Volume 41, Number 13 · July 14, 1994
An Inability to Mourn
By Gordon A. Craig
The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan
by Ian Buruma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,, 330 pp., $25.00
In one of his panegyrics to the joys of the chase, R.S. Surtees calls hunting 'war without its guilt.' This is a striking and evocative phrase, reminding us that since ancient times guilt has been the burden of the warrior, the wages of his hubris, of his daring to substitute his own ambition for the will of the gods, of his seeking to change history. It is for this reason that warring tribes and nations have tried to propitiate the deities at the outset of their campaigns, to win them over with pleas and promises and cajolery; and this is also why their scholars and clerics have labored to devise definitions of just wars that will serve to legitimize their particular enterprises and exculpate them as they embark upon them.
Review, 3544 words
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