POINT OF VIEW

A Duty to Describe War’s Horrors

By Russell Frank

In 1860, Charles Dickens visited a Liverpool workhouse where British soldiers, “racked with dysentery and blackened with scurvy,” were being treated after having been scandalously mistreated on a voyage from India aboard the ship Great Tasmania.

“I find it very difficult to indicate what a shocking sight I saw,” Dickens wrote, “...without frightening the reader from perusal of these lines, and defeating my object of making it known.” Having thus warned the reader, the great writer launched into a horribly vivid description of the men's sufferings. Three years later, Walt Whitman interrupted his equally lurid account of the wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville with this declamation: “O well it is their mothers, their sisters cannot see them – cannot conceive, and never conceiv'd these things.”

Journalists who cover war and calamity have been wrestling with the same dilemma ever since. On one hand, they believe the public should know the worst. On the other hand, they know the public wishes to be spared the details.

After guiding my journalism students through a series of war stories, I more surely place myself on the side of those who believe in “making it known.” In addition to Dickens and Whitman, we read Steinbeck on World War II, Michael Herr on Vietnam, as well as reporting on the Spanish Civil War, the civil war in Angola and the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan. There is very little glory in these accounts. Mostly we read about misery, fear, hunger, pain and grief.

“Those paintings reproduced in history books which show long lines of advancing troops are either idealized or else times and battles have changed,” Steinbeck wrote for the New York Herald Tribune in 1943. When the news is that “the 5th Army advanced two kilometers” – the painting – Steinbeck insisted that the war correspondent also tell about “the shattered arms and bandaged heads, the walking wounded struggling painfully to the rear.”

Martha Gellhorn's reporting on the Spanish Civil War includes an account of a visit to the children's ward of a Barcelona hospital. There she met a boy wounded in a bombing raid earlier that day. As a result of the bombing, his family “had no home, no furniture, nothing to cook with, no blankets, no place to go.” The boy's mother brought him a little cold rice.

Michael Herr summed up his experience as a war correspondent thus: “You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms, or balls, major and lasting disfigurement – could come in on the freakyfluky as easily as in the so-called expected ways... .”

Reporting in 1975 from Luanda, the Angolan capital, during the eerie lull between the departure of the Portuguese and the advent of civil war, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski described life in a city that had ceased to function: no police, no firemen, no doctors, no pharmacists and no garbage crews. “The garbage grew and multiplied like the rising of a monstrous, disgusting dough expanding in all directions, impelled by a poisonous deadly yeast.”

The Russian journalist Svetlana Alexiyevich let others write about “our internationalist duty, the interests of state, our southern borders” in defense of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. She reported on what the Russian soldiers ate in Afghanistan in 1980: one can of mackerel split four ways. The label on the can said: “Date of manufacture, 1956; shelf-life eighteen months.” Home on leave, one soldier tells his mother: “You can't imagine how much I don't want to die for someone else's country.” Then he returns to the front and is killed.

I think the lesson my students have learned from this sampling of wartime journalism is simply this: War entails enormous sacrifices. It had better be worth them.

Yet governments minimize the sacrifices and tell us only of the justice of the cause and the valor of those who fight for it.

Watching a nurse change the poultices on one of the soldiers in Liverpool, Dickens wrote: “I had an instinctive feeling that it was not well to turn away, merely to spare myself.” Instead of getting angry at the news media for not sparing us the sight of the sacrifices that are being made in our name, we should direct our anger at those who tout the benefits of war while ignoring its costs.

Russell Frank teaches journalism ethics and the literature of journalism at Pennsylvania State University. This essay appeared originally In The Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, on April 28, 2004. Journalist quotations are from The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda, Eds. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997).