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From war memoirs to milblogs: Language change in the witnessing of war,

1914−2014
Lilie Chouliaraki
Discourse Society published online 28 July 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0957926514536830

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DAS0010.1177/0957926514536830Discourse & SocietyChouliaraki

Article

Discourse & Society

From war memoirs to 1 ­–19

© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0957926514536830
in the witnessing of war, das.sagepub.com

1914–2014

Lilie Chouliaraki
London School of Economics, UK

Abstract
In this article, I explore linguistic variation in selected soldiers’ memoirs at two key historical
moments of the past hundred years – the 20th century’s world wars, representing the apex of
industrial warfare, and the 21st century’s insurgency’ conflicts, representing the emergence of
information wars - the introduction of digital technologies in the conduct and communication
of war. Focusing in particular on the ways in which the trope of irony is mobilised in this genre,
my analysis demonstrates the historically-specific character of the linguistic practice of witnessing
death at war and identifies the changing moral discourses that emerge from such practice.
The technological shift from industrialised to information wars, I conclude, is associated with a
concomitant discursive shift from existential and historical forms of irony, where witnessing used
to consist of a dispassionate reflection on the staggering waste of human life in 20th century
conflicts, towards meta-irony, where witnessing has become a compassionate and caring
commentary on the suffering of individuals, in the ‘humanitarian’ conflicts of the 21st century.

Keywords
Estrangement, irony, memoirs, milblogs, war, witnessing

I feel that if I can make a child smile for a day, I have completed my mission. That mission is
to win the hearts and minds. The hearts and minds. My fellow soldiers are here to make a
difference. (‘My Mission’ milblog entry, 26 October 2006)1

Corresponding author:
Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: l.chouliaraki@lse.ac.uk

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2 Discourse & Society 

The wars of the West are no longer fought in the name of the ‘fatherland’, though national
interests naturally continue to inform their motivations. They are fought in the name of
‘making a difference’. This is evident in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), where global
security and democracy become the noble justification for military conflict (Coker, 2001).
This new moralisation of war, however, does not signal the introduction of ethics into the
sphere of warfare but, rather, represents a transformation in the moral discourses of war,
where an ethics of patriotic duty now turns into an ethics of empathetic commitment, into
making ‘a child smile for a day’. Even though this transformation has been explored in the
context of international relations (Buzan et al., 1998), geo-politics and military conduct
(Coker, 2001), political culture (Mouffe, 2005) and media reporting (Hammond, 2007),
yielding important interdisciplinary insights into the changing practices of warfare, it has
hardly so far been studied from the perspective of language and discourse studies.
In ignoring such perspectives, this interdisciplinary literature has further ignored his-
torical change in the ways war is represented and narrated. What struggles over language
are involved in the discursive moralisation of war, in the past hundred years? How are
these historical struggles around language articulated in the narratives of those who wit-
nessed it? Importantly, why does this matter? What do these transformations tell us about
the ways the language of witnessing has come to shape the moral discourses of war and
the conceptions of humanity inherent in such discourses? It is these questions that I
explore in this article.
I do so by looking into the genre of soldiers’ memoirs. Spoken by those who have
done the fighting, this genre offers the most powerful portrayals of each individual war,
yet, put together, these portrayals establish one collective narrative that claims to most
authentically convey the experience of death at war – what Hynes calls ‘The Soldiers’
Tale’ (1997): ‘they’, Hynes says about soldiers’ memoirs, ‘don’t glorify war, or aestheti-
cize it, or make it literary and heroic … they make war actual without making it familiar.
They bear witness’ (1997: 30). It is this bearing witness that renders memoirs a powerful
site for the discursive moralisation of war, in that it invites us to imagine what death
might feel like for those who have seen it but also what humanity means for those who
have survived it. For if war is not only what it inhumanely does to people – its instrumen-
tal dimension – but, as Hegel argues, also what it imagines people to become as human
beings – its existential dimension – then studying historical variation in the language of
witnessing war death has something important to tell us about the kinds of people we are
invited to become as subjects of its imagination.
My comparison of memoirs – from the two world wars, the major industrialised
conflicts of the 20th century (1914–1918 and 1939–1945), and the new information
wars of the 21st century (2001–2014)2 – explores precisely this claim: how linguistic
variation in the genre may reflect deeper transformations in the ways we witness war
and in the moral discourses of humanity that such witnessing makes available to us,
today.

Irony: The linguistic trope of modern warfare

Despite the renewed interest in the moralisation of war at the turn of the century (e.g.
Butler, 2006), the question of how soldiers’ witnessing has transformed the moral

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Chouliaraki 3

discourses of war is not new. There is, for instance, considerable research on the rupture
that the First World War and, later, the Second World War brought about, not only in the
geo-politics of the 20th century, but also in the public imagination of warfare (Hynes,
1997). It is, in particular, the emergence of irony as the key linguistic trope of represent-
ing modern war that has become a major theme in literary and narrative studies (Fussell,
1975; Winter, 1995).
In light of the unprecedented carnage of the two world wars, the argument has it
that the earlier, classical diction of war as tragedy, as heroic death in the name of duty
or valour, recedes in favour of a new diction that seeks, instead, to comprehend the
unthinkable sacrifice of millions of lives:

Tragedy is inspired by a faith that can weather the plague, whether in Sophoclean Athens or in
Elizabethan London, but not in Auschwitz. It is compatible with the great victories of Marathon
and Salamis, but is not concordant with Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tragedy depends
on sympathy, truth and involvement … its sickness unto death was and is: despair. (Kaufmann,
1992: 166)

The modern world, the argument continues, is thus a world in which the despair of
war has come to concern so many that the power of tragedy – that is, its capacity to
stage human conflict in ways that invest such conflict with moral meaning – has given
way to irony as the privileged discursive trope for witnessing war.
Sharing with tragedy an awareness of the suffering and death of the battlefield,
irony differs from the tragic trope in that, rather than heroically defying or dramatically
lamenting death, it embraces the futility of human life by stoically accepting its inevi-
tability yet emptying it of meaning. This lack of meaning defines, thus, irony as a lin-
guistic trope that, instead of reiterating old moral certainties, focuses instead on the
paradox of modern war – namely, that despite modernity’s technological progress in
the name of humanity, the life of individuals does not, after all, matter: ‘even as indi-
viduals and their fates assumed new significance’, as Faust puts it, ‘so those individu-
als threatened to disappear into the bureaucracy and mass slaughter of modern warfare’
(Faust, 2009: 270). The textual manifestation of irony is, according to Fussell, speech
from a future anterior position, where the facts of war are witnessed through the prism
of a belatedly acquired bitter wisdom, as a ‘dynamics of hope abridged’, thereby
emphasising the random and futile character of death in battle (Fussell, 1975: 41). His
interpretation, albeit challenged (Campbell, 1999), has remained dominant in studies
of the language of all subsequent wars, reproducing what Harari calls ‘the thesis of
disillusionment’ from the Western Front to Hiroshima and from Vietnam to Iraq (2005).
Are, however, contemporary war memoirs ironic? And are war memoirs ironic in the
same way, across time? What pressures does historical change exert upon the language
of witnessing war and which moral discourses of humanity emerge through it? Despite
the quintessentially linguistic character of irony, simultaneously shaping and being
shaped by the context of its time, no study has so far investigated its linguistic features nor
identified the extent to which such features have been subject to change. Next, therefore,
my analysis focuses on transformations in irony as a linguistic practice of witnessing
death at war, in two key moments of modern warfare: the industrialised warfare of the
two world wars and the information warfare of the ‘War on Terror’.

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4 Discourse & Society 

Analysing the linguistic practice of witnessing

The memoir’s genre and irony
In order to study irony as a linguistic practice of witnessing, I extend Harari’s (2007)
historical methodology, which explored war memoirs from the Renaissance to the early
20th century, to argue that the 20th and 21st centuries continue the Enlightenment tradi-
tion of memoirs as personal narratives that work to constitute the soldier’s identity as a
coherent and sovereign self – though the media and discourses of these narratives differ
over time. If war, as Leed (1979) argues, is so discontinuous with soldiers’ out-of-war
lives that it makes it hard for them to hold together a sense of themselves as enduring and
developing through life, then memoirs offers a narrative platform through which they
can place these fragments into a coherent pattern and produce a sense of self that invests
their war experience with meaning. The ‘meaninglessness’ of irony is, from this perspec-
tive, a deeply existential act of meaning-making, of re-signifying the reality of war,
essentially the witnessing of death in battle,3 in ways that make sense of this liminal
existence as an inevitable possibility of their life.
Starting, thus, on the assumption that war memoirs are a textual practice of self-
formation, which originate in witnessing death, I focus on irony as one of the genre’s
persistent linguistic features, in order to show how it variously domesticates the paradox
of modern warfare: the insignificance of individual life in the face of mass destruction.

The hybridity of witnessing

To this end, I draw on the distinction between the two voices inherent in the narrative
structure of witnessing: eye-witnessing, the soldiers’ descriptions of battlefield death, and
bearing witness, their evaluations of this death (Oliver, 2004). This duality of witnessing
finds its textual manifestation in the hybridity of the memoir genre, which mixes dis-
courses of sensory perception on battlefield action, the ‘Battlefield Gothic’ (Hynes, 1997:
12), with reflexive discourses that seek to render death intelligible. Thus, whilst questions
of factual accuracy are not central to memoirs, as both eye-witnessing and bearing witness
voices are subjective accounts that cannot faithfully represent reality, the hybridity of the
genre offers powerful insights into ways these two voices are drawn together to shape the
soldiers’ stories about their lives and the lives of those perishing around them.
In focusing on eye-witnessing action, Battlefield Gothic is the dominant narrative
style of war memoirs, manifested in short, affirmative clauses, the use of first-person
singular or plural (I/We), action verbs (leaped, plunged, etc.), past tense and direct
speech, as well as a lack of modality, all of which express urgent action-in-process:

I leaped into the nearest trench; plunging round the traverse, I ran into an English officer in an
open jacket and loose tie: I grabbed him and hurled him against a pile of sandbags. An old
white-haired major behind me shouted: ‘Kill the swine!’. (Junger, 1920/2003: 236)

This focus on intense action resonates with accounts of warfare experience that, whilst
accepting (some) soldiers’ need for reflexivity, strongly emphasise the high adrenaline
pleasure that this experience entails (Hynes, 1997; Winter, 1995). Given the

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Chouliaraki 5

predominance of action in war memoirs, then, irony should be seen not as a coherent
argumentative structure that fully defines the content of the genre, but as textual
‘moments’ that randomly punctuate the Battlefield Gothic, so as to articulate the author’s
stance towards the death he/she witnesses.

Bearing witness and estrangement

For this reason, rather than focusing on the eye-witnessing voice, I turn to the mar-
ginal voice of bearing witness – those fleeting instances where the soldier’s voice
reverts from description to reflection, as he/she seeks to make sense of death on the
battlefield. This hybridity of voice, I argue, has the discursive effect of estrangement
– of inserting distance between the soldier’s action and his/her perception of it and so
de-familiarising his/her taken-for-granted assumptions about life and death: ‘by mak-
ing things strange’, Boym, speaking of estrangement, says, ‘the artist [cf soldier] does
not simply displace them from an everyday context into an artistic framework’, but
‘also helps to “return sensation” to life itself, to reinvent the world, to experience it
anew’ (2005: 586). It is through de-familiarisation, therefore, that the war memoir
‘reinvents’ the war as ironic, in that its shift of voice from battlefield drama (eye-
witnessing) to fleeting and oblique attempts to give meaning to it (bearing witness)
opens up a narrative space for exposing the paradox of war – the nullification of
human life in industrialised conflicts.
My analysis centres, thus, on three linguistic devices of estrangement that interrupt
the narrative flow of memoirs and, by way of textual discontinuity, highlight the sig-
nificance of death without explicitly commenting on it. These devices are (1) ellipsis
– the omission of information regarded self-evident or superfluous, (2) juxtaposition
– the structure of contrasts between incompatible elements, and (3) chronotope – the
mobility between present, past and future temporalities (Bakhtin, 1981), Fussell’s
future anterior being one of these. Each of these devices of estrangement punctuate the
narrative of memoirs with a series of tensions between what is known and what is not
(ellipsis), what can be expected and what not (juxtaposition) or what has happened and
what will happen (chronotope), thereby de-familiarising the Battlefield Gothic and
evoking what Hynes calls the ‘greatest constant in remembered war’: its ‘strangeness’
(1997: 19).
Irony, in summary, is a linguistic trope of war memoirs that invites us to reflect on the
meaning of war death, by means of estrangement. Relying on ellipsis, juxtaposition and
chronotope, estrangement moves between reality and its de-familiarisation to invest the
soldiers’ witnessing of death with meaning without attaching to it moral justification.
What renders irony instrumental in war memoirs is precisely its capacity to sustain life
narratives that simultaneously speak of dying and avoid commitment to a cause, thereby
enabling soldiers to gesture towards, rather than explicitly announce, the stance of disil-
lusionment. Despite sharing this stance, however, no war of the past hundred years is
similar to any other, as each occurs in its own historical context. It is linguistic variations
of irony, absent in existing research, that I next explore, seeking to illustrate how such
variations reflect changing moral discourses on war and articulate different conceptions
of humanity across time.

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6 Discourse & Society 

Memoirs of industrialised warfare

The memoirs of the two world wars constitute a large body of witnessing texts that offer
unique insights into the human consequences of mechanised, mass-scale warfare. My
selection of two key texts from each war follows the twin criteria of popularity and endur-
ance in the Anglo-American world. My First World War texts are the two established liter-
ary classics on the Western Front (Moorcroft Wilson, 2003: 238), still figuring in best-selling
lists around the world: Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929/1999) and Siegfried
Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930/1997).4 Given that the Second World War
did not produce a similar literary canon (Mosse, 1986), I use two texts that turned into
international mega-hits on the television screen: David Kenyon Webster’s Parachute
Infantry (1994/2002), which was one of the volumes that inspired the HBO mini series
‘Band of Brothers’ (2001)5 and Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow (1957/2010), which
was one of the two books used in the sequel HBO series ‘The Pacific’ (2010).6
Because of the sheer volume of text in each book, it is impossible to include here all
their instances of irony; nor, given the elusive and shifting properties of irony, is it pos-
sible to quantify its occurrence in a content analysis. The extracts selected here, there-
fore, are meant to illustrate the workings of this linguistic trope, in ways that both
demonstrate the textual properties of estrangement and exemplify changes in the enact-
ment of estrangement through time. Indeed, whilst there is irony in all four texts, the
prominence of specific estrangement devices varies, with First World War memoirs char-
acterised by juxtaposition and ellipsis, giving rise to, what we may call, an existential
form of irony, and Second World War memoirs by chronotopicity, associated with a his-
torical form of irony. Let me examine each in turn.

The existential irony of First World War memoirs

Recounting an attack on the Western Front, Robert Graves speaks of an officer who
whistled to his men, who had been temporarily lying down, to move forward again.
Nobody moved and, at his angry order not to be ‘bloody cowards’, he heard his sergeant
gasping in agony: ‘Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they are all f- dead.’ Graves
then adds ‘The Pope’s Nose machine-gun, traversing, had caught them as they rose to the
whistle’ (1929/1999: 131). This last sentence, in past perfect sense (‘had caught them’),
breaks with the use of the present in direct speech (‘Not cowards, sir’) so as to release
information that preceded the speech, and so throw into relief the futility of the officer’s
order (the men were already dead when he swore at them) and his ultimately misplaced
anger (‘willing enough’, they had actually ‘risen’ ‘to the whistle’). The story concludes
at this moment of estrangement, when the course of events takes an unexpected turn,
leaving us with a sense of bitter discomfort at its last-minute twist – ‘Not cowards, sir.
Just f- dead’. Irony inheres, here, in the chronotopic mobility of the narrative, moving
from a present to a past position, but also in the elliptical structure of the clause, gestur-
ing at, rather than spelling out, emotion – in the suppressed ‘f- dead’. This impassionate
posture de-familiarises death by avoiding addressing it directly, whilst it powerfully
evokes the singularity of those few individual lives, who, killed at the peak of a legend-
ary battle, were only a drop in the ocean of the million perishing at the Somme in 1916.

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Chouliaraki 7

This ironic effacement of sentiment also occurs in first-person accounts of possible

death. Here is Graves before going ‘over the top’, in another of the Somme attacks:

We were waiting at the fire step from four to nine o’clock with fixed bayonets, for the order to
go over. My mind was a blank except for the recurrence of ‘S’nice, s’pie, s’nice, s’mince, s’pie
… I don’t like ham, lamb or jam and I don’t like roley-poley’. (1929/1999: 137)

It is the juxtaposition between the soldier’s intense anxiety in anticipation of his

exposure to enemy fire and the lyrics of a 1914 music hall tune that here works as a
device of estrangement. With no place for emotion or reflection – ‘my mind was a
blank’ – psychological intensity is signified elliptically, through suggestive references to
the manner of attack: the dreaded ‘order to go over’, the prolonged wait, ‘from four to
nine’, and the state of full alertness, ‘at the fire step … with fixed bayonets’. Irony
emerges through a process of de-familiarisation that frames this liminal moment in a
discourse of light entertainment – ‘S’nice, s’pie, s’nice’. To a soldier’s protest, ‘this is
murder, sir’, Graves responds by spelling out the grounds for his irony: ‘of course it’s
murder you bloody fool. But there is nothing else for it, is there?’ Irony, in the form of
suppressed emotion that obliquely surfaces through an irrelevance, seems the only
appropriate response to ‘murder’.
Siegfried Sassoon remembers his own Somme attack, in a remarkably similar
manner:

. . . during the cannonading cataclysm the following refrain was running in my head: ‘They come
as a boon and a blessing to man, the Something, the Owl and the Waverley Plan’. For the life of me
I couldn’t remember what the first one was called. Was it Shakespeare? Was it Dickens? Anyhow,
it was an advertisement which I’d often seen in smokey railway stations. (1930/1997: 46)

The threat of imminent death is here formulated through the juxtaposition between
‘the cannonading cataclysm’ of the bombardment and Sassoon’s struggle to remember
the lines of an advertisement – ‘for the life of me I couldn’t’. The extract works ironically
insofar as the intensity of Sassoon’s emotions under bombardment, formulated as noth-
ing less than a ‘cataclysm’, is displaced by his focus on remembering some irrelevant
lyrics – ‘Was it Shakespeare? Was it Dickens?’ Death is, again, momentarily de-familiar-
ised as a marginal affair, compared to the importance of remembering ‘what the first one
was called’, thereby elliptically gesturing at the threat of imminent death in the waste-
land of the Western Front.
Juxtaposition is further evident in Sassoon’s account of receiving a letter on the
decimation of his battalion, whilst on leave in England:

‘Just a line to let you know what rotten bad luck we had yesterday … only two officers got back
without being hit. The Batt. is not now over strength for rations!’ I walked about the room whistling
and putting the pictures straight. Then the gong rang for luncheon. Aunt Evelyn drew my attention
to the figs, which were the best we’ve had off the old tree that autumn. (1930/1997: 90–91)

Sassoon’s physical distance from the site of action is coupled with psychological
estrangement, as the details of ‘whistling’, ‘putting the pictures straight’ and ‘[drawing]

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8 Discourse & Society 

attention to the figs’ move textual focus away from the author’s own psychological state
and towards the trivial details of domesticity. This juxtaposition between homely com-
forts and the letter’s account of death – ‘only two officers got back’, ‘The Batt. is not now
over strength for rations!’ – evacuates emotionality from his already mediated witnessing
of the massacre, and sets the experience of death in a new, absurd light, by situating it in
the unlikely context of an English country house.
These instances suggest that, if irony is a means of making sense of the war, then these
First World War memoirists use it to articulate a particular relationship between them-
selves and the world. In so doing, they set in motion a form of irony, existential irony,
which displaces the moment of death onto a random and trivial deviation, now acquiring
a novel, disproportionate significance – be this a musical tune or the taste of figs. Central
to this existential ironisation of death are the linguistic techniques of juxtaposition and
ellipsis, which bear witness to the experience of death by suppressing emotion and evad-
ing the explicit evaluation of conflict, yet powerfully evoke the shocking newness of the
experience, in the context of industrialised killing. It is this reticent intensity of irony that
enables those First World War texts to engage with the realities of industrialised warfare,
its ‘vast randomness and anonymity of death’ (Hynes, 1997: 56), rendering irony ‘the
trope of a person who knows too much but refuses to take reality seriously’ (Illouz, 2010:
31). Compatible with the rupture that this war brought about in modern consciousness
(Fussell, 1975), existential irony captures, thus, the soldiers’ disenchantment with a war
that challenged notions of heroic sacrifice with new and unfamiliar experiences of death.
As major German memoirist, Ernst Junger, explains, speaking of the ‘heavy bombard-
ments’ at the trenches:

. . . at such moments, there crept over me a mood that I hadn’t known before. A profound
reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely on the edge … I felt I got tired and
got used to that aspect of war, but it was from this familiarity that I observed what was in front
of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzling and distinct. And I felt that the
purpose with which I had gone to fight had been used up and no longer held. The war posed
new deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether. (1920/2003: 260)

The historical irony of the Second World War

If the First World War, ‘a strange time altogether’, gave rise to existential irony, estab-
lishing a new relationship between the self and the world based on the latter’s profound
strangeness, Junger’s ‘new and subdued light’, the Second World War memoirs tend to
negotiate a relationship of the self with the present time. This is exemplified by the
dominant linguistic trope of this war’s irony: chronotopic mobility.
David Kenyon Webster speaks of his Normandy experience:

If someone had told a small boy hurling mud balls that he would be throwing hand grenades
twelve years later, he would probably have been laughed at. I have always been glad that I
could not look into the future. (1994/2002: 17)

Spoken from the present into the past, this sentence turns the soldier’s experience,
‘throwing hand grenades’, into the hypothetical spectacle of a ‘small boy’ and introduces

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Chouliaraki 9

a discourse of lost innocence into the narrative. Irony consists in this moment of estrange-
ment when the present, seen through the innocence of the past, becomes alien – ‘he
would … have been laughed at’ – and is deplored through an elliptical, yet suggestive,
last clause: ‘I have always been glad that I could not look into the future.’ Irony is simi-
larly activated through chronotopic mobility when Webster speaks of his comrade’s
death: ‘Ash … was right about that [singing the lyrics of ‘We ain’t never comin’ back’],
for in the end, and as I had feared when I left him behind in the swamp, Ash stayed in
Normandy. Ash and 230 others’ (1994/2002: 52). The past is, similarly, assessed in light
of the present – ‘Ash was right about that’ – estranging death through the memory of the
victim’s voice prophesying his fall, and through the use of lyrics carrying the prophecy,
‘we ain’t never comin’ back’. Estrangement, however, is further sustained through the
choice of ‘stayed’ and the use of active voice, in ‘Ash stayed in Normandy’, which de-
familiarises death by attributing agency to the fallen. Suppressed emotion is, again, an
effect of this ironisation of death, as evident in the next clause which elliptically links the
loss of one to the fall of many: ‘Ash and 230 others’.
Robert Leckie also uses chronotopic mobility to de-familiarise an attack on the US
navy at Guadalcanal as an incomprehensible spectacle:

We were bathed in red light, as though fixed in the eye of Satan. Imagine a myriad of traffic
lights glowing in the rain, and you will have a replica of the world in which I awoke … They
were those of Japanese seaplanes, we learned later … it was the Battle of Savo Island, what we
learned to call more accurately the Battle of the Four Sitting Ducks. (1957/2010: 65)

This is the chronotopicity of an innocent present – ‘bathed in red light’, ‘fixed in the
eye of Satan’ and ‘myriad of traffic lights glowing in the rain’ – which becomes mean-
ingful only through its a posteriori interpretation, in ‘we learned later’, ‘what we
learned to call’. Rather than nostalgia, irony here foregrounds ignorance, the inability
to bear witness to war without previous experience of it. The euphemism of the ‘Battle
of the Four Sitting Ducks’ magnifies the ironic effect by bringing back in time the
subsequent critique of this battle as a result of the US navy’s ‘fatal lethargy of mind
which induced confidence without readiness’ in the early stages of the Pacific cam-
paign (Murray, 2011: 327).
A different chronotopicity is at play below, where Leckie speaks of his dead
comrade:

We should have gone home on V.E. Day, then … Janovec would be alive, but no we have to stay
on, and on, and on. Come on Janovec, get up, you’re the slowest, stubbornest man in the squad.
(1957/2010: 308)

Two chronotopic moves are employed here: a hypothetical one, which speaks of the
past as an alternative route to the present – ‘we should have gone’, ‘then … Janovec
would be alive’ – thereby de-familiarising the moment of mourning, not as an inevitable
reality but as an undesirable possibility caused by military authorities – ‘but no we have
to stay on’; and a real-time one – ‘come on Janovic … get up … you’re the slowest’ –
which estranges death, by addressing the fallen as if he were alive. This complex chrono-
topicity, combined with the use of the first person, in the affectionate address to the dead

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10 Discourse & Society 

soldier, suppresses emotions of indignation and despair by fantasising about an alterna-

tive might-have-been rather than by criticising the army.
Chronotopic mobility is further evident in Leckie’s reflections during the landing at
Peleliu. Having witnessed the slaughter of the platoon ahead of him, Leckie says:

And here is the point in battle where one needs the rallying cry … How much less forbidding
might have been that avenue of death that I was about to cross had there been some wholly
irrational shout – like ‘Vive L’Empereur’ or ‘The Marine Corps For Ever!’ – rather than the
educated voice which said in a sangfrois that was all at odds with the event ‘Well, it’s our turn
now’. (1957/2010: 307–308)

Employing a hypothetical structure – ‘how much less forbidding might have been …
had there been’ – this clause sets up a juxtaposition between two ways of summoning
soldiers for an attack: ‘some wholly irrational shout’ and ‘the educated voice’. It thus
de-familiarises impending death through the fantasy of an imagined past, where the gran-
deur of the rallying cry, ‘Vive L’Empereur’ or ‘The Marine Corps For Ever!’, stands in
sharp contrast to the inadequacy of the present command, ‘it’s our turn now’. In so doing,
this sentence comments on, without explicitly mentioning, the inadequacy of military
conventions and the intensity of the soldiers’ emotions in the face of death.
Irony is here less about establishing a relationship of oblique intensity between self and
the world, as in the First World War memoirs, and more a matter of articulating a critical
relationship between self and the present time. Nostalgia, innocence and fantasy are, in
this sense, the effects of historical irony – a form of irony that relies on estrangement from
the here-and-now so as to evoke another space-time from which to reflect on the present.
This historical ironisation of death manages the voice of bearing witness by recounting
death through the use of mobile chronotopes: from the perspective of a lost or fantasised
past or an anticipated future. As in the First World War memoirs, irony here also relies on
the suppression of emotion towards death. However, if the First World War’s existential
irony articulates a world which is ‘all new, all strange and irrational and we feel this new-
ness in their narratives’ (Hynes, 1997: 106–107), this war’s historical irony takes this
discovery for granted and witnesses death in the light of this accumulated knowledge.
Having inherited, as Hynes further observes, ‘that sceptical tone … of First World War
narratives’, Second World War memoirists express a wary knowingness about the ran-
domness of fate and the mistakes of their army: ‘The men who were there’, as he put it,
‘accepted the causes they fought for, but they were sceptical and mocking about the opera-
tion of armies – the strategies, the commanders, officers of all ranks, the food, the weap-
ons, the propaganda language their governments uttered’ (1997: 113–114).

Memoirs of information wars

Sixty years on, memoirs continue to be written but the most popular ones today are the
online military blogs – milblogs (Wall, 2005: 153–172). This mediatisation of the mem-
oir genre offers us ‘a new way to view the military and the war as you get an uncensored,
unmediated, intimate and immediate view of the reality of the conflict’ (Burden, 2006:
5). In order to capture the novelty of the new medium and keep my empirical focus on

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Chouliaraki 11

published memoirs constant, I draw on two of the most popular milblog collections that
have also reproduced soldiers’ accounts in book form and, in so doing, ‘give the ephem-
eral Internet bits and bytes a permanent place to live’ (Burden, 2006: 5). These are
Matthew Currier Burden’s The Blog of War (2006) and Garry B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury.
com’s the Sandbox (2009).7

The meta-irony of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts

The distinctive feature of milblogs is their abandonment of the suppressed emotion of
earlier memoirs and their reliance on new, more explicit forms of affectivity.
First, there is an explicit articulation of irony as irony, as in the following ‘Doonesbury.
com’ entries: ‘War and faith, it seems to me, must always have had a close relationship.
Ironic, since many mainline forms of religion would consider war antithetical to their
charters’ (7 August 2007); ‘This was his third deployment, and this time he became a
“fobbit” and doesn’t have to leave the FOB. How ironic that on this deployment he gets
shot’ (6 August 2007); ‘Ironic, considering the primarily Christian (if not Catholic)
make-up of this region of Iraq, the only like it almost anywhere’ (6 December 2007) –
this latter referring to the banning of the Pope’s visit to Iraq; and a more recent example:
‘Fear had distorted the logic of my psyche as to whom the actual enemy was. And, at
that moment, ironically, my fear was admittedly the most dangerous enemy I truly had’
(16 February 2013).
Second, explicit affectivity is signalled through paralinguistic graphics, as in a veter-
an’s account of his post-traumatic stress disorder: after mentioning his ‘panic attacks’
and ‘really bizarre and very intense nightmares’, he concludes that ‘Roy Batty ain’t dead
yet, he’s just down at Tyrell Corporation for some maintenance. :-)’ (14 August 2007).
The juxtaposition between suffering (‘panic attacks’, ‘nightmares’) and its euphemism
(‘just down Tyrell Corporation for some maintenance’), which estranges the veteran’s
distress through humorous defiance, is here flagged through a smiling emoticon, :-).
Similarly, in referring to a mortar attack in Baghdad, which resulted in some soldiers’
reprimand for not evacuating the attack zone, the blogger writes:

Wow. I would love to get arrested for that. There’s no way I would get in any trouble, and it
would be hilarious for my chain to have to come bail me out for ‘Failure to run during a mortar
attack’. HAHAHA! (20 August 2007)

The real risk of the attack is juxtaposed with the hypothetical accusation of martial
authorities – ‘Failure to run during a mortar attack’ – which estranges death by fore-
grounding humour (‘it would be hilarious’) and by using emotional markers (‘wow’,
‘HAHAHA’). Finally, the following instance is reminiscent of Graves’ ‘S’nice, s’pie,
s’nice, s’mince’ incident, in that it also estranges risk through reference to music, this
time from ‘Metallica’:

Another great moment in ETT coping is when another Captain here on the team says to me, as
we hide behind a rock waiting for an IED to detonate, ‘Sir, you know what the problem is with
real life?’ ‘No, what’s the problem?’ I’m wondering what could be so pressing at this moment.

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12 Discourse & Society 

He responds, ‘There’s no soundtrack. Wouldn’t some Metallica be great right now!’ (29
December 2008)

It differs from Graves’, however, in that, rather than suppressing emotion, it renders
emotion not only all too explicit (‘another great moment in … coping’), but also the very
point of the blog entry, which is entitled ‘Laugh or you will go insane’.
This affective turn, manifested in the ‘explicitation’ of irony and the use of emotional
language and emoticons, should be seen as part of a broader discursive move that today
works to personalise the death of soldiers and civilians alike, rendering them the object
of explicit moral reflection (King, 2010). Let me discuss these two aspects of
personalisation.
The personalisation of soldiers is evident in an extended blog entry on a US Marine’s
death:

Kylan didn’t quite fit in an Annapolis. He was a nerdy kid from Aptos … Kylan had an
intellectual curiosity that bordered on true geekdom … Kylan’s major field of study was history
and he was quite a gifted student … Always gifted at languages, he had learned to speak …
Kylan had returned to Annapolis to teach history for a couple of years … he had plans to earn
a Doctorate in Turkish Studies at Johns Hopkins University … On August 21st … Lieutenant
Kylan Jones-Huffman was shot and killed while riding an SUV … His unit was stationed in
Bahrain and he was only supposed to visit Iraq for one week. (Burden, 2006: 214)

Irony is present in the chronotopic tension of the last clause, where the soldier’s death
is de-familiarised by reference to its unlikely circumstances – ‘while riding an SUV’,
‘stationed in Bahrain’, in ‘Iraq for one week’ – and their juxtaposition with his long-term
life aspirations (‘to teach history for a couple of years’, ‘to earn a Doctorate’), rendering
his loss of life poignantly absurd. The celebration of the soldier’s life, however, is further
coupled with references to the author’s personal relationship with him: ‘Kyle is indi-
rectly responsible for much of the happiness in my life, and for that he has my eternal
gratitude’ and ‘two days before I boarded my flight home from Kuwait, Lieutenant
Kylan Jones-Huffman was shot’, which replace the elliptical formulations of earlier
memoirs to highlight, instead, the author’s own emotional connection with his dead
friend.
The personalisation of civilians is manifested in the fusion of Iraqi life stories with
soldiers’ reflections on them: ‘A boy walked into my life for a brief moment this past
Easter Sunday, and I am better because of it’ (Burden, 2006: 134–139). The soldier’s
encounter with a terminally ill Iraqi boy is narrated from the perspective of a wishful ‘if
only’, reflecting the soldier’s distress for the boy’s imminent death:

I wanted to give this kid something, anything that would make him happy. I wish I’d given him
a ride in the tank … I wish they’d saved the liver of one of the Iraqi soldiers that had been killed
by another boy Ahmed’s age and given it to him.

Irony is involved in the last clause of this extract, where the juxtaposition between
Ahmed, who needs a liver donor, and ‘another boy Ahmed’s age’, who might have killed
an American soldier, not only de-familiarises soldierly death as an act of organ donation

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Chouliaraki 13

for an Iraqi civilian, but further estranges the act of killing by setting a relationship of
equivalence between the Iraqi victim, the sick boy, and the Iraqi perpetrator, a killer boy
of ‘Ahmed’s age’. Military death becomes thus ironic, in that the author’s benevolence
towards the Iraqi boy appears to emerge not from his clear-cut perceptions of enemy or
friend, but rather through the blurring of this divide, as the figure of the Iraqi boy occu-
pies both positions. Simultaneously, the voice of bearing witness locates the emotional
centre of the story away from the boy’s misfortune and onto the author, as the latter’s
encounter with suffering ultimately serves as a lesson in moral education – notice the
formulations ‘His message had been delivered’ and ‘Ahmed reminded me’ in the con-
cluding sentence: ‘His message had been delivered. Ahmed reminded me that I should be
eternally grateful for all that has been given to me. At this point, guard duty didn’t seem
like that bad any more.’ Civilian suffering is here embedded in a therapeutic discourse of
self-development, which endows the soldier with emotional depth and construes military
practice, his ‘guard duty’, not as a matter of external obligation but of personal attitude.
The witnessing of milblogs, I argue, establishes a relationship between neither self
and the world, as in the First World War memoirs, nor self and the present, as in the those
of the Second, but more as a relationship of the self to the self. Irony, consequently,
seems to be giving way to meta-irony, a discursive device that, whilst echoing earlier
ironic sensibilities, does not suppress emotion towards death but embraces it and openly
reflects upon its meaning. By using overt references to ‘irony’, where irony is talked
about as irony (hence the term ‘meta-ironic’), emotional language and the personalisa-
tion of soldiers and civilians, milblogs break with the discourse of disillusionment char-
acteristic of the global conflicts of the 20th century, and rediscover the moral meaning of
war death in the introspection of the self – be this in relation to a fallen fellow soldier or
an ambivalent connectivity to suffering locals.
This break with disillusionment in favour of meta-ironic reflexivity could be associ-
ated with radical changes in the conduct of warfare, as the well-defined battlefields of the
two world wars have now given way to the murky waters of insurgency warfare
(Stephenson, 2012). Rather than grappling with the insignificance of individual life in
the context of industrialised death, today’s witnessing engages instead with different
emotional and moral challenges in the context of new, less intensive but equally terrify-
ing patterns of dying:

We did not die by the hundreds in pitched battles. We died a man at a time, at a pace almost
casual. You could sometimes begin to feel safe, and then you caught yourself and looked
around, and you saw that of the people you’d known at the beginning of your tour a number
were dead … And you did some nervous arithmetic.8

It is these challenges that I return to next, in my concluding section.

From memoirs to milblogs: The changing moral discourses

of war
The witnessing of war is not an a-historical constant, but a dynamic process of discourse
subject to variation. This variation, far from simply discursive, depends on broader

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14 Discourse & Society 

historical change in the geo-politics of war, the conduct of warfare and its technologies
of mediation. Yet it is the study of language that offers an advantageous, albeit hitherto
under-researched, point of entry into the ways such variation is manifested in text, shap-
ing the ways we represent war and define the meaning of humanity at different moments
in time.
Drawing on Fussell’s claim that ‘every war is ironic because … its means are so melo-
dramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends’ (Fussell, 1975: 7), I focused on irony
as a key linguistic trope of war memoirs from the global conflicts of the past century to
the contemporary conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike Fussell and others, however,
who employ an undifferentiated concept of irony, I showed that irony is a historically
malleable trope that can reveal transformations in the ways soldiers bear witness to the
death around them and articulate their emotions about this death. Whilst existential and
historical forms of irony render death meaningful by suppressing emotion and refraining
from moral evaluation, meta-irony combines the witnessing of death with explicit for-
mulations of emotion and moral stance. Consequently, each ironic trope articulates a
different moral discourse in the context of war – what I next term the ‘dispassionate
discourse of the ordinary witness’ and the ‘compassionate discourse of the professional
witness’.

The dispassionate discourse of the ordinary witness

Existential and historical forms of irony differ in that each articulates its own distinct
discourses on the strangeness of warfare. If existential irony relates to the world by
focusing on the shocking ‘newness’ of industrialised killing, in the First World War,
historical irony expresses the soldiers’ sense of the present as an ambivalent historical
moment, when a just cause went hand in hand with an irrational waste of human life,
in the Second. These differences granted, both forms of irony worked to embrace the
futility of war whilst, at the same time, reworking the meaning of humanity.
What kind of humanity emerged out of the devastating experience of world warfare?
This, I claim, was the humanity of ordinary people, who joined the frontline of the two
world wars in their millions as civilian volunteers or conscripts. Unlike previous con-
flicts, as Hynes says in talking of the First World War, ‘this time the middle classes sent
their own civilian sons, and so both families and sons, whose lives until then had been
innocent of war, learned what war meant’ (1997: 106). Innocent of war, those sons’
experience of battle was largely that of witnessing the death of others like them and
imagining themselves as potential victims on the same battlefield – their experience,
thus, ‘blurring’, for the first time, ‘the line between the fighting man and the helpless
victim of war’ (Hynes, 1997: 128). Replacing the romantic spirit of earlier, born-to-
fight military elites, this new consciousness of the civilian soldier managed its disillu-
sionment with the enormity of war deaths in the only way it could: by employing the
standpoint of the ordinary witness.
This is the standpoint of the civilian-turned-soldier who, as Hynes puts it, ‘acts as a
soldier but also stands back and observes and judges (and sometimes mocks) his soldier’s
acts’. This duality of standpoints was enacted, as we saw, through the mechanism of
estrangement, which, by establishing a narrative gap between the voices of eye-witnessing

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Chouliaraki 15

and bearing witness, allowed the text to reflect on death without explicitly committing to
moral argument – be this establishment critique or anti-war scepticism. Rather than protest-
ing against or lamenting the loss of human life, this hybrid standpoint construed a dispas-
sionate conception of humanity that stoically accepted the inevitability of mass death, yet,
at the same time, used a low key emotionality to gesture towards the despair of massive
human loss. The strategies of ellipsis, juxtaposition and the chronotope have been instru-
mental in this construction of dispassionate humanity. As soldiers struggled to put into
words an experience so alien to them, it is the textual discontinuities of irony, rather than
the assertions of the Battlefield Gothic, that ultimately invested those memoirs with their
distinct quality of civilianness – with astonishment, nostalgia or fantasy – and, in so doing,
introduced into these texts ‘a note of scepticism that made their war ironic in their telling’
(Hynes, 1997: 146).

The compassionate discourse of the professional witness

What function does meta-irony serve, however, in the moral discourses of the 21st cen-
tury? How does the witnessing of death figure in today’s memoirs and what conception
of humanity emerges from them? Meta-irony, I argue, is related to the mediatisation of
memoirs, where witnessing ceases to be the literary accomplishment of the few and
enters the digital platforms of the many (Wall, 2005). Part of a broader move towards
mediated self-representation, where people go online to speak in public ‘from personal
and experiential perspectives’, meta-irony carries both the self-reflexive aesthetic of
digital media, expressed in the soldiers’ explicit references to being ironic, and the affec-
tive charge of private emotion, shown in their compassion towards fellow soldiers or
civilians (Thumim, 2011). Meta-irony is, in this sense, less a distinct form of ironic wit-
nessing, echoing its 20th-century predecessors, and more a new witnessing position that
subordinates irony to what has been theorised as the emotionalisation of public culture
(Illouz, 2008). Closely linked to the emergence of the media as a key communicative site
of the public sphere, emotionalisation refers to the self-representational process by which
private feelings cease to be restricted to the domestic sphere and have come to colonise
and shape the quality of contemporary public discourse.
This mediatisation of war memoirs should, however, also be associated with the
mediatisation of warfare itself – the unprecedented reliance of the conduct of war on
information and communication technologies (Rasmussen, 2007). Meta-irony emerges,
in this context, as a narrative response to the crucial shift from industrialised to informa-
tion wars, which today require a specialised army force trained in managing ICTs. Rather
than the civilian consciousness of earlier 20th century wars, then, meta-irony articulates,
instead, the consciousness of a new professional army that places high precision tech-
nologies in the service of minimising war victims,9 whilst simultaneously operating in a
mediatised culture that encourages the public expression of private emotion.
What conception of humanity does this transformation in witnessing entail? Far from
the humanity of the ordinary witness, with its affective charge of reticent intensity, this
is the humanity of the professional witness, with an affective charge of compassionate
emotion – of ‘knowing too much and, because of this, insisting on taking things seri-
ously’, to paraphrase Illouz’s earlier definition of irony. Central to this conception is the

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16 Discourse & Society 

humanitarian ethos of contemporary Western armies, which derive their legitimacy not
from the defence of the nation, but from their fusion with aid and humanitarian forces so
as to protect human life (Coker, 2001). Consequently, the moral discourse of warfare,
rather than disillusionment towards the expendability of human life, articulates a renewed
moral claim based on the liberal imperative of sparing pain: ‘The liberal experience of
war’, as Coker says, ‘should be liberal too. We should fight it for a material cause, to
spare others pain or to terminate oppression’ (2001: 453).
The discourse of compassionate humanity can be seen, under this light, as a recent
attempt to minimise the savagery of earlier mass conflicts by reducing the number of
combat forces whilst, simultaneously, shaping their military ethos along the lines of pro-
tecting lives – thereby, paradoxically perhaps, effecting a new ‘civilianisation’ of the
military. Infused by this spirit of compassionate humanity, the professional witness of
contemporary warfare abandons the discursive techniques of estrangement characteristic
of earlier conflicts, and, rather than discovering humanity in turning outwards – to the
world or to the present, he/she turns inwards – to the self, so as to communicate his/her
intense emotions about the trauma of human suffering. In so doing, it replaces the elo-
quent reticence of Graves and Sassoon with its own meta-ironic narratives of ‘empathy
and caring, caution, protection, apology and sentiment’ (Coker, 2001: 453).

Conclusion
In this article, I have explored linguistic variation in selected soldiers’ memoirs at two
key historical moments of the past hundred years – the 20th century’s world wars, repre-
senting the apex of industrial warfare, and the 21st century’s information wars, repre-
senting the introduction of digital technologies to the conduct and communication of
war. Focusing in particular on the ways the linguistic trope of irony is mobilised in this
genre, my analysis has demonstrated the historically-specific character of the linguistic
practice of witnessing death and identified the changing moral discourses that emerge
from such practice. Specifically, I have illustrated the discursive shift from existential
and historical forms of irony, where witnessing consisted of a dispassionate reflection on
the staggering waste of human lives in 20th century conflicts, towards meta-irony, where
witnessing has today become about a compassionate and caring commentary on the suf-
fering of individuals – soldiers and civilians alike.
Given the 20th century’s catastrophic conflicts, it is hard to challenge the compas-
sionate moral discourse of war that the 21st century’s meta-irony articulates. Yet the
paradox of this discourse, suspended as it is between new affectivities and new risks,
points to a compelling contradiction of contemporary warfare between its sentimental
humanity and its cumulative death toll: 330,000 war deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan in 2001–2013, including 201,885 civilians and 26,405 allied forces and police
– excluding indirect civilian deaths that add up to many hundreds of thousands more.10
In light of this death toll, meta-irony, spoken as it is by the professional witnesses of
liberal warfare yet felt mostly by vulnerable civilians on the ground, may ultimately
work to undermine the morality of the most ‘humane’ wars of the past hundred years,
offering, through its very empathetic rhetoric, glimpses into a new, contemporary sense
of the tragic.

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Chouliaraki 17

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
  1. See ‘Doonesbury. The Sandbox’ milblog: http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/2006/10/
index.html
  2. On a methodological note, the classification of ‘industrial’ and ‘information’ distinguishes
wars conducted with mechanised, mobile and long-distance military technologies introduced
in the early 20th century and bearing unprecedented physical and emotional consequences on
soldiers, from 21st century wars, conducted through military technologies that are fully inte-
grated with media and communications technologies and promising to alleviate the physical
and psychological suffering of soldiers (Rasmussen, 2007). This transformation in the means
and ends of war is accompanied by a parallel move towards what I later refer to as a ‘civil-
ianisation’ of the military (Coker, 2001), which has impacted greatly on the ways soldierly
death is invested with moral meaning today. An important cornerstone in this military and
discursive process of transformation is the Vietnam War, which, I have not included in this
study – but see Herzog (1992).
  3. I here follow Faust’s analytical claim, based on her study on the American Civil War, that
‘dying assumed clear pre-eminence over killing in the soldier’s construction of his (sic) emo-
tional and moral universe’, as it ‘enabled soldiers to mitigate their terrible responsibility for
the slaughter of others’ (Faust, 2009: 6).
  4. Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon were both officers in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, a well-
reputed infantry regiment of the British Army. They met on the Western Front in 1915 and their
experience of trench warfare, particularly the Battle of the Somme in 1916, defined their atti-
tudes towards the war and figured prominently in their early poetry. They wrote their memoirs
10 years after the Armistice as a way to overcome the harrowing impact of war memories on
them. Both pieces were immediately highly acclaimed and remain, to this day, two of the most
important testimonies of the First World War (Moorcroft Wilson, 2003).
  5. David Kenyon Webster served at Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the
101st Airborne Division of the US Army. His memoirs tell the story of his parachuting experi-
ence from D-Day, 6 June 1944, to his advance into Austria and Germany in May 1945. For
further information, see http://davidkenyonwebster.com/
  6. Robert Leckie served in the Marine Corps with the 1st Marine Division and fought in the
Pacific, at the Battles of Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester and Peleliu. It is this deployment,
from August 1942 to January 1943, that his memoirs refer to. For information, see http://
thepacific.wikia.com/wiki/Helmet_For_My_Pillow
  7. Available at: http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/html. The status of milblogs as memoirs
or as journalism is debated (e.g. Wall, 2006). My approach is that their online version is a hybrid
of both in that they combine the narrative of war experience with the immediacy of news, whilst
their published version places them more firmly in the category of memoirs, as their value now
lies less in real-time dissemination and more in telling memorable stories of the battlefield.
  8. Wolff (1994), in Stephenson (2012: 371) on the Vietnam War. Stephenson argues that Wolff’s
description of the Vietnam experience of death is characteristic of all subsequent insurgency
wars, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
  9. The 2003 ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion of Iraq, for instance, cost the lives of ‘only’ 148 US
troops (Rasmussen, 2007: 175–181, 186–187).
10. See www.costsofwar.org

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18 Discourse & Society 

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Author biography
Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics.
She has written extensively on media and ethics, particularly on the mediation of distant suffering
in disaster news, humanitarian and human rights communication as well as war and conflict report-
ing. Relevant books include ‘The Spectatorship of Suffering’ (Sage, 2006/2011), ‘The Soft Power
of War’ (ed., Benjamins, 2009), ‘The Ironic Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-
humanitarianism’ (Polity, 2013).

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