Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I've read my share of combat memoirs, which is sort of puzzling and a little pointless, given that war is probably the ultimate you-had-to-have-been-there experience. Hynes quotes the Chanson de Roland poet, among others, on the essential inaccessibility of war stories: "The man who has not understood with his flesh cannot talk to you about it." One of the reasons I read is to vicariously experience things I'm too chickenshit to attempt in real life, but reading about war can't even begin to convey emotions and sensations that have no correlatives in civilian life. It is, nevertheless, a subject I find endlessly compelling, partly due to an irrational but deeply held belief that battle is a necessary ingredient in the formation of manly identity. In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the character Delmar says, "You ain't no kind of man if you ain't got land." I haven't admitted this for most of my adult life because most of the time I'd like to believe that I'm a progressive and a feminist and a kind, empathetic person, but I can't help feeling at some ineradicable, little-boy level that you ain't no kind of a man, either, if you haven't been, as the Civil War veterans put it, "to see the elephant."
Samuel Hynes, a WWII Marine Corps pilot and a professor of English literature at Princeton, was one of the talking heads in Ken Burns' The War (He tells the charming "Remember Pearl Olson" anecdote - which he trots out again here.). He is a perceptive reader and, usually, an elegant stylist and, in this twentieth-century survey of the genre, the chapters about the two world wars are illuminating. The book loses focus in the Vietnam chapter, though, and pretty much goes off the rails in the trendy-feeling chapter about the victims of war. I don't object to Hynes making the assertion that the sufferers in the POW and death camps acted as soldiers of a sort by making small acts of resistance against their keepers. The problem is that he makes it over and over again, finally descending into fatuous, vacuous pc-speak like, "Yet the telling survives. And because it does, we can believe that humankind is not completely powerless so long as it has a voice. Humanity has not been abolished if the stories live."
Bonus fun fact: Flashman's George Macdonald Fraser wrote a combat memoir about his participation in the Burma campaign. That and Hynes' own memoir, Flights of Passage , will be my next forays into the genre.