The Dulce et decorum motif

Heroism is an oft-addressed subject, as we all know, starting from school in Polish, history, and civics lessons, through innumerable publications, to the most august academic conferences. For example, in a review of memoirs as a historical source on the basis of the recollections of Philippe‑Paul, comte de Ségur¹, the Polish Military Institute of History noted that this author’s observations on the passions and emotions triggered in people by their experiences of war, and the capacity some noble individuals had for self‑sacrifice and heroic deeds were still relevant today (Wrzosek 1971: 356).

As we get more and more publications on the medical, psychological, and sociological aspects of the past War and other scientific works on the War, we are also getting more publications that take a reflective approach to the War, many of which are well worth reading and sometimes spark discussion, as we have shown in this periodical. Many of the remarks made in such works will no doubt call for verification as time goes on², compared against a broader background built up by publications of this kind, which will continue to accrue.

However, we can no longer ignore the duty to record new ideas and supplement them with remarks and comments of our own. Many of the general observations made by people working on wartime memoir literature refer to a considerable spell of time, going back to the years prior to the Second World War. There is nothing strange about this, for the sombre spell of Poland’s wartime occupation is but a fraction of the lives of those whose personal experience pulled them into the vortex of dramatic wartime events, and after the lapse of many years is prompting them to engage in retrospective reflection generated in new, contemporary times.

One of the favourite subjects for school essays before the War was the Horatian maxim, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country). There was an aura of romantic heroism about the idea of dying for one’s country. That was the attitude with which many young people went to war. Death for one’s country was considered the supreme proof of one’s personal worth. Patriotic upbringing gave rise to many a heroic deed and the fine attitude adopted by many young soldiers and officers on the front and in the underground resistance movement, thereby help to issue “an entry into the annals of history” for the Polish nation, as Zbigniew Załuski put it. Some of these people met a terrible fate, in Gestapo prisons and Nazi German concentration camps, rather than with sword in hand on the battlefield of their dreams.

Not only the extreme monstrosity of the Nazi German concentration camps, but also the history of wars reveals the sheer horror of this subject. The Polish reviewer of de Ségur’s book writes, “Napoleon did everything in compliance with the law and for freedom and the well‑being of others. No one ever did any otherwise, until the bloodthirsty madness of the twentieth‑century fascist dictators released them from this convention, whereupon they would declare quite candidly that they would kill all the Poles, for instance, because they considered them a horde of dirty troglodytes, and that was a sufficient reason.” (Czeszko 1968: 121)

In his essay on frontline soldiers apparently turning into beasts under the impact of “the hashish of battle,” Melchior Wańkowicz reached a conclusion that the literature on the War was “complex‑ridden.” According to Wańkowicz the writings of World War 2’s concentration camp survivors have given us a “complex‑ridden literature,” while Erich Maria Remarque, author of a blood‑curdling study of cruelty, was yet another reflection of those Second World War complexes. Yet Wańkowicz admitted that “not even the most inhuman indoctrination could kill the human in Man. . . . What about aspects of human sympathy? They are repressed whenever soldiers are ordered to kill. But, as if by way of compensation, they are restored most forcefully whenever a soldier can afford to do so psychologically.”

In late eighteenth‑century Poland the motto “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country” fell on fertile ground, in connection with the rise of patriotic feeling associated with the growing sense of Polish national identity in the last years of the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764–1795). Yet certainly by the following century, until the close of the 1820s (viz. after Poland’s loss of independence to three Partitioning Powers), some had started to treat this idea of patriotism as not suited to the situation under foreign rule. So the matter is not entirely new and has its historical analogue.

Characteristic evidence of this comes in Adam Mickiewicz’s famous poem “Do matki Polki” (To a Polish mother) of July 1830. Aware of the fact that Polish underground freedom fighters would have to do battle in new and far more difficult conditions, the national bard wrote the following prophetic words:

. . . Your son is summoned to battle for no glory,
To martyr’s death with no resurrection.

Send him early into the solitary cave
To ponder and sleep upon a bulrush bed,
Dank, fetid vapours there to inhale,
The venomous serpent close by his head.

There let him learn to hide his wrath underground,
His ideas abstruse like the abyss, unstopped,
His speech silently killing like miasma unsound,
His body slight, slithering like the snake stone‑cold. . . .

Mickiewicz was aware of the situation in which a modern fighter for the oppressed nation’s freedom was likely to find himself and advised the Polish mother to accustom the future independence fighter to the worst, often humiliating dangers:

Early shackle chains about his wrists,
Bind him to the prisoner’s barrow,
Lest he blench on seeing hangman’s fists,
Lest the whip should flush him to the marrow.

For he shall not like Crusaders ride
The cross of victory in ‘Salem to install,
Nor like the New World Patriots stride
To till the soil of freedom, but soak it with his gore.

His summons served by unnamed spy,
He’ll stand before a forsworn court and fight,
His battlefield an open pit for the decried,
His sentence cast by a foe of awesome might.

Instead of gravestone for the vanquished
The dry gibbet shall be left to stand;
For dirge a woman’s wail, short and anguished,
And long parley by night ‘mid fellows from his native land.

For 130 years this poem was erroneously read as a testimonial of Mickiewicz’s loss of faith in the purpose of self‑sacrifice. Yet in point of fact it shows that Mickiewicz appreciated the need for a change in the form of battle. It was not until 1961 that Wacław Kubacki spotted this and published a separate essay on his observation.

What is striking about Mickiewicz’s poem compared with concentration camp literature, including hundreds of relations published in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim is that there are detailed analogies between them, virtually line by line, regarding situations and material objects. For instance, Auschwitz inmates were harnessed up to pull a Rollwage (a road roller); the Gestapo had literally dragged them out of their homes; the Sondergericht summary courts were a parody of normal courts of justice, and the death sentences Nazi Germans handed down in them preceded the executions and the deposition of victims’ bodies in mass, unmarked pits. A comparison of lines from Dante’s Inferno with passages from survivors’ memoirs gives the same, gruesome effect (Masłowski 1971).

Of course associations of this kind could not possibly have come to the minds of pre‑war writers. The predominant theme was Dulce et Decorum, the prototype of the Romantic hero. Imagine a young man educated in the atmosphere of the interwar schools, and full of admiration for the heroic death of the armed hero, finding himself in a Nazi German concentration camp, where killing had been stripped of its aura of heroism, and what made death so terrifying was that it occurred on a mass scale with all its abhorrence and heaps of random corpses. Death in the German concentration camp meant people perishing in abject inanition, cursed, beaten, and left in their excrement. An inmate did his very best, right to the end, to evade such a death and survive at any cost, or at least prolong his life for another hour (as in the penal commandos), or for the next day. His struggle to save his life was the condition of survival; if at any time the idea of death crossed his mind, usually his tragic, desperate intention to free himself of the unimaginable suffering would soon be fulfilled.

If we look at it from the medical and psychological point of view, we shall have to say that the sight of corpses is absolutely repugnant to humans, and probably many animals as well, especially those at the top of the ladder of evolution. The sight is the very opposite of life, generally giving rise to abhorrence, anxiety, and the wish to run away from it. From the very earliest times of his cultural development Man has always stood up in opposition to the reflex of repugnance, devising all manner of rituals connected with death and comforting himself that death is not the end. It is highly paradoxical that what has come down to us of the ancient civilisations and what makes many of them so grand is connected with their cult of the dead, which in some cultures, such as in Ancient Egypt, reached monstrous proportions.

The question arises to what extent the development of culture has been proceeding against the grain of common sense. All these things which have survived of diverse cultures, leaving a clear mark on the growth of universal human culture, generally went beyond the pale of ordinary, commonsensical everyday life, were of no immediate practical use, often a fantasy, separated off from the reality and concreteness of life, an abstraction (the Latin verb abstraho means “I remove or tear something away,” and it is the opposite of concresco, “I develop and grow in the company of something else”).

One of the things adjusting to life in a concentration camp called for was getting used to the repugnance of death, overcoming one’s natural reaction of disgust, and forgetting about all the rituals associated with death practised in the cultural world. Many survivors have reacted in a shocking way to ceremonies connected with death. The sight of a funeral cortege and the sad faces of mourners attending the deceased on his last journey made them burst out laughing. For most of them death on the battlefield has lost its aura of respectful mystery.

The mass scale and technology of wartime killing, which reached a peak in Auschwitz and Hiroshima, seem to have had a substantial effect on modifying the attitude of modern Man to heroic death and heroism as such.

Heroism is a common subject in post‑war fiction and deserves a separate, extensive study. It is quite a complex matter, for although it appears to concern human attitudes, the worldview and actions of entire generations, the extent of their political awareness, settling old accounts and educating the young etc., the basic concepts involved have not been rigorously defined. Sometimes true heroism is criticised for faults more befitting heroics, the stereotypical, conventional type of “heroism.” This may lead to wrongful misunderstandings.

Patriotic attitudes and readiness to behave heroically cannot be undermined by the fact the romanticism of war has lost its lustre, and instead its mass cruelty and senselessness have come to the fore. Of course we don’t know whether the experience of the death camps and the atomic bomb will stop people from engaging in total war in the future, the best we can do is to hope that there will be a lasting, universal peace, and continue to make an effort to maintain it. However, it seems that people’s psychological readiness to engage in mass murder has been attenuated very considerably. But we cannot forget that the aggression in the Congo and Vietnam was supported by groups of mercenaries with Nazis such as the infamous Kongo Müller among them, in search of the opportunity for cruelty.

Attempting to prove one’s mettle honourably on the field of battle has generally lost its appeal; in any case modern warfare with its science and technology is leaving the individual less and less room for such behaviour. History, which until recently concerned war and political struggle, is turning more and more to economic and cultural issues. The search is on for a new heroic ideal; the man who bravely killed others and risked his own life no longer fits in with the modern methods of warfare. War itself has ceased to be attractive. We are beginning to consider things like the courage to stand by one’s beliefs, the search for new ways to see reality, dedicating one’s life to the arts or sciences as heroic. One of the people who have addressed the matter is Jerzy Broszkiewicz in a television interview conducted by W. Cybulski on 1 March 1971, on a film about Copernicus.³ It is not yet clear what the hero of our time is to be like, but we do know that the warrior ideal has receded into the background.

Heroism has not become an irrelevant issue. There is a heroic streak in every person, especially in the youth, and a properly educated concept of heroism plays an important part in character development.

In our assessment of war and heroism we cannot overlook the horrific situation of prisoners held in Nazi German concentration camps, which radically disclosed the horror of total invasive war and challenged attitudes to heroism. The matter certainly calls for discussion.

Life in those camps revealed the truth about Man. “The king was naked.” In many of the survivors you can observe a search for the truth going on beneath the soft social manners and the diverse masks you have to put on in everyday life. What’s more, you could go as far as to claim that this attitude has passed on to today’s young generation. Many of the conflicts between the young and the old generation arise precisely for such reasons. The young accuse the old of hypocrisy. Of course, there has always been a conflict between the young and the old, because the young have not yet become accustomed to the duplicity in social life, but it has never been as acute as it is now. For the young a hero must be real, “authentic,” as they say nowadays.

The fairly long period of relative stability in Europe until the First World War—the Victorian age and the golden era of Emperor Franz Joseph—most probably contributed to the establishment of certain forms in social life, and hence also to the rise of hypocrisy. Never was sentimentality as popular as it was then, yet often beneath its mawkish surface there cowered brutality and remorselessness.

The First World War disclosed the brutality of life and by the interwar years the mantle of sentimentality had become very disfigured. The Second World War completed the destruction of the duplicity of social life. The brutality which manifested itself so monstrously during the War could not simply disappear from post‑war life once the War was over. It is still offending many people, yet often beneath it there are hidden more delicate feelings, truer and nobler emotions.

Of course we cannot base our argument on generalisation, but the situation seems to have flipped over into its converse. In the past sentimentality often had an underlay of brutality; nowadays often there are subtle feelings hidden under the brutality. At any rate, sentimentality has lost its popularity, which has to be counted to the credit of the present times, because sentimentality is the most deceitful emotion.

If in that stabilised, bygone age people were satisfied with an emotional order adapted to social requirements, in contemporary times people are looking for the profound truth about humankind; often they are no longer embarrassed about things that were once kept hidden away, or not even fully realised; our awareness of the truth about ourselves seems to be greater than it was in the past.

This type of expansion of self‑knowledge gives rise to a sense of chaos; we cannot control all that is coming to light from within ourselves. If the scope of our awareness is narrow, then it’s easier to set up a make‑believe order in our emotional lives, yet it is an artificial, false order, readily collapsible in extreme situations, e.g. under the impact of war or the threat of concentration camps. The death camps revealed the truth about the Man, and humanity still cannot get over it. But it has forced us to face up to the question, “What am I really like?”

Decorum has been undermined as well. But can we answer the question about Man’s true face, for is it not decorum that constitutes some of his subtlest, noblest forms of existence? In the Nazi German concentration camps such conduct was relentlessly stripped away; the individual was reduced down to his “number,” his utility determined his value. The principle of utility held even after a prisoner’s death; his hair, gold teeth etc. were stored away. Assessing a person’s value in terms of his utility is one of the negative features of the technological civilisation. It comes from the technological approach to humanity; in his relations with the technological world which he has created Man inadvertently adopts such an approach in the way he sees other people—like technological gadgets, and their utility is the measure of their value. Whatever is useless may be thrown away. Decorum is of no avail. So utility cannot be the chief and exclusive criterion.

To survive the concentration camp a prisoner had to defy the idea of being “a number.” He had to find values within himself—thinking of his nearest and dearest, of life in freedom, of revenge, friendship, patriotism, idealistic tenets, religious faith, trust in his fellow‑prisoners etc.—to tear him away from the monstrous and depressing concreteness of life in the camp. The concentration camp scraped off the decorum an individual had had up to that time, but it also forced him to create a new decorum. He could not just be a useful number for the insane Nazi German machine.

The question of utility is connected with one’s attitude to death. A person who is dead is totally useless. The only problem is how to dispose of the corpse. Finding a solution to this worry was a vexation for Rudolf Höß, the commandant of Auschwitz. The old, the disabled, and the chronically ill may also be said to be useless; in Auschwitz they were “sent to the gas.” In the technological society they are isolated off in various types of welfare homes. The question of death looks quite different in the world of Nature. There death is constantly intertwined with life. For single‑celled organisms death is usually the moment when a new life arises. In organisms consisting of many cells the life process entails the death of some cells and the proliferation of others. Their potential for the transfer of their genetic code withstands the prospect of complete annihilation.

The utility rule applies in life, too. Both morphological as well as functional forms become obsolete when they are no longer useful. However, that does not make life itself “useless.” Such an idea would be nonsense. Life is an aim in itself; it is constantly in search of new, superior forms of order; its old, inferior forms die away and are replaced by new, more integrated ones. This is the process of evolution, to which Man is subject not only within the scope of generations, but also in his individual life. Man’s evolution concerns mostly his functional forms, for his morphological forms are not undergoing much change. And those of his functional forms which are transforming are mainly those which involve his ability to exchange information with his environment; the forms for his energy metabolism are not so far away from what is observed in the animal world, at least in the higher animal world.

The way the human nervous system has developed in practice gives Man an infinite potential to create functional forms (functional structures) in his “informational metabolism.” Without doubt this potential is being used only to a small extent, most of it is degenerating into atrophy through lack of opportunities for growth. Most probably the extraordinary scope of this potential for the creation of diverse functional structures makes Man transcend the concreteness of life. His ways of experiencing and behaving go well beyond the moment of birth and are conditioned by his cultural tradition. He enters a ready‑made system of functional structures, so those that do not fit into the system have no chance to develop and they die away. Thus birth does not mark the beginning of everything, for Man is defined not only in the sense of biological but cultural inheritance as well, by what came before him, and his inheritance goes back into the remote past.

Neither is death the end of everything for Man. Not only does he leave his biological, but also his cultural legacy. His genetic plan is materialised in the following generations, and his creativity, activity, and influence on other people do not vanish when he dies. Every human individual, even the humblest, leaves a vestige of himself. Man cannot be enclosed within the bounds of his own birth and death; his life is attached to the past and reaches out into the future.

That is why for normal development the human individual needs tradition (i.e. a past) and transcendent aims (a future). He should be able to say, “I know where I have come from and where I am going.” Treating a human individual from the aspect of his current utility clashes against his natural time coordinates, which go back well into the past and forward into the distant future. The human individual does not fit into the current “here and now”; his gaze is always well ahead. He reaches out into the future beyond the limits of his own life, and he tries to learn the reality that surrounds him beyond the ordinary picture his senses present him with; he secretively believes that “not all of him will die,” that something, even the slightest trace, will survive.

Many of these traces, viewed retrospectively, assume the dimensions of heroism. Let’s recall some of the best‑known examples of those who devoted their lives and their social and political activities for the benefit of mankind. Dr Halina Jankowska, who died with her patients in the ruins of the St. John of God Hospital in Warsaw; Dr Janusz Korczak, who voluntarily went with his young charges to their deaths; and Father Kolbe, who gave his life up for another Auschwitz inmate. All of them made a spontaneous choice determined by their personal attitude, conscience, and assessment of the new, ominous, unprecedented situation. We are quite right to consider many other people’s similar attitudes heroic. It’s a tradition making up just a link in an oft obscured chain of deeds in everyday life which call for heroism, true and genuine heroism.

There were many more such deeds in the concentration camps; many of them have sunk into oblivion. We should note that we still have such true heroes of the last War living among us, but many a time their feats are unknown even to their closest family members. They think that what they did was only “what they should have done.” That’s more than just ordinary modesty. As a result many facts from those most difficult years in our history will remain unknown, not passed down to posterity as memories and recollections; while on the other hand sometimes we tend to amplify and promote other facts from the period of Poland’s wartime occupation that may indeed be unusual, but not truly heroic. So alongside the true heroes we know of there are others who are hidden.

This is an issue that has been intriguing those who are involved in accessing, editing, and publishing wartime memoirs. This is what the situation is like in retrospect. The spontaneous deeds of heroism done during the War were not done to set up the person who accomplished them on a pedestal, but because his conscience told him to do it. Such ideas came to people who were able to take a broader view of things, beyond the pale of their survival instinct and wish to save their own lives without worrying about others.

Perhaps this ability to transcend the concreteness of the given situation actually helped many prisoners survive the concentration camp pandemonium. Professor Stanisław Pigoń has given a fine description of this in his recollections of Sachsenhausen. He compares the levels of a prisoner’s resilience to a castle’s defensive structure, its bailey (the lower level) and its keep, the highest and safest place (Pigoń 1968: 204).

The crisis of tradition and transcendence our civilisation is going through now is making it difficult for contemporary Man to establish his bearings on the past and the future. He tends to say, “I don’t know where I have come from or where I am going.” So he feels lost and easily consents to be evaluated on the basis of his current utility. That is why nowadays from his very youth he tends to be anxious about death and old age. If you look at a human individual merely from the aspect of his utility, old age and death mark the end of everything.

The last War, and especially its methods of mass extermination, have shaken the old aura of the war hero, and have undermined the hitherto conventional forms of tradition and transcendent aims. At the same time they have disclosed the layers of the human psyche which previously went virtually unnoticed. Humanity is facing a daunting challenge: to construct a new model of heroism and new ways of looking at its past and future, and to define the broader scope of awareness it now has. How and to what extent we manage to accomplish this task will most probably have a signal effect on the future of our culture.

Our future will definitely be affected by the attitude and activity of the young generation, for whom the Second World War is merely a page in history. But it happens to be a past which has not entirely receded into history without exerting an impact on the young. There are things that connect the past with the present and reach out into the future. The specialist publications on some aspects of the last War, such as the medical aspects, aren’t convincing enough in this respect; however, what may be convincing are the attempts at a broader examination presented in numerous publications and recollections. The levels of observation we are in search of are being superimposed on such general studies. For example the psychiatric, psychological, and sociological research that has been done has helped to lift the veil a little over survivors’ inner experiences, for us to look into the moral and ethical problems in the Nazi German concentration camps. Upon the framework of an information structure being built up so arduously the publications we are looking forward to will let us draw more and more lessons from the examination of the problems associated with the Second World War.

If we do not take up this challenge we shall not be able to protect the young generations against indifference to the Second World War; we shall not get them to read these publications and explain to them that the quote from Wańkowicz’s essay about the experiences of concentration camp survivors giving us a “complex‑ridden” literature should not be misunderstood or taken at face value.

Translated from the original article: Kępiński, A., Masłowski, J. “Motyw ‘Dulce et decorum.’” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1972.

Notes

1. Philippe-Paul, comte de Ségur (1780–1873), French historian and Napoleonic general.
2. The authors write from the perspective of 1972.
3. Interestingly, dulce, the first word of the aphorism, is very problematic to translate. It certainly did not denote the same taste as our “sweet,” nor did it mean “pleasant.” This has been pointed out by T. Żychiewicz, who writes, “The Romans did not have sugar or saccharine. All they had for sweetening was honey. The honey of the Roman countryside was rather tart and sharp on the throat. It contained the wide, open, bottomless sky and the almost raucous singing of the cicadas of a still noontide, the wind that combed the heads of flowers down low during a storm, and the fragrances stifling from the weight of the soil. That’s the taste of the Latin word dulce—absolutely different from what we mean by “sweet.” Absolutely different even from the Italian word dolce, despite the fact that the Italian soil and the sky over Italy haven’t changed. And that’s why a Roman soldier had the right to speak of “sweet death” for a good cause. But we don’t. . . . Habent sua fata verba (Words, too, have their own fate).” Quoted after J. Tokarski, 1971: 131.