The battlefield is a world apart. A place that evokes emotions that civilians do not know and veterans try to grasp in their memoirs. There is suffering, agony, fear, exhaustion, but also the pleasure of being with oneâs comrades, being absorbed in group action, the power of life and death, the excitement of a game: to hit, to win, to be pushed to physical and emotional limits. 1 One of most enduring adages in military memoirs since the late sixteenth century is that it is impossible to imagine what the battlefield is like for those who have never been there. Not only traumatic experiences are difficult to share, many battlefield emotions are loaded with taboos and sometimes shame and guilt.
Compared to their predecessors, modern media pay much attention to individual and intimate feelings like fear and dejection suffered by the military subject. The psycho-medicalisation of Western society has turned soldiers from heroes into victims of their uncontrollable emotions. As Mary Favret noted in her lecture at one of our workshops: nowadays more US Soldiers die from suicide than on the battlefields across the world. 2 Emotions can be lethal. It is difficult to live with the memory of violence, with fear or with guilt. It seems to be even more difficult to reconnect emotionally to a world that does not share these memories and does not understand or appreciate what has been lived through.
Is this a modern phenomenon? We think that battlefield emotions have been a source of inner and social conflict for many centuries. Also, in the eighteenth century soldiers would not write about the numbers they killed. To cite an eighteenth century soldier: âI slewed about all over the place like a mad thing, and immune to the slightest fear, in one burst I shot off well nigh all 60 of my rounds till my musket was pretty well red-hot and I had to drag it behind me by its strap; I donât believe I hit a living soul thoughâit all went into the air.â 3
The emotions of soldiers have always been conditioned by stringent emotional regimes. Military discipline does not allow for emotions that may undermine the troopsâ morale. Military action requires a mental state or combat motivation, comradeship and pride that overcomes fear and enables killing. While Western society today encourages soul-seeking and the exploration of individual vulnerabilities and intimate feelings in public, soldiers must repress such feelings and hang on to others, such as love for abstract entities and values, professional pride and comradeship. While civilian society developed a culture of sensibility and sentimentalism in the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, soldiers had to uphold an image of heroic masculinity, courage and chivalry as well as aggression and invincibility. 4
The early modern changes in the relationship between civil and military emotional cultures, and the consequent frictions, resulted from a number of simultaneous developments. Military theory and practice as well as the social position of the soldier changed over time. Military reforms like the introduction of projectile arms in the late Middle Ages, and firearms in the fifteenth century, the organisation of the troops in smaller and more manoeuvrable pike and shot formations in the sixteenth century, new drill techniques in the seventeenth century, as well as mass conscription in the eighteenth century, have transformed military experiences over the centuries. Also, the scale of battles changed over time. The army of the French King in the mid-fifteenth century (by the end of the Hundred Years War) counted 20,000 armed men, in 1695, the Nine Yearsâ War, French troops mounted up to 340,000. 5 Siege warfare introduced the hardships of underfed and poorly clothed soldiers wintering in muddy camps as well as the new dangers involved with the undermining with explosives of walls and bulwarks. 6 Mass manoeuvres and the use of firearms reduced the key importance of individual performance in man-to-man fights while, on the other hand, these reforms demanded more professional training of soldiers, paying more attention to discipline, technical skills and mental constitution. 7
Finally, social status and life conditions of the military changed dramatically over time. Until the mid-seventeenth century the troops of early modern armies were a scourge to the population. The lack of regular wage, poor logistics and foraging, combined with military legislation that allowed them booty in the occasion of sacks and victories, inspired a particularly negative framing of the soldier in the public media of the time. 8 The relative freedom and mobility of the sixteenth-century soldier, such as the German Landsknecht, who was free to join whatever commander who offered him the most attractive contract, came to an end when soldiers were incorporated in armies that transformed them in mere wage-earners and aimed to discipline their behaviour not only on the battlefield but beyond. 9 The semi-permanent settlement of garrisons in early modern urban societies again led to a reconfiguring of expected behaviour and discipline. 10
Professionalisation and growing discipline, however, did not dispel the utterly chaotic and complex character of early modern battles. Rather, advancing military techniques turned battlefields in hell on earth. Huge battles during the succession wars, like the Battle of Blenheim (1704) and the Battle of Fontenoy (1745), were characterised by increasing numbers of dead, wounded and deserted soldiers. 11 This is also the time in which soldiers started to describe their own feelings during combat. Instead of describing the disgraceful fear of their enemiesâas sixteenth-century authors would doâthey started writing about their own fear, as well as about the difficulty to articulate the sensory and emotional perception of the battlefield. 12 In the course of what we now call the âMilitary Enlightenmentâ of the late eighteenth century, 13 military strategists and reformers became aware that the management of the soldierâs emotions could be decisive in battle. The military reformer Henry Lloyd was one of the first to acknowledge that the strength of an army depended on the combat motivation of each individual soldier, a readiness to fight which not only was bound to external circumstances (like payment) but also to internal stimuli. 14 German pioneers like Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst and Carl von Clausewitz had an interest in philosophical issues and discovered the new scholarly field of âSeelenkundeâ (psychology) that became part of their military theory in the last decades of the eighteenth century. 15 With Vom Kriege (1832), Clausewitz enabled a general reading audience to reflect on military experience and behaviour while discussing emotion management as a particular point of interest for military strategists. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century the mental health of the soldier became a concern of military scientists. Military psychiatry emerged as a new field, with special interest in a psychological approach to military trauma. 16
The immense body of literature on military psychology as well as the popularity of veteran memoirs today contrasts sharply with our knowledge of battlefield experience and emotions before Napoleon. Military history has long been focussed on the technical and logistics, on the harder facts and figures of war, but the field of battlefield experience and emotions is in full development. This volume testifies to the recent explorations of historians in the social, cultural and psychological history of the military and the battlefield. 17 The blossoming history of emotions, so far, has largely concerned itself with war and violence from the perspective of the victim. 18 In this book we have tried to bring these scholarly fields together, aiming for an interdisciplinary exploration of battlefield emotions from the perspective of the military, individual soldiers and audiences.
The volume consists of three parts. In the first, the object of study is the military as an emotional community. Authors explore the emotional practices in the army, such as practices of drill, command and obedience, social control and the emotional management of pain and fear. The second part approaches emotional practices and experiences of the individual early modern soldier through the study of autobiographical writing. The third part discusses the mediated battlefield in art, literature, theatre, journals and material cultureâthe war imagined by others, the experience of war at a distance. The division is somewhat artificial because in historical reality collective practices, individual experiences and public imagination interacted and overlapped. As soon as the flourishing printing press and the emergence of genres like the military memoir or published correspondence of officers enabled the public to reflect on battlefield experiences, these reflections would take effect on how soldiers would interpret future experiences and the emotions related to them. Thus, the mediated battlefield provided for a stock of examples, heroic anecdotes and emotive utterances about the battlefield that would help soldiers to frame their own emotional experiences.
Practices
What do we know about the emotional practices of pre-modern soldiers on the battlefield, in their barracks and camps among comrades, and back home with their families? And what do we know about the emotional requirements of early modern soldiers during a battle?
A key issue in the military throughout history is combat motivation. In order to be able to fight, soldiers must overcome fear and be emotionally rewarded for the risks they run. Military drill, and the armyâs system of punishment, compensation and remuneration represents an emotional economy in which fear, pride, honour, faith, loyalty and comradeship play a role in varying degrees over time. In this context, the control and expression of emotions was highly embodied. Physical exercises contributed to the desired mood or emotional state of the troops.
The concept of âemotional habitusâ, introduced by ethno-historian Monique Scheer, seems very apt to describe the emotional socialisation of soldiers in the military. The idea of an emotional habitus...