Innocence and experience

Over on the DMN book club blog, we're continuing to talk about Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory," and Dr. Allums recently posted a reflection on the palpable anger that infuses Fussell's acclaimed work. Where does that anger come from? Here's Fussell, a World War II infantry officer, from his 1996 memoir "Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic":

At dawn, I awoke, and what I now saw all around me were numerous objects I'd miraculously not tripped over in the dark. These were dozens of dead German boys in greenish gray uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were replacing. If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces and hands like marble, still clutching their rifles and machine pistols in their seventeen-year-old hands. One body was only a foot or so away from me, and I found myself fascinated by the stubble of his beard, which would have earned him a rebuke on a parade ground but not here, not anymore. Michealngelo could have made something beautiful out of these forms, in the tradition of the 'Dying Gaul,' and I was astonished to find that in a way I couldn't understand, at first they struck me as awful but beautiful. But after a moment, no feeling but horror. My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakeneing, fell away all at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just. To transform silly conscripts into cold marble after passing them through unbearable humiliation and fear seemed to do them an interesting injustice. I decided to ponder these things. In 1917, shocked by the ghastliness of the Battle of the Somme and recovering from a nervous breakdown, Wilfred Owen was seeking relief by reading a life of Tennyson. He wrote his mother: "Tennyson, it seems, was always a great child. So should I have been but for Beaumont Hamel." So should I have been but for the forest overlooking St. Die'.