The measure of a man

It is hard to be a man. At least, so I’m told. Castrating schemes and humiliating rites allegedly threaten the unwary male. Girlfriends have become assertive; the executive director wears a skirt. Even science has conspired against men: Increasingly sophisticated in vitro fertilization may yet render a male presence in the bedroom redundant. The problem has even come to the attention of feminists more and more concerned about the state of this new “second sex.” Many men don’t know where to turn. Leo Braudy’s new book, “From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity,” won’t restore the castrated male, but it will remind him that manliness has always been in flux and that diversity and confusion can be creative.

“From Chivalry to Terrorism” is history at its most powerful. It is impossible to do justice to the range of fascinating material in this book. If you want to know about things as diverse as pornography or pacifism, male domesticity or military training, novels or machines, nationalism or athletics, romance or religion, pirates or highwaymen, you can look here. This series of interpretive essays is empathetic, analytical history at its best and most lively. It is also deeply personal. Braudy, a professor of English and American literature at USC and author of “The Frenzy of Renown,” an influential study of the history of fame, among other works, is not afraid to put himself on the page. With bemusing modesty, he says he is writing “as an ordinary man and citizen, steeped in a never ending barrage of stories about men and war.”

Braudy’s book is much more ambitious than its title suggests. There is, however, little on terrorism, and the first paragraph insists that “war is not its theme.” Rather, with encyclopedic thoroughness, Braudy sets out to tell us what it has meant to be a man, from the Norman Conquest of England to present-day America. Men are made, not born. And although Braudy believes that combat is the “crucible of masculinity,” war is really only the armor within which Braudy encases his themes. Manliness is too complex to be reduced to the warrior ethos, he says.

Nevertheless, Braudy is right in arguing that warfare throughout history has been one of the central rites of manliness. Despite the presence of women in and near the front lines and the massive mobilization of female labor in military production, women’s role in war has been relegated to the home front, where they act in a limited fashion as virgins, whores or mothers. Across time and cultures, combat has been a man’s occupation. This does not mean that men are somehow primed for war. Those who argue that men’s minds are different from female ones are only arguing in terms of averages. As that other astute interpreter of masculinity Joshua Goldstein argues, biology may provide some answer to the question of why war tends to involve men -- but not why it is almost exclusively male. It only explains why men “on average” have a greater propensity for war. In contrast to the idea that biology is fixed while culture is flexible, “biology provides diverse potentials which culture then limits, selects, and channels,” Goldstein reminds.

Culturally, armed conflict has provided the main test for men wanting to claim their right to the power and prestige of being “men.” After all, war does not come naturally. That is why men need considerable socialization and training to engage in combat. Most men don’t want to fight -- and that includes men who have chosen a career in the armed forces. In a 1992 survey of the U.S. military, only 14% of enlisted officers said they would volunteer for combat if they had a choice. Harsh discipline, including the death penalty, is needed to get guys to pump lead.

Braudy contends that women play a central role in socializing men for armed conflict and that war would not happen if women weren’t so keen to buckle on men’s psychological (if not military) armor. He tells the story of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who invaded Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire. Fearing defeat in the battle for Ravenna, Theodoric prepared to order his troops to retreat. His mortified mother rushed up to Theodoric, demanding that he act like a man by continuing to fight. When he ignored her, she lifted up the front of her dress and said, “Truly, dear son, you have nowhere to flee unless you return to the womb from whence you came!” Shamed, Theodoric returned to battle. The historical truth of this story is questionable, but it illustrates the societal pressures on a man to act honorably and bravely in battle if he is to retain his birthright as a man.

In modern times as well, the majority of women have supported the martial endeavors of their menfolk. Indeed, during the wars of this century, women have been recorded wishing they could be allowed to kill the enemy with their own hands. Men in the trenches were much more liable to feel pity for their opponents: After all, front-line soldiers knew that the men in the opposing trenches were cold and hungry, cannon fodder just like themselves. Womenfolk back home -- scared witless about the safety of their lovers, husbands and brothers, yet unable to externalize their terror through aggressive “hitting back” at the enemy -- responded with profound verbal hatred and aggressiveness against the Hun, Nazi or other pernicious foe. As Braudy acknowledges, violent fantasies are widespread: The John Wayne syndrome has a robust counterpart in the G.I. Jane syndrome.

Braudy recognizes that gender is a relational concept -- you can’t know what is manly unless you know what is womanly. But it is the John Wayne syndrome and its numerous permutations through the centuries that intrigue him. He is particularly insightful when examining questions about physiology and maleness. Are men innately aggressive? Is there a link between testosterone and tyranny? Could aggression be the result of testosterone deficiency rather than its excess? The most consistent thread in the book is about changing notions of honor and the way these notions have been used to justify violence. There are marvelous vignettes drawn from the past. For instance, how did chivalrous behavior change after the defeat of French mounted knights by English archers and knights on foot in the battle of Agincourt in 1415? What was religion’s role in preparing men to go to battle in the 15th through 18th centuries? Was there a “military revolution” in the late 16th century? Did advancing technology wreck the plausibility of claiming to be a manly, principled warrior? Of course, as Braudy carefully documents, notions of chivalry proved remarkably flexible. World War I, however, did cause a crisis. By 1916, the men doing the fighting were no longer “socialized warriors.” Many had only a few weeks’ training before being flung into the trenches of Flanders. These conscripted combatants were ambivalent. Chivalry, manly strength and righteousness had no place in the vast and anonymous landscape of modern warfare. It was in this context that servicemen struggled to define what it meant to be “men.” Where was heroism or individual prowess?

There was one place, though, where the chivalric idea lasted a bit longer. High above the bloody, muddy trenches were the airmen, who saw themselves fighting a clean war, raining death on a filthy foe below. Air warfare was seen to involve certain chivalrous codes, such as honorable exchange, compassion and altruism. It also invoked reckless adventure and a high-minded disdain of death. Most important, aerial warfare symbolized individual prowess in anonymous, technologically driven warfare. Despite attempts by the Royal Flying Corps commanders to insist upon individuals’ interdependence and joint responsibility for victories, they failed to halt the romanticization of individual aviators during World War I. Aerial combatants manipulated knightly grammar to describe their actions. Fighter pilots were described by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George as the “knighthood of this war.”

As in his discussion of the cult of the airman, Braudy does not shy away from the glamor and excitement of war. He analyzes the glorious flesh of the imagination: the chiseled features of airmen and the muscular bulk of sailors. These representations of warriors can inspire military fervor. Walter Ralegh, Francis Drake, Robert Clive, Charles Gordon, David Livingston and T.E. Lawrence were the romantic symbols that filled boys’ magazines. Flying aces such as Germany’s Erich Hartmann (who scored 352 hits during World War II) were heroes about whom many men dreamed. There is even glamor in death. In Victorian literature, for instance, heroic sacrifice is at the heart of many swashbuckling boys’ stories. Thus, in J.M. Barrie’s play of 1904, when Peter Pan nearly drowns while trying to save Wendy, he thinks: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

Braudy is all too aware of the other side to the male warrior myth. In war there is horror. Artistic representations are particularly effective in making this point. Otto Dix’s “War Triptych” (1932) and Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937) present us with the mutilated, agonized and contorted flesh of combat. There is no glory there, no hypnotic beating of drums, no braying horses, no clash of sword against sword. Instead, combat is shown to have become mechanical slaughter, a silent scream. Even the body has lost its boundaries: Guns are “arms” and radar is “eyes.” More to the point, in the experience of individual men at the front lines, there was terror. Men’s bodies changed: Scars appeared, limbs disappeared; death was the haunting presence. Lt. A.B. Scott was all too conscious of his physical vulnerability at the front lines when on Aug. 18, 1918, he confessed in his diary: “Slowly and surely I am breaking up, and now I am so far gone that it is too much trouble to go sick. I am just carrying on like an automaton, mechanically putting up wire and digging trenches while I wait, wait, wait for something to happen -- relief, death, wounds, anything, anything in earth or hell to put an end to this, but preferably death -- I am becoming hypnotised with the idea of Nirvana -- sweet, eternal nothingness.” Fear had killed off his imagination, transforming him into just one further “automaton” of war.

It seems churlish to quibble, but at times Braudy’s focus on masculinity seeps away, and what remains is a history of men: what they did and how they thought. His theme -- allegedly the shift from chivalry to terrorism -- could have been more carefully drawn. But I suspect most readers will simply be overwhelmed by the sheer scholarship. Those who persevere will find Braudy to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of war’s history. In this, he follows in the tradition of scholars Paul Fussell, Eric J. Leed, George L. Mosse and Jay Winter. And like these fine writers, he fundamentally alters military history, by acknowledging that the border between “military” and “civilian” is constantly in flux.