Limbless veterans at Roehampton Military Hospital

In our Newsletter of July 18, 2014, I suggested that in warfare, loss may be conceived as victory. The “greatness” of one’s nation is demonstrated by virtue of its capacity and willingness to “throw away” human beings & material resources. In our Newsletter of July 19, 2014—responding to Richard Rhodes’ reflections on this mechanism—I hypothesized that loss or sacrifice represents victory because it function to demonstrate the depth of devotion to a sacred object (whether this object is called “Allah” or “Great Britain”). Sacrificial death bears witness to the intensity of belief—and to the reality of the object in the name of which one dies and kills. The proof of the pudding lies in the dying and killing.

In a subsequent email, Rhodes referred to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1987) which, he said, explores how wounding and death in warfare represent ways of “anchoring belief in physical reality.” The opening of the body affirms the “intensity and totality of the sacrificer’s witness.”

The photo above (of British soldiers after the First World War) is an excellent example of how loss might equal gain: how the triumph of belief is registered within the bodies of soldiers, who have given their limbs to their nation. Looking at the faces of these men, one sees pride and self-satisfaction. Rather than regrets, we witness an almost arrogant self-assurance.

In Dismembering the Male (1996), Joanna Bourke observes that public rhetoric in Great Britain during and after the Great War judged soldiers’ mutilations to be “badges of their courage,” the hallmark of their glorious service, “proof of patriotism.” The disabled soldier was not less but “more of a man.” A writer in The Times (1920) stated, “Next to the loss of life, the sacrifice of a limb is the greatest sacrifice a man can make for his country.”

Scarry states that in warfare, the human body is “brought to bear upon the process of verification.” The “alteration of the soldier’s body” in warfare gives witness to the power of ideology. The sheer factualness of the human body lends the cultural construct an “aura of realness or certainty.”

The photo shows that the legs of these soldiers were given away to the nation-state. Body parts have been removed—consumed by the nation. The absence of legs proves the reality of Great Britain. Where legs were, there shall nation be.