Introduction

Abstract

It is instructive to consider how sets of images assist our imagination in understanding how wars were fought and what they were fought for. School lessons that perhaps informed us of the heroic Minutemen and of valorous deeds at Valley Forge are likely to construct our responses to the War of Independence, while we may associate the Indian wars with Custer’s exploits at Little Big Horn. Possibly, in the latter case, a film starring Errol Flynn as Custer has created certain stereotyping in our minds, and so the reality of the war has more or less passed into film or dream, seemingly devoid of politics. Such an exercise, of trying to remember what images are dominant when we think of particular wars, will quickly teach us how tenuous the boundaries are between verifiable historical fact and mythical embellishment. Literature, of course, has a specially important part to play in making war over into the conventions of artifice. Hemingway’s famous account of Caporetto in A Farewell to Arms, crystallised in the image of Frederick Henry making ‘a separate peace’, resonant with metaphors of betrayal, treachery and desertion, suggests the aura of the First World War more evocatively than a sheaf of War Illustrated magazines.