble’ attitude still around during the USA/Vietnam War; as well as a lot of people at the time who didn’t have the attitude.

– I could have sworn there was a famous quote by someone, at some point in the 20th century, saying “you can’t take the glory out of war.” But google keeps giving me no hits for that or permutations thereof; so maybe my memory is faulty. Anybody else remember this?

9

I think things changed forever when war started being broadcast in our living rooms every night.

There was no victor tale from Vietnam. Even in battles “won”.

10

I recently heard the argument that it started with the American Civil War. This was the first war where there was widespread photographic evidence of what war really looked like as opposed to earlier wars which were portrayed by sanitized paintings.

11

At least since 1920.

12

The advent of more real time footage available to those safe at home certainly disgusted people that may have been otherwise willing to go along with a war. Take a more recent example: mass murder in American high schools. (And younger grades :mad: )
Take school security camera footage of 25 kids having their heads blown off broadcast on television by a bubble headed bleach blonde, and you’ll see America become less tolerant of kids having their heads blown off.
Keep it where people don’t see it and, well, status quo.

13

I was going to post that one. That poem hammered the definitive nail into the coffin.

14

World War featured tanks, machine guns, poison gas, dropping stuff from airplanes, and months of fighting to move the front line back and forth by a few yards. It was really hard to romanticize it.

15

Modern day warfare is, obviously, different from “glorious” medieval combat.

The Boer War, American Civil War, Russian Japanese War, and several other wars in that time period were fought with machine guns and trenches. That pretty much maximizes casualties. There’s little opportunity for individual heroics and many opportunities to be anonymously killed, possibly because your superiors made the same mistake as they made yesterday, last week, last month, last year, last war. World War I was similar, only this involved many nations, which learned the painful lessons.

World War I also had the Armenian Genocide (which occurred after the Turks won a skirmish against the Allies they thought they would lose; instead of reinforcing their victory they sent troops to murder innocent civilians, and I never once saw a propaganda poster using that as a reason for attacking the Ottoman Empire) and a scandal involving the ANZAC forces who were fighting the Turks. Letters and news reports from the front were being so heavily censored that the civilian population had no idea what horrible conditions their forces were suffering from. (And they were horrendous. The Turkish and ANZAC trenches were less than ten feet away from each other in some places. You literally had to sleep within pistol and grenade range of the enemy.)

Then came the Vietnam War. A nuclear-armed superpower could not defeat “evil” Communist guerillas, because the only way to “win” the war would be to kill vast chunks of the civilian population. South Vietnam was not Communist. I just see it as being a non-Communist dictatorship. The image that sticks in my mind reading about that war had four generals giving an oath of loyalty to the President of South Vietnam. Less than a year later, one of those generals assassinated his superior and took over. Those were the “good guys”.

This was markedly different from the situation in World War II, where people who met every definition of evil were defeated in numerous massive “heroic” battles, such as Kursk, Stalingrad, and D-Day. (Of course, the Allies had to team up with Evil Stalin and dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, killing many civilians, but we tend to gloss over that.)

Due to the development of the nuclear bomb, there are fewer large scale conflicts. There’s a lot more guerilla wars, where distinguishing between terrorists and civilians is enormously difficult. To get the information needed to achieve some level of victory, you have to team up with bad people, compromising your morals. For instance, tolerating Bashir Assad, dictator of Syria, because he was busy fighting ISIS, a foe that was actually reaching out and touching (and blowing up parts of) the West. Because wars usually involve proxy forces, you have less control over what “your” soldiers are doing. They’re not actually yours.

Also, these days you can outright lie about your enemy (“Iraq supported Al Qaeda”) and throw thousands of your soldiers lives away because… you didn’t like one dictator out of so many.

The sheer number of sides in a conflict make it impossible to root for someone and makes it difficult to even understand a Wikipedia article. I once read about one of the (several) wars involving Syria, Lebonan, and Israel. I decided to group the various combatants into “super factions” to reduce the cognitive load, hoping to keep the number below seven. I don’t remember all the super factions, but they included the Palestinians, the Israelis/South Lebanon Army, Hezbollah/Iran, etc. Now that I had this handy chart, I could understand the war… The war started with one group of Palestinians murdering members of the other group of Palestinians, who retaliated, and at some point one group decided to start murdering Christians as well. My entire “carefully considered” (really extremely naive) super faction technique didn’t survive a single sentence of the Wikipedia article! I wanted to last until the Israelis entered the picture, but… clearly no heroic charges of knights in shining armor, on white horses, saving pretty civilian princesses from enemy soldiers or dragons who aren’t fighting anywhere near civilians, and of course the bad guys, wearing clearly-labeled black hats, are invading your territory and aren’t defending their own land from people they think are evil due to religious propaganda…

16

The publication date may be 1920, but Owen died during the war — checking Wikipedia, I see it was November 1918.

I think the poetry of Owen’s friend Siegfried Sassoon gives a good sense of how WWI changed many people’s views of war. Contrast “Absolution” with any of the poems he wrote after seeing action. For example, “Blighters”:

17

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.” - Ernest Hemingway, 1935

18

I think it changed when the common person was educated enough to start writing about it. It was never noble and glorious for the people in the trenches, it was always hell. But, prior to, say, the American Civil War, their voices weren’t heard much. When kings and noblemen were the ones writing about it and starting the wars for their own purposes, it was glorious. Once the guys getting killed and maimed started getting heard, it was hell.

19

I’m sure they went through cycles of “war fever” followed by “war is hell” and back again in old Sumeria. I doubt anything has changed significantly since.

20

As others have noted, World War I had a lot to do with it. There are several reasons for this, I think

1.) the long stalemate of Trench Warfare – armies found themselves bogged down and unable to advance against a well-entrenched enemy. Sitting in a mud-filled trench has to be the very antithesis of Glorious Combat. Instead of everything being decided in a short burst of fighting, armies could spend weeks or months of inaction. I suspect the proven worth of a strong and well-supplied siege position had much to do with the establishment of the Siegfried Line and the Maginot Line. But even the best fortification can be outflanked, which is what happened with the Maginot Line. The French knew it, too - they figured they had forced the Germans to come in by a known direction.

2.) The Modern Weapons of War – modern chemistry, with its devastating poison gas, and mechanical warfare, with airplanes and tanks and finally practical submarines, and modern large ordnance and bombs, produced much more lethality and suffering than in previous wars. devastation than in previous wars. And much of this was mechanized and faceless – getting blinded by an anonymous mustard gas attack was nothing like one-on0one combat.

3.) Modern Medicine – Ironically, the ability to save the lives of more wounded soldiers may have ultimately had a devastating effect on morale. As David J. Skal pointed out in The Monster Show, doctors were able to save and prolong the lives of soldiers who might not only have lost a limb, but who suffered severe damage to their heads and faces. There were organizations of such mutilated soldiers, and they served as a constant reminder of war and its effects. He even goes so far as to suggest that they inspired the look of movie monsters (which is ironic, in a way, since they toned things down in the movies during WWII, so as not to remind people of the horrors of war. As I’ve pointed out before, it was during WWII that vampires started to be destroyed by sunlight* in Curt-Siodmak’s screen treatments for Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, and the unrelated Return of the Vampire. Before that, you had to bloodily kill them by pounding a stake into the heart. Ray guns, too, became popular at this point, providing a bloodless, non-violent death for Bad Guys.
So, I suggest, war lost its shiny veneer of glory because of the mundane and unspectacular new nature of war, because of its faceless, mechanized killing, and because the human cost of war was made more visible by modern medicine.

*(after a brief, abortive first run of that concept in [Nosferatu, which didn’t take hold )