Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Joanna Bourke, a historian at the University of London, writes in An Intimate History of Killing that commanding officers are praised if they manage to sustain a “joy of slaughter” in their troops. She quotes soldiers who found, in sticking the enemy with a bayonet, an “exultant satisfaction” and others who described the “sickening yet exhilarating butchery” as a “joy unspeakable.” She cites a particularly chilling passage from Henry de Man’s book The Remaking of a Mind, published shortly after World War I. “I had thought myself more or less immune from this intoxication [of slaughter],” de Man wrote, “until, as trench mortar officer, I was given command over what is probably the most murderous instrument in modern warfare.… One day … I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life.” He added that he could have “wept with joy.”

  The perversity of war is nowhere more eloquently addressed than by T. E. Lawrence in his masterpiece, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He writes of war’s brutalizing influence and its intimate, proximate delights: “The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others’.… We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.… Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white.” The disappearance of moral law encouraged a descent in which Lawrence found comfort. “I liked the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downward. There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall. It was a satisfaction on which to rest.”

  The excitement of killing is not limited to our species; indeed, there are many examples of it among our closest kin, the great apes. In Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson give a particularly graphic example of chimpanzees attacking another of their kind:

  It began as a border patrol. At one point they sat still on a ridge, staring down into Kahama Valley for more than three-quarters of an hour, until they spotted Goliath [an elderly chimp and former member of the group to which the attackers belonged], apparently hiding only twenty-five meters away. The raiders rushed madly down the slope to their target. While Goliath screamed and the patrol hooted and displayed, he was held and beaten and kicked and dropped and bitten and jumped on. At first he tried to protect his head, but soon he gave up and lay stretched out and still. His aggressors showed their excitement in a continuous barrage of hooting and drumming and charging and branch-waving and screaming. They kept up the attack for eighteen minutes, then turned for home, still energized, running and screaming and banging on tree-root buttresses. Bleeding freely from his head, gashed on his back, Goliath tried to sit up but fell back shivering. [He] was never seen again.

  Ritualistic behaviors leading up to contagious excitement are common among young mammals and, as we have seen, often preparatory to group activities which entail risk and require social cohesion. Play followed by hunting is widespread in animals, whether African wild dogs, apes, or humans. The rewards for competing or killing have to be intensely pleasurable in order to excite the dangerous behaviors required to survive, and they necessarily involve highly activated if not overtly exuberant states. This is a disturbing but not unexpected reality. War is the ultimate test of survival; in its ultimate stakes is the possibility of ultimate pleasure.

  Chuck Yeager, who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier and is believed by many to be the greatest American aviator ever, describes the ancient delight of the hunt: “That day [during World War II] was a fighter pilot’s dream. In the midst of a wild sky, I knew that dogfighting was what I was born to do. It’s almost impossible to explain the feeling: it’s as if you were one with that Mustang, an extension of that damned throttle. You flew that thing on a fine, feathered edge, knowing that the pilot who won had the better feel for his airplane and the skill to get the most out of it.… Concentration was total; you remained focused, ignoring fatigue or fear.… You fought wide-open, full-throttle. With experience, you knew before a kill when you were going to score. Once you zeroed in, began to outmaneuver your opponent while closing in, you became a cat with a mouse. You set him up, and there was no way out: both of you knew he was finished. You were a confident hunter and your trigger finger never shook.… When he blew up, it was a pleasing, beautiful sight.… The excitement of those dogfights never diminished. For me, combat remains the ultimate flying experience.”

  If war is to be used to defend territory or governments, there must be enthusiasm for it. Yeager, whose name means “hunter,” was an enthusiastic warrior and immensely valued for it by his country. Conviction is demanded, and a measured fanaticism requisite, if the young are to be asked to die for a cause. But exuberance for war must be held in restraint lest it become atrocity, and passion for a cause must be kept in line lest the enthusiast turn fanatic.

  Who is to say, however, when the line has been crossed? In the heat of war, in the face of death, can any line be made inviolable? The passions of war require a complex use of spur and bit in ways that those of ordinary times do not. With war, observed T. E. Lawrence, “a subtle change happened to the soldier. Discipline was modified, supported, even swallowed by an eagerness of the man to fight. This eagerness it was which bought victory in the moral sense, and often in the physical sense, of the combat.… Eagerness of the kind was nervous, and, when present in high power, it tore apart flesh and spirit.” To incite emotions to fever pitch during war required a counterpoised use of restraint in times of peace, argued Lawrence: “To rouse the excitement of war for the creation of a military spirit in peace-time would be dangerous,” he said, “like the too-early doping of an athlete. Consequently discipline, with its concomitant ‘smartness’ (a suspect word implying superficial restraint and pain) was invented to take its place.”

  Not all warriors respond to discipline: two of the most renowned military leaders of the twentieth century, General George S. Patton and General William “Billy” Mitchell, famously did not. In their defiance lies the permeable border between fanaticism and visionary leadership; in their vehement enthusiasm lies the realization that a great man is not necessarily a good man.

  Patton and Mitchell had much in common. Both were born to privilege; both were passionate and scathingly intolerant of those not sharing their enthusiasms. Thwarted exuberance tipped easily into anger and self-righteousness. They were fiery leaders, impetuous, vain, and brave beyond question; both were incendiary advocates for innovative warfare. Both were regarded by their superior officers as loose cannons, publicly rebuked for insubordination, and at times considered mentally unstable (indeed, both the Patton and Mitchell families had histories of mental instability). Temperamentally they were far better suited to war than to peace. They led with exuberance and they misled with its excesses. Neither was willing to settle for anything other than his own vision of how armies and men ought to perform. They sought glory and they made history.

  Patton’s enthusiasm for war was early and unqualified. “God but I wish there would be a war,” he wrote to his future wife while still a cadet at West Point. War, he said, was life. He expressed his passion for combat, and his disdain for those who disagreed, in verse:

  When the cave man sat in his stinking lair,

  With his low browed mate hard by;

  Gibbering the while he sank his teeth

  In a new killed reindeer’s thigh.

  Thus he learned that to fight was noble;

  Thus he learned that to shirk was base;

  Thus he conquered the creatures o
ne and all,

  And founded a warrior race.

  · · · · · · · ·

  They speak but lies these sexless souls,

  Lies born of fear of strife

  And nurtured in soft indulgence

  They see not War is Life.

  They dare not admit the truth,

  Though writ in letters red,

  That man shall triumph now as then

  By blood, which man has shed.

  It isn’t Yeats, but the point is clear. Patton saw himself as a warrior first, last, and always. (The “always” was quite literal: he believed that, in previous lives, he had been, among others, a Roman soldier, a Viking, and a soldier in Napoleon’s army.) In a blood-rousing passage written in his West Point notebook, he exclaimed: “You have seen what the enthusiasm of men can mean for things done … you must do your damdest and win. Remember that is what you live for. Oh you must! You have got to do some thing! Never stop until you have gained the top or a grave.” The passion for winning extended to battles on the playing fields as well. To his son many years later, Patton wrote: “You play games to win not lose. And you fight wars to win! That’s spelled W-I-N! … Pologames and wars aren’t won by gentlemen. They’re won by men who can be first-class sonsofbitches when they have to be. It’s as simple as that. No sonofabitch, no commander.” The leader, Patton believed, commanded by an “all-pervading, visible personality. The unleavened bread of knowledge will sustain life, but it is dull unless seasoned by the yeast of personality.”

  At its best, Patton’s personality served him and the United States well. His tactical brilliance and exuberance were legendary. General Dwight Eisenhower said of Patton that he was “one of those men born to be a soldier, an ideal combat leader whose gallantry and dramatic personality inspired all he commanded.… His presence gave me the certainty that the boldest plan would be even more daringly executed.… George Patton was the most brilliant commander of an army in the open field that our or any other service produced.” But the separation between gainful exuberance and bloodthirst eroded over time. His remarks during World War II went from the merely reckless—“This is a damn fine war,” he said, “I hope to God I get killed up front somewhere”; once, he jumped from his car shouting, “Where are the damned Germans, I want to get shot at!”—to speeches that were unhinged, indefensible, and arguably at least in part responsible for the slaughtering of prisoners of war under his command. In August 1942 he gave a fiery speech to his troops: “We’re going to go right in and kill the dirty bastards,” he exhorted them. “We won’t just shoot the sonsofbitches. We’re going to cut out their living guts—and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.” He was no more circumspect in a speech delivered not long after: “We’ll rape their women and pillage their towns,” he said, “and run the pusillanimous sonsofbitches into the sea.”

  At some point, Patton ceased to inspire his men to greatness and instead quite possibly inflamed them to wanton killing. Intemperate behavior disintegrated into the unpardonable. He was forced to apologize publicly for slapping a shell-shocked soldier, and later, after his behavior became increasingly erratic and his speeches even more inflammatory, Eisenhower relieved him of his command of the Third Army. Exuberance had shifted into deranged hatred and zealotry.

  General Sir Alan Francis Brooke, the chief of the British Imperial General Staff, believed that Patton was a “dashing, courageous, wild and unbalanced leader, good for operations requiring thrust and push but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgment.” Dwight Macdonald denounced Patton as “an extreme case of militarist hysteria.” “Compared to the dreary run of us,” he added, “General Patton was quite mad.” S.L.A. Marshall concurred: “I think he was about half mad. Any man who thinks he is the reincarnation of Hannibal or some such isn’t quite possessed of all his buttons.” Patton’s biographer Ladislas Farago said much the same: “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that he was, if not actually mad, at least highly neurotic.”

  Mad or not, Patton was an uncommon leader who used his passions both well and ill. When he died in December 1945, the New York Times gave a sense of his complexity: “He will be ranked in the forefront of America’s great military leaders”; a legend, he was “a strange combination of fire and ice. Hot in battle … a profound and thoughtful military student.” He was not, they said, “a man of peace.”

  Neither was General Billy Mitchell, the military aviation pioneer whose much ridiculed and seemingly grandiose visions of the future of airpower turned out to be correct. His advocacy for a separate branch of the military dedicated to the tactical use of airpower led directly to the formation of the United States Air Force, but his dream was realized at the cost of his career. His exuberance about the possibilities of flight hardened into what critics perceived as fanaticism, and his volatile temperament gave them the cause they needed to prevent his ideas from being put into action. It is unclear, however, given the intransigence of his opposition, that another temperament would have been as effective or persuasive.

  Mitchell, the son of a U.S. Senator, was the top combat airman of World War I, having, in a single campaign against the Germans, commanded nearly fifteen hundred aircraft. He believed, contrary to his superior officers in the Army and Navy, that airpower would make Navy battleships obsolete; his enthusiasm was absolute and his public statements were commensurate with his enthusiasm. To prove his point, he ordered his pilots to sink the reputedly unsinkable former German warship Ostfriesland; it took them only a few minutes. Mitchell had made his point, but few wanted to hear it and fewer still appreciated his attitude. “Those of us in the air,” he wrote, “knew we had changed the methods of war and wanted to prove it to the satisfaction of everybody.”

  Mitchell vociferously and repeatedly made his arguments for air supremacy and the need to equip the United States with a modern air force. His passions lay in the future, while those of most in the military were bound up in the armies and navies of the past and present. His love for flight was matched by his disdain for the “older services,” an unrelenting attitude that antagonized and ruffled many. “Napoleon studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan,” he commented. “The navies draw their inspiration from the Battle of Actium in the time of the Romans, and the sea fight of Trafalgar.” But, he said, in the development of airpower “one has to look ahead and not backward, and figure out what is going to happen, not too much what has happened.”

  The future of defense was in the air, Mitchell proclaimed over and over. “The competition will be for possession of the unhampered right to traverse and control the vast, the most important, and the farthest reaching element of the earth, the air, the atmosphere that surrounds us all, that we breathe, live by, and which permeates everything.” His fierce exuberance about airpower was influenced strongly by his sense that the stakes were high, but many felt that his certainty of belief was arrogant. Mitchell believed that those who took to the air were a special breed, a belief that got no argument from pilots but incited a great deal of resentment in others. “Bold spirits that before wanted to ‘go down to the sea in ships,’ now want to go up in the air in planes,” he wrote. “The pilots of these planes, from vantage points on high, see more of the country, know more about it, and appreciate more what the country means to them than any other class of persons.”

  The pilot was not only privy to a view of the country that others could only envy, he was also of a select breed that called for a different disciplinary standard. “The old discipline, as conceived and carried out by armies and navies throughout the centuries,” maintained Mitchell, “consists in the unhesitating obedience by a subordinate to the orders of his superior.… With the aviator, however, the keenest, best educated, most advanced kind of man has to be selected.” Unhesitating obedience may suffice for the average man—it was only, after all, “within the last generation that most of the men composing armies could read or write�
��—but not for the aviator. Indeed, according to Mitchell, “[t]he [Army’s] General Staff was trying to run the Air Service with just as much knowledge about it as a hog has about skating.”

  These sentiments, heartfelt and publicly expressed, were provocative and meant to be. Mitchell was incapable of keeping his concerns and enthusiasms to himself. In 1925, however, he went too far for the military to look the other way. After the air arm had a series of flying accidents, which occurred in the context of a consistent pattern of underfunding, Mitchell gave a prepared statement to six reporters. He said, among other things, “I have been asked from all parts of the country to give my opinion about the reasons for the frightful aeronautical accidents and loss of life, equipment and treasure.… These accidents are the direct result of the incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the Navy and War Departments.” He was court-martialed, of course, on charges of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline and in a way to bring discredit upon the military service.” He was tried and convicted of insubordination and sentenced to a five-year suspension from active duty without pay or allowances. He resigned from the Army in 1926 and died, essentially in exile, ten years later.

  Perhaps a less passionate man, or a less ambitious one, would have been able to bring about change in a less tumultuous manner. Probably not. The strength of Mitchell’s convictions gave them a prominence they would not otherwise have had, and it is unlikely that his provocativeness alienated many people not already likely to be alienated. Certainly he was controversial. Certainly he was an enthusiast who crossed over the line into crusaderhood, if not fanaticism. But he was right on vital fronts. He was correct about the centrality of air power to the national defense; he predicted, in 1924, that the Japanese would one day bomb Pearl Harbor and then the Philippines; he rightfully and passionately warned that Alaska and the Pacific would play critical roles in military strategy. He predicted traveling into interstellar space. Time bore him out. In 1947 the U.S. Air Force was created; Mitchell was posthumously awarded a special Medal of Honor and promoted to the rank of major general.