How to write battle scenes #1
You could do a hell of a lot worse than Emile Zola.
“I have not been in a battle; nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath,” so John Keegan writes on the first page of The Face of Battle. But just as that did not stop Keegan from writing, so it shall not stop me.*
Because, reader, I have an unfortunate, debilitating lifelong condition. I am a war nerd. It was never something I could help, from my earliest memories I was fixated on war, first the fighting between pirates and the merchant navies and then the American Civil War. Something in the drama and, as a child, something in the ease of good guys vs. bad guys drew my attention again and again. This persisted after I became resolutely and categorically anti-war. To some extent, I think having anti-war politics made me more interested in war as a subject of study.
I have not published a battle scene, but then I have not published much fiction. I have written a great many, however. My early forays into fiction were all efforts to write the sorts of battle scenes I wanted to read. My first novel was a post-apocalyptic war novel, my third ended in a battle between the national guard and college students and my fourth was a parody of the style of Victorian military history.
My first adult loves as a reader were Bernard Cornwell’s books, the Sharpe Series first, for its ease and formulaic drama, and then the Warlord trilogy, for its retelling of Arthurian legend with the tools of historical realism.
A lot of young men have obsessions like this. Video games, movies and even books only make it worse, this fixation with violence. It is a vital part of the formation of reactionary masculinities, I think.
But an obsession with war, with battle, can also lead one to ask deeper questions of society: Why do some find this horror necessary? How are armies supplied? Is all politics the continuation of class war by other means? Does political power grow from the barrel of a gun? What even is war?
These are the sorts of questions writers ought to think through before they set out to write battle scenes.
Over an extended series of essay, I am going to talk through the moral, technical, psychoanalytic and aesthetic questions raised by the battle scene. In our first foray we will start with a broad theory of battle scenes, then discuss Emile Zola’s battle scenes and the use of libidinally charged imagery in those scenes, because 19th century nationalism understood violence as a clash of sexually freighted symbols.
But before we go further, I should address something else: I’ve had a considerable influx of readers as a result of a video I made about The Alexiad of Anna Komnene. Welcome to the newsletter, and thank you for reading. I hope this essay, which is very strange and a stylistic departure from most of my earlier posts, will not alienate you. Eventually, likely not for a very long time, I do intend to write something comparing The Alexiad with Ammianus Marcellinus, or possibly with Gore Vidal’s Julian. But today, you will have to make do with Emile Zola.
What is a battle scene?
In its broadest sense, a battle scene is a depiction of a violent conflict with at least three participants, where the conflict occurs for political reasons. I exclude one-on-one fights here because those are explicit conflicts between characters and systems of theme and symbol. However, one-on-one fights do occur within battle scenes and are, especially in pre-modern battle scenes, a staple of the genre, so we will eventually cover some examples.
The purpose of a battle scene is not to mimetically depict war, outside of some extremely limited texts which, I would argue, suck ass (including Saving Private Ryan, fuck that movie.
Instead, battle scenes generally 1. Make character/thematic conflicts literal; 2. Swamp character conflicts with overwhelming social force; 3. Dramatize political arguments about the nature of wars and societies; 4. Titillate and excite; 5. Disgust, repel and horrify; 6. Bring competing thematic structures into direct, oppositional conflict; 7. Concentrate, disperse and re-concentrate the psychological, symbolic or literal forces working in a text.
In this way, they do not differ at all from any well-constructed scene, save for a morbid tendency.
The Battle of Sedan as imagined by Emile Zola in La Debacle (The Downfall) actually accomplishes all seven of the above stated purposes.
Best known today for his book Germinal, which depicts a bloody coal strike in northeastern France in the 1860s, in his own day Zola was a leading figure in 19th c. French Naturalism. We’ve talked a bit about Naturalism before, but it’s worth recapitulating.
The naturalists use most of the same techniques as realists, but they tend to determine the outcomes of their characters through a combination of situation, social class and heritable traits. Their characters are less free than realist or modernist characters. The Rougon-Macquart series, in which The Downfall and Germinal are entries, is Zola’s attempt to codify naturalist sociology in literature. He follows multiple generations of a family from the French middle-strata, including peasants, artisans, professional soldiers and farmers, combining and recombining the family ‘traits’ he believed determined the lives of his characters.
The Downfall follows Jean Macquart, who lost his land and wife in a previous entry, and now serves as a corporal in the army of the French Second Empire. Jean and Maurice, an intellectual in Jean’s squad, stumble through the French countryside with Marshal MacMahon’s army looking for the Prussians. They walk themselves ragged. Then the Germans converge on Sedan.
At Sedan, an entire French army was bottled up and smashed by the superior maneuverability of the Prussians and their steel-barreled breech loading cannon. Napoleon III, the French dictator, was captured; Prussia parlayed the victory into the foundation of the German Empire, and three generations of German officers developed a flawed operational doctrine that required them to seek decision through a ‘Cauldron Battle.’ The road from Sedan led directly to Stalingrad. But all that lay in the future.
Zola’s battle works on two levels of point-of-view: a close third POV following Jean and Maurice through the action, and a wandering third POV moving between different minor characters and historical figures we’ve met along the way. These characters and their (invariably tragic) versions of Sept. 1-2, 1870 serve Zola’s arguments about different class fractions of the French populace. But they also oppose the French national character to the German, and transform the experience of Sedan into a legible system of opposing themes and symbols.
A note on translation: I read The Downfall as translated by E.P. Robins, a version which dates back almost immediately to the publication of novel. I think it’s useful to use a Victorian translation as opposed to the modern one, because it will carry with it the general concerns of its era: national greatness and sublimated sexual symbolism.
Losing the war, losing the self.
I have spoken with a fair number of Getliterate subscribers whose knowledge of 19th century military affairs is limited, so a very brief primer is in order. In 1870 France and a coalition of German states led by Prussia went to war. The German army was better organized and had recent experiences rapidly concentrating its strength over long distances, thanks to Prussia’s railroads and its wars against Denmark and Austria. The Germans used steel-barreled, breach loading cannons, which could fire a greater number of heavier projectiles a longer distance than the French artillery. The French infantry were equipped with a marginally superior rifle, but this advantage was more than offset by the Germans’ superiority in artillery, logistics and officer training. Sedan was a battle where the French rifle was defeated by the German cannon.
So what happens when Zola’s farmers and intellectuals run into the German cannons?
Early in the battle, Jean and Maurice’s company (a unit of roughly 100 men), which is commanded by Captain Beaudoin, is positioned on open ground as the Prussian cannonade begins. The German shells kill some of the men. Yet for Maurice panic only comes when his side’s own artillery returns fire: “The cannonade on either side went on with increased fury, and in the hideous uproar terror—a white unreasoning terror—filled Maurice’s soul.” (169)
Zola continues this with his naturalist emphasis on the immutable personality: “It was nothing more than the strain from which his nervous, high-strung temperament was suffering from reflex action.” Jean, a steadier, earthly man with combat experience, seizes Maurice and holds him fast. Precipitate terror on a field of flying shrapnel would mean death—to lie still in the furrows is a man’s duty.
Then the Germans come on. “It was all very vivid and clear-cut in the transparent air of morning; the Germans, outlined against the dark forest, presented the toy-like appearance of those miniature soldiers of lead that are the delight of [young Nye Canham].” (169).
The French respond without order: “the chassepots [French rifles] seemed to go off of their own accord,” (169) and Maurice, being a changeable bourgeois, is seized by enthusiasm: “the noise he made had the effect of dispelling his fear and blunting the keenness of his sensations.” Shooting relieves the moral pressure, which has become a bodily pressure. In Zola this is almost sexual; the men shoot off orgasmically, there is a psychoanalytic dimension here that would thrill Klaus Theweleit.
All day the men take the German artillery’s lashing fire, face the attacks of the blue-coated Prussians and watch as their own artillery is shot to pieces. One-by-one they die.
Zola describes these deaths and wounds in gory detail. Men are disemboweled, are struck through the head with shrapnel. They burn to death in leaf litter and fall clutching the national flag. As death and wounds carry off the men of the company, the other constituent elements of the French army suffer similar fates. The army, through the accumulation of individual deaths, begins to lose its coherence and each element collapses to disarticulated individual soldiers fighting and running for survival. This experience of unit disintegration is common in literatures of defeat. The French, Italian and German experiences in Russia and Greek/Roman literary traditions all emphasize this reversion to the individual at the moment of the collapse of military strength. The French army/Nation, in the microcosm of Beaudoin’s company, falls to pieces and is swept away.
Jean and Maurice retain their bond and flee together. They encounter Henriette, Maurice’s cousin, whose husband has died in the fighting. These three retreat together, forming a sort of quasi-family in retreat from battle. This sets up the erotic/libidinal tension between Jean and Henriette that lends the back third of the novel its power. Zola, having dispersed the psychic forces of the novel through the destruction of the French army, begins to re-concentrate them in the fleeting bonds that form in flight. Eventually, Jean-Henriette-Maurice will form an anti-Oedipal triangle with Jean as punishing father, Henriette as chaste but desiring sister/mother and Maurice as punished/sacrificed brother/son.
I digress.
Around those three characters, something strange begins to take shape. As the French army collapses, the French Men also collapse.
Klaus Theweleit, whom I referenced earlier in this essay, wrote a two-volume masterwork on the ego structure of the narrators of 20th-century German fascist literature. Theweleit wrote that the process of military training and indoctrination in Wilhelmine Germany produced a psychology that depended on the military unit as Totality Formation, meaning a system of coercive authority and psychosexual pleasure-pains that fixed the boundaries of the individual within a stable, controlled social whole. (Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2 157-9 give or take). This is useful in understanding how writers portray and describe the experience of military defeat: the individual exists in a coherent whole and is bound there by his comrades. Recall Jean holding Maurice to his place in the line physically.
So as the formation cracks, the individual ego breaks open. Desire reasserts itself, to live, to flee, to drink behind a wall—all of these are things the men of Beaudoin’s company do as Sedan falls around them. (A similar process occurs in victorious literary armies. See Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Company and the sack of Badajoz, where the victory of penetrating the Spanish fortress is metaphorically orgasmic for a number of British soldiers and the sequence culminates in an attempted rape by an NCO that is halted by the intervention of a superior officer.)
The collapse of the military formation in Zola collapses the individual. A cavalry charge repulsed ends so:
Regiments and squadrons, as organizations, had ceased to exist; their constituent elements were drops in the mighty wave that alternately broke and reared its crest again, to swallow up all that lay in its destructive path. He had long since lost distinct consciousness of what was going on around him, and suffered his movements to be guided by his mount, faithful Zephyr. (217).
A lieutenant in Beaudoin’s company, Rochas, rallies some few dozen men. This re-establishes a semblance of victory and discipline: “Rochas, meantime, was in his element.” and “The handful of [enemy] men before him stood in his eyes for the united armies of Germany, and he was going to destroy them at his leisure. All his long, lean form, all his thin, bony face, where the huge nose curved down upon the self-willed sensual mouth, exhaled a laughing, vainglorious satisfaction.” (252 both.)
The line is re-established, the physical self resumes its steady form. The men no longer flow in a tide of retreat, but stand firm. Then, a contingent of Germans come up their rear (Robins word, not mine!).
“A hot fire of musketry came pouring in on them from the left,” and “Men fell on every side, and for a moment the confusion was extreme; the Prussians were already scaling the wall of the park,” and “a maddened mob of savages, firing at one another at point-blank range, so that hair and beards were set on fire, tearing one another with teeth and nails when a knife was wanting to slash the adversary’s throat.” (252-3).
Rochas maintains his individuality as the order collapses into a swirling flow of unrestrained desire.
“Rochas made no attempt to fly; he seemed unable to comprehend. Even more erect than usual, he waited the end, stammering,” (253, emphasis mine). Here the experience of defeat is a sort of incomprehensible sexual thrill, a pain that cannot be tolerated, a vessel-popping spasm that leaves Rochas literally without words. But he is still the man of his boys, still the masculine order-figure, the last in the totality formation.
Rochas is, in fact, encumbered by his potency. He carries the national flag on its staff, a metaphoric phallus draped with the sacred silk of the Empire—Marianne or Joan of Arc’s undergarments if you will permit me to make the vulgar symbol literal. He turns to run and “the staff, although it was broken, became entangled in his legs.”
Only then, halted by his broken phallus, does Rochas comprehend defeat and tear up the silk flag “so that it might not be defiled by contact with Prussian hands,” in a symbolic murder of the feminized national symbol, which cannot survive the death of the individual masculine ego.
Now the battle is truly lost!
The dam is breached and the desire to live can flow freely: “About them, filling the road in all its breadth, was the rear-guard of fugitives from the battlefield, still flowing onward with the irresistible momentum of an unchained mountain torrent.” (254).
Here we find the irresolvable tension at the heart of the description of defeat: the collapse of the totality formation or the social order produces the individual as a being with an individual will again—but these individuals act in total concert! They run to the gates of Sedan in such haste they trample each other, plunge into the ditch about the walls, stumble and drop, never to rise. They are never more separate nor more solid than previously. This threat of dissolution, almost as much as death, is the powerful, looming terror that drives the battle scene on. Death can be endured stoically, in Zola at least, but retreat is a humiliation you experience for its entire duration.
The totality formation, as a hierarchical structure, resembles a huge machine. The movement of military elements within a unit regulates the discharge of the emotional passion—the fact that the Chassepots go off when Maurice sees the Germans for the first time is not just a young man’s premature ejaculation, it is a symptom of the insufficient discipline of French arms. Already, from the first, their totality formation is dysfunctional. So when the load bearing elements, the junior officers and experienced NCOs, are killed or shocked into flight, there are no other pieces capable of holding the edifice together. Incapable of acting against one another as mechanical parts, the soldiers fall out of order in a great mass.
Their military relations with each other dissolve, but this does not produce a society in mirror. Instead we have a flood of pale-faced men racing for the sacred, impregnable fortress walls, each perfectly alone yet perfectly identical, flowing toward a point where they can reach the society from which they have been cast out and there be reborn. This is the result of the Rochas’ ecstasy of defeat.
The only men to maintain an individual existence in this mass are Jean and Maurice, protecting Henriette. Flight then has become the salvation of the individual, so that they can escape to gather again the symbolic weight of the French nation on their shoulders.
Broadly, before the internal combustion engine, when you got your ass kicked, you ran for the nearest geographical shelter. Usually this was a city or fortress, at times a river or marshes or woodland or impassable mountains. One of the perils of modern war, and one of its traumatizing aspects, is that it extends the sphere of violence from the symbolic bed/field where men lay broken after passionate penetration, to the cityscapes and refuges where they remake their selves in the quiet hours after battle. Literature often replicates the separation of the urban/civilized sphere from the psychosexual terror of the battlefield. In Zola, when the latter invades the former, we leave the relatively straightforward sexual/national confrontation in the countryside for the terrible nightmare flames of Paris and find, in the modern city, a biblical apocalypse and sexual impotence.
So what can an aspiring writer draw from the mix of naturalistic realism and libidinal fever in Zola?
First, reality rarely affords a battle as thematically perfect as Sedan. For an example, look at the first Napoleon. Borodino and Leipzig are the perfect thematic punctuation marks for the little corporal’s career—yet he found his way still to Waterloo, a far inferior battle at the level of literary aesthetics and a vaguely tragicomic affair overall. Created battles, on the other hand, offer writers the chance to write a perfect battle, especially if the emphasis in the text is not on mimetic reproduction of reality.
Second, a battle must be deliberately constructed to mobilize its symbols and themes according to the author’s wish. The reverse of this is true too; you will have to work very hard to avoid mere titillation or hero-worship if you so wish.
Third, different people will have wildly divergent experiences in combat. A cavalry trooper will have quite a different time of things than his captain, for instance. While an infantryman in one company may go through a whole battle without firing once, and another man a few hundred yards away will have a veritably Homeric time of things. Indeed, it’s possible for large sections of an army to win their portions of a battle so decisively that they believe they have won the whole thing—this is what happened to Xenophon in The Anabasis.
It goes without saying that civilians will find battle quite different than soldiers will. Zola is particularly good at working civilians into his battles, and it is a shame that I haven’t the space to do more than mention Henriette—when I come back to civilians in war I will start again with her.
Fourth, a battle scene can work on several different levels. There is the level of reality reproduction: how closely does this accord with an experience of events? The level of narrative structure: how well does this develop the characters and themes of a story? The symbolic: how do objects, people and places take on meanings beyond the literal, how are these meanings manipulated, confirmed or discarded? The sentence level: what do the words on the page do to the reader, do they excite, repel, bore?
I don’t think most writers write a battle intending to make a flag into a gendered symbol of national-sexual pride or to write the experience of defeat as orgasmic, but it’s possible to do so without intent. And a close reading of one’s work between the first draft and the second will often reveal those hidden layers, or places where such layers might develop.
But I have gone on at great length.
I initially planned this essay to cover the death of Weiss and the confrontation between Henriette and Otto before the walls of Paris, but it’s already so very long, so those parts will wait, indefinitely, for essays on individual tragedy in battle and one-on-one duels.
Next Week: Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel.
Next battle essay: Like a God of Old: Tolkien’s cavalry charge and the construction of heroism (probably? Maybe I’ll go off-script.)
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*This is not strictly true, as I will discuss at length eventually. Being a young journalist, possessing some modicum of physical courage and moral clarity, I could not restrain myself from covering many of the street battles which the socialist left and black freedom movements fought against the fascist right and cops in so many American cities between 2015 and 2021. I have seen my share of broken teeth, of bloodied fighters, of gas and chemical spray. I have seen people clubbed and stabbed and I have seen lines of soldiers with rifles pointed at the unshielded bodies of unarmed crowds of demonstrators. I hope never to hear the sounds of stun grenades again as long as I live. It is by luck only that I came through those six years, such a foul precursor of the present debacle, without real injury and without seeing anyone killed before me.
What's wrong with Saving Private Ryan, and mimesis of battle more generally?