The hissing fuse...

Having recently run across Sidney Roundwood's Captain Murdoch and his ferret, I found this quotation in Edward Lengel's To Capture Hell particularly apt, so I took from it the title of my blog.

Lengel quotes Lt. Edward Lukens, of the AEF's 80th Division, a young officer serving in an infantry regiment from western Pennsylvania. Lukens was leading his men in pursuit of fleeing Germans through a ruined wood when he saw a German dugout and investigated. Detecting movement within, he armed a grenade.

At the sound of the hissing fuse, there came from the dugout the most unholy conglomeration of yells that I ever heard from human throats--screams of terror and abject pleading. But six seconds is too short a time to negotiate a surrender; they had kept hidden too long and could not possibly claim to be regarded as prisoners. The fuse was already going and down the hole went the bomb.*

I thought that passage perfectly encapsulated the casual brutality of war, a sensibility that is not part of our games but that we ought always to be reminded of when we are playing our tabletop battles. I don't think for a moment that it is somehow special to the Great War; I think it is the sort of practical morality of soldiers that, when brought out in the light of day, "looks bad in the newspapers and upsets civilians at their breakfast" but that it inescapable once you put humans at the business of killing each other in a large, organized, and utterly chaotic way.



* Lengel, Edward G. (2008) To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Page 94.