Anatomy of a Disconnected War.(war in literature)(Brief Article)

The war in Afghanistan has inspired a mass of images and commentary, but it has not yet engaged the popular imagination. Objectively, it is terrifying. Subjectively, it remains strangely uninvolving.

Part of the widespread uncertainty about the military deployment stems from the fact that, when you examine it from a literary perspective, the Afghan war has virtually no point of comparison with the historic wars of the 20th century, notably the first and second world wars, Korea and Vietnam.

Literature is always a reliable guide. Each of those wars threw up a memorable literature, from Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen to Norman Mailer and Michael Herr. As children of a century of bloodshed, our imaginations have been shaped by a dog-eared library that profoundly influences our understanding of international conflict. Say what you like about those stories, they still add up to a formidable inherited grammar of war.

Part of the trouble with the current engagement is that when we consult that anatomy of war, expressed in the classic journalism of William Shirer and George Orwell, in countless war poems, novels, memoirs and films, from "Goodbye to All That" to "Apocalypse Now," one finds virtually no connection with what's happening in Afghanistan.

First of all, there's been no eerie premonition. There were, no doubt, experts in Muslim affairs who warned of the menace of the Al Qaeda organization, but they went unheard. By contrast, the wars of the last century were preceded by as much as a decade of steadily escalating nervous tension.

Before the first world war, popular fiction, like Erskine Childers's "The Riddle of the Sands," traded on English fears of invasion. Childers's fellow Irishman, W. B. Yeats, dreamed of future violence in a way that was echoed across Europe. In Germany, among the poets affected by a half-heard drumbeat of imminent catastrophe, Alfred Lichtenstein, who was to die on the Western front, wrote "Prophecy" in 1913:

Soon there'll come--the signs are fair--