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No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Years ago, I accompanied my father on a business trip from Germany to France. On our way back, we stopped outside of the city of Verdun to see the site of the infamous battle that was fought there during most of the year of 1916. It was not so much a battle as a prolonged carnage by artillery fire. Hundreds of thousands died, many without having even seen the enemy. The shelling was so bad that it blasted most of the topsoil off the hills surrounding Verdun. For years, it was impossible to reforest them. Even during the 1970s, 60 years after the battle, the trees looked anemic.
Americans tend to think of great battles as those that take a toll on life that is about 1% that of the battle of Verdun. They have images of neat rows of crosses when thinking of military cemeteries. This image does not apply to Verdun. My father and I found a charnel house, a huge structure storing the bones of the fallen, thousands upon thousands of them. The ossuary of Verdun is the shadow image of the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum, built to wrest a beautiful memory from death. The charnel house of Verdun has no such pretensions. It is no great sight to behold, and to see the gigantic stacks of bones, you need to bend down before you can look through the floor-level windows. Here lie the anonymous soldiers of World War I, and there are no blaring trumpets and somber looking men in uniform giving patriotic speeches. You have to go to Paris or Arlington for that.
About 20 miles east of Verdun, we came upon a lovely country manor. This is where the crown prince of the German empire and his staff were quartered. They were close enough to hear the thunder of the artillery (Stahlgewitter) and distant enough to dull their thinking of its meaning with champagne from the Champagne. These were the men who insisted to attack the French at their strongest point - a spectacularly idiotic rejection of Clausewitz—and to press on when the evidence showed that the tactic wasn't working (Clausewitz reeling). These were the men who switched units around along the frontline when they realized that the German and the French men who were facing each other had worked out tacit understandings of how not to do damage (e.g., by shelling according to the clock, giving the other time to take cover). Mixing up the units broke up the cooperative game played between soldiers of the opposing sides. This was bad news for the grunts and (presumably) good news for the brass. As I wrote in my last post, the interests of the brass and the interests of the grunts are not aligned. They have to play a non-cooperative game and the brass tends to win.
The grunts have one ultimate but risky option. They can refuse to show up or leave after showing up. The brass and most of the rest of society do not look kindly upon desertion because it jeopardizes their interests. The penalties for desertion are steep. It is death during wartime, and there is no trial or just a pro forma court-martial. The punishment of deserters is delivered in the spirit of moral rectitude. The deserters get, as it were, their just desserts.
A little research reveals that these penalties are not fully effective. The United States forces count several thousand desertions per year. And this is an army of volunteers. Desertion makes rational sense if the chances of getting killed in combat are greater than the chances of getting caught and killed by a firing squad. In a war that goes badly, an army and its policing units is faced with the dilemma of fighting on without punishing deserters, thereby encouraging more to desert (unless the tide is swiftly turned against the enemy), or diverting precious resources to the capture and execution of deserters, which may also give the advantage to the enemy.
The death penalty for desertion shows up the absurdity of the usual "an eye" justification of capital punishment. The typical deserter has not killed any one of his own group. At most, desertion can be construed as reckless endangerment, as it—perhaps—increases the risk of being beaten by the enemy. Even then, the individual deserter can argue that his individual act of desertion makes no measurable difference. Just as it is not rational to praise an individual voter for helping to maintain democracy, so it is irrational to punish an individual deserter. No, you say, the point is deterrence. But that point is pointless if the soldier's calculations say that he is more likely to die in combat than in custody.
I have no illusions about how strange my analysis must seem. The moral(istic) reaction against any kind of betrayal of the ingroup runs deep; it is probably one of the basic elements of any moral system. The human mind is prepared to assign great value to ingroup loyalty, and those who are interested in exploiting this preparedness have an easy time. Propaganda, or more subtle "communicative acts," knock down an open psychological door. In my view, the most troublesome aspect of this game is that it is too easy for those who have power to convince those who do not have power that they are sitting in the same boat, when they are not. The difference between the country house and the charnel house is the difference between sipping champagne and choking on your own blood.
My assessment of Crown Prince Wilhelm, who was in charge of the 5th army at Verdun, may be too harsh and my distinction between grunts and brass too simplistic. I learned from his brief biography on Wikipedia that Wilhelm realized the futility of the Verdun offensive and that he tried in vain to convince the High Command to stop it.
