My Take | Going to war with eyes wide open
- Singapore’s next presumptive premier, Lawrence Wong, is too charitable when he warns the United States and China may ‘sleepwalk into conflict’. Their current folly, though, is much worse as both sides are deliberately – and dangerously – provoking each other
I read somewhere that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels turn boys into men. I can certainly understand the sentiment. But in my own case, I lost my “virginity” to Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, first published in 1932.
“You can be a virgin to horror the same way you can be a virgin to sex,” the narrator and anti-hero Bardamu observed towards the end of the novel.
The whole book is about witnessing horror for the first time, beginning with that of the first world war. At the start of the novel, Bardamu was losing a heated political argument with a friend at a cafe while the waiter looked at him with contempt because his tip was too small. To escape all that nonsense, he jumped out to join the greatest party in town – all of Paris was celebrating because what would become the Great War had been declared. He went with a marching band; little did he know he had just joined the army and there was no way out:
“But just then, who should come marching past the cafe where we’re sitting, but a regiment with the colonel up front on his horse, looking nice and friendly, a fine figure of a man! Enthusiasm lifted me to my feet …
“And there I was with the regiment, marching behind the colonel and his band … We marched for a long time. There were streets and more streets, and they were all crowded with civilians and their wives, cheering us on, bombarding us with flowers from cafe terraces, railway stations, crowded churches. You never saw so many patriots in all your life!”
Such wild partying of “patriots” was replicated in major capitals across Europe. Europeans had been so bored by la belle époque and its enduring peace, prosperity and progress that many welcomed the new excitement of war against each other. That turned out to be not only a world war but also a European fratricide and destruction of their own civilisation.