The art of war

On his deathbed, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus remarked of the Japanese attack on Manchuria: ‘None of this would have happened if people had only been more strict about the use of the comma.’ The implication being that by channelling rage into the ordering of small things, we might stay away from violence on a colossal scale. Unable to restrict ourselves to matters of punctuation, alas, humanity is often at war: with itself, and others, however hallucinatory.

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Two current exhibitions come at rage from very different starting points. War and the Mind demonstrates the devastating psychological impact of war on those who fight it and those who have no choice but to suffer it. To this end, it encompasses everything from the physical and mental impact of fighting – ‘shell shock’, now more commonly described as post-traumatic stress disorder – to the psychological war for hearts and minds and the creation of an othered enemy who must be destroyed at all costs.

Along the way we encounter Lady Baden Powell cautioning young people in a letter in 1934 not to become ‘war minded’; Freud describing humanity’s ‘instinctive craving’ for violence; and Winnie-the-Pooh author, A.A. Milne, a dedicated pacifist, nevertheless changing his mind in the face of Hitler’s aggression. Of the 150 or so artefacts on display some are familiar – recruitment and anti-war posters particularly so – but others are more striking: a soldier’s dog-tags, a comforting reminder that one’s remains will hopefully be identifiable; an ashtray fashioned into the shape of a sinking combatant made of world-war-one shell cases, an example of ‘trench art’.

It becomes clear just how difficult it is to convince random civilians – no matter how enthusiastically they want to defend their country – to sustain hatred for any long period of time.