On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (16 page)

Chapter Five

Killing at Edged- Weapons Range:

An "Intimate Brutality"

At the physical distance in which a soldier has to use a nonprojectile weapon, such as a bayonet or spear, two important corollaries of the physical relationship come into play.

First we must recognize that it is psychologically easier to kill with an edged weapon that permits a long stand-off range, and increasingly more difficult as the stand-off range decreases. Thus it is considerably easier to impale a man with a twenty-foot pike than it is to stab him with a six-inch knife.

The physical range provided by the spears of the Greek and Macedonian phalanx provided much of the psychological leverage that permitted Alexander the Great to conquer the known world.6

The psychological leverage provided by the hedge of pikes was so powerful that the phalanx was resurrected in the Middle Ages and used successfully in the era of mounted knights. Ultimately the phalanx was only replaced by the advent of the superior posturing and psychological leverage provided by gunpowder projectile weapons.

The second corollary to the distance relationship is that it is far easier to deliver a slashing or hacking blow than a piercing blow.

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To pierce is to penetrate, while to slash is to sidestep or deny the objective of piercing into the enemy's essence.

For a bayonet-, spear-, or sword-armed soldier his weapon becomes a natural extension
of
his body — an appendage. And the piercing of the enemy's body with this appendage is an act with some of the sexual connotations we will see in hand-to-hand combat range. To reach out and penetrate the enemy's flesh and thrust a portion of ourselves into his vitals is deeply akin to the sexual act, yet deadly, and is therefore strongly repulsive to us.

T h e R o m a n s apparently had a serious problem with their soldiers not wanting to use piercing blows, for the ancient R o m a n tactician and historian Vegetius emphasized this point at length in a section entitled " N o t to Cut, but to Thrust with the Sword." He says: They were likewise taught not to cut but to thrust with their swords. For the Romans not only made jest of those who fought with the edge of that weapon, but always found them an easy conquest. A stroke with the edges, though made with ever so much force, seldom kills, as the vital parts of the body are defended by the bones and armor. On the contrary, a stab, though it penetrates but two inches, is generally fatal.7

Bayonet Range

Bob McKenna, a professional soldier and magazine columnist, draws upon more than sixteen years of active military service in Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia in order to understand what he calls the "intimate brutality" of bayonet kills. " T h e thought of cold steel sliding into your guts," says McKenna, "is more horrific and real than the thought of a bullet doing the same — perhaps because you can see the steel coming." This p o w -

erful revulsion to being killed with cold steel can also be observed in mutinous Indian soldiers captured during the 1857 Sepoy M u -

tiny who "begged for the bullet" by pleading to be executed with a rifle shot rather than the bayonet. More recently, according to AP news articles, we have seen this in Rwanda, where the Hutu tribesmen made their Tutsi victims purchase the bullets they would be killed with in order to avoid being hacked to death.

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It is not just the killer who feels this profound revulsion toward the intimate brutality of a bayonet kill. John Keegan's landmark book
The Face of Battle
makes a comparative study of Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815), and the Somme (1916). In his analysis of these three battles spanning more than five hundred years, Keegan repeatedly notes the amazing absence of bayonet wounds incurred during the massed bayonet attacks at Waterloo and the Somme. At Waterloo Keegan notes that "there were numbers of sword and lance wounds to be treated and some bayonet wounds, though these had usually been inflicted after the man had already been disabled, there being no evidence of the armies having crossed bayonets at Waterloo." By World War I edged-weapon combat had almost disappeared, and Keegan notes that in the Battle of the Somme, "edged-weapon wounds were a fraction of one per cent of all wounds inflicted."

Three major psychological factors come into play in bayonet combat. First, the vast majority of soldiers who do approach bayonet range with the enemy use the butt of the weapon or any other available means to incapacitate or injure the enemy rather than skewer him. Second, when the bayonet is used, the close range at which the work is done results in a situation with enormous potential for psychological trauma. And, finally, the resistance to killing with the bayonet is equal only to the enemy's horror at having this done to him. Thus in bayonet charges one side or the other invariably flees before the actual crossing of bayonets occurs.

Actual bayonet combat is extremely rare in military history. General Trochu saw only one bayonet fight in a lifetime of soldiering with the French army in the nineteenth century, and that was when French units collided by accident with a Russian regiment in the heavy fog of the Crimean War's Battle of Inkerman in 1854. And in these rare bayonet engagements actual bayonet wounds were even rarer yet.

When this uncommon event does occur, and one bayonet-armed man stands face-to-face with another, what happens most commonly is anything but a thrust with the bayonet. Just as Roman legionnaires had to fight the tendency to slash with their swords KILLING AT E D G E D - W E A P O N S R A N G E 123

rather than thrust, so too do modern soldiers tend to use their weapons in a manner that will not necessitate thrusting into their enemy's bodies.

Holmes says that despite all the bayonet training soldiers receive,

"in combat they very often reversed their weapons and used them as clubs. . . . T h e Germans seem to have a positive penchant for using the butt rather than the bayonet. . . . In close-in fighting the Germans preferred clubs, coshes, and sharpened spades." N o t e that all of these are bludgeoning or hacking weapons.

He goes on to give a superb example of the subtle and unconscious nature of this resistance to bayoneting: "Prince Frederick Charles asked a [World War I] German infantryman why he did this. 'I don't know,' replied the soldier. ' W h e n you get your dander up the thing turns round in your hand of itself.'"

Numerous accounts of American Civil War battles indicate the same resistance to use of the bayonet on the part of the vast majority of soldiers on both sides. In melees both Yank and R e b preferred to use the butt of the weapon, or to swing their muskets by the barrel like a club, rather than gut the enemy with their bayonets.

Some writers have concluded that a specific characteristic of this brother-against-brother civil war must have been the cause of the soldier's reluctance to bayonet his enemy, but wound statistics from nearly two centuries of battles indicate that what is revealed here is a basic, profound, and universal insight into human nature.

First, the closer the soldier draws to his enemy the harder it is to kill him, until at bayonet range it becomes extremely difficult, and, second, the average human being has a strong resistance to piercing the body of another of his o w n kind with a handheld edged weapon, preferring to club or slash at the enemy.

Since personal kills with a bayonet are so extraordinarily rare on the battlefield, it is much to Richard Holmes's credit that his lifetime of study in this field has gleaned the following personal narratives from individuals w h o contributed to this "fraction of one per cent of all wounds inflicted" in modern war.

In one such narrative, a lance corporal in the German infantry in 1915 describes a bayonet kill:

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We got the order to storm a French position, strongly held by the enemy, and during the ensuing melee a French corporal suddenly stood before me, both our bayonets at the ready, he to kill me, 1

to kill him. Saber duels in Freiburg had taught me to be quicker than he and pushing his weapon aside I stabbed him through the chest. He dropped his rifle and fell, and the blood shot out of his mouth. I stood over him for a few seconds and then 1 gave him the coup de grace. After we had taken the enemy position, I felt giddy, my knees shook, and I was actually sick.

He goes on to state that this bayoneted Frenchman, apparently above all other incidents in combat, haunted his dreams for many nights thereafter. Indeed, the "intimate brutality" of bayonet killing gives every indication of being a circumstance with tremendous potential for psychological trauma.

An Australian soldier in World W a r I, writing in a letter to his father, puts a distinctly different light on bayoneting Germans: Strike me pink the square heads are dead mongrels. They will keep firing until you are two yds. off them & then drop their rifles & ask for mercy. They get it too right where the chicken gets the axe. . . . I . . . will fix a few more before I have finished. Its good sport father when the bayonet goes in there eyes bulge out like prawns. [Sic]

If we can believe what is said here, and if both the killing and the lack of remorse were not just idle bragging to his father, then this soldier represents one of those rare soldiers w h o have the internal makeup to participate in such an act. Later in this book we will address predisposition as a factor in killing, with particular emphasis on the 2 percent who are predisposed toward what has been termed

"aggressive psychopathic" tendencies. And in the section "Killing and Atrocities" we will more closely consider the process in which soldiers who fight at close range and attempt to surrender stand a good chance of being killed on the spot by the soldiers they had most recently been trying to kill. T h e objective here is to gain insight into the nature of killing with edged weapons, and into the nature of those w h o are able to kill in this manner. And from KILLING AT EDGED-WEAPONS RANGE

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what we can observe, it must be a rare and unusual individual who can find such activity to be "good sport."

Another Australian, a World War I veteran of the first Battle of Gaza, who apparently did not participate in any bayonet kills, described bayonet fighting as "just berserk slaughter . . . the grunt-ing breaths, the gritting teeth and the staring eyes of the lunging Turk, the sobbing scream as the bayonet ripped home." Here we see combat at its most personal. When a man bayonets a person who is facing him, the "sobbing scream," the blood shooting out of his mouth, and his eyes bulging out "like prawns" are all part of the memory the killer must carry forever. This is killing with edged weapons, and it is no wonder that it is so extraordinarily rare in modern warfare.

We can understand then that the average soldier has an intense resistance toward bayoneting his fellow man, and that this act is surpassed only by the resistance to
being
bayoneted. The horror of being bayoneted is intense. Lord Moran said that during his long years of experience in the trenches of World War I, the one time

"when I had a bayonet a few inches from my belly I was more frightened than by any shell." And Remarque, in
All Quiet on the
Western Front,
tells of a German soldier who was caught while in possession of one of the saw-backed pioneer bayonets and was subsequently brutally killed and left as an example to his peers.

Holmes tells us that Germans in both wars who were found with such weapons were so treated by captors who were horrified by the weapon and thought that it was deliberately designed to cause added suffering.8

Soldiers who would bravely face a hail of bullets will consistently flee before a determined individual with cold steel in his hands. Du Picq noted, "Each nation in Europe says: 'No one stands his ground before a bayonet charge made by us.' And all are right." A human wave of cold steel — be it pikes, spears, or bayonets — coming at one's position would be cause for understandable concern on anyone's part, and as Holmes puts it "one side or the other usually recalls an urgent appointment elsewhere before bayonets cross." Very often neither side can bring itself to 126

KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

close with the enemy's bayonets, the advance falters, and the two parties begin to fire at one another from ridiculously short ranges.

World War II veteran Fred Majdalany wrote that there was a lot of loose talk about the use of the bayonet. But relatively few soldiers could truthfully say that they had stuck a bayonet into a German. It is the threat of the bayonet and the sight of the point that usually does the work. The man almost invariably surrenders
before
the point is stuck into him.

In the modern bayonet charge one side or the other usually breaks and runs before they meet, and then the psychological balance tips significantly. But this does not mean that bayonets and bayonet charges are ineffective. As Paddy Griffith points out: A great deal of misunderstanding has arisen from the fact that a

"bayonet charge" could be highly effective even without any bayonet actually touching an enemy soldier, let alone killing him. One hundred per cent of the casualties might be caused by musketry, yet the bayonet could still be the instrument of victory. This was because its purpose was not to kill soldiers but to disorganize regiments and win ground. It was the flourish of the bayonet and the determination in the eyes of its owner that on some occasions produced shock.

Units with a history and tradition of close-combat, hand-to-hand killing inspire special dread and fear in an enemy by capitalizing upon this natural aversion to the " h a t e " manifested in this determination to engage in close-range interpersonal aggression. T h e British Gurkha battalions have been historically effective at this (as can be seen in the Argentinean's dread of them during the Falklands War), but any unit that puts a measure of faith in the bayonet has grasped a little of the natural dread with which an enemy responds to the possibility of facing an opponent who is determined to come within "skewering range."