A few months ago we blogged about an interesting, little-known WWI-era poem, written by Robert Graves for Siegfried Sassoon, called "The Wet Bond of Blood," about the brotherhood men forge in combat. (That post is linked here.)
From the news this past week comes a related story in the L.A. Times, talking about the work of Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn, a husband-and-wife research team at UCLA, who have been delving into 41,000 Civil War records of the Union Army to find out what makes some soldiers "stay and fight on a brutal battlefield," and others "desert and flee." Their new book is called "Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War."
According to the L.A. Times,
"The book's thesis is that serving in a homogenous Army company, particularly one of volunteers recruited from the same region, reduced desertion rates in the 1860s. Patriotism played a role in keeping soldiers at the front lines, according to the book, but more important factors were sticking with buddies of similar backgrounds and avoiding a bad reputation back home.
"Loyalty to comrades trumped cause, morale and leadership. But loyalty to comrades extended only to men like themselves -- in ethnicity, social status and age," the authors wrote."
For example,
"Through statistical analysis, the authors developed a formula in which group loyalty in those Union regiments was found to have counted twice as much in preventing desertion as a soldier's ideology, and six times as much as their unit leaders' popularity. For example, Company D of the 36th Regiment contained neighbors and relatives from Worcester County, Mass. The men, mainly mechanics and artisans, saw heavy action and no desertions.
In contrast, Company B of the 47th Regiment from New York was a more diverse lot, including men from cities and farms, along with laborers who were paid to substitute for conscripts. Its desertion rate was 16 percent."
"Cohesion" in military units is a topic even experts like Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D. have spoken about as vital and essential for morale, and for the prospect of some form of healing taking place also in community. As the article's author remarks, "Unlike the Civil War army, American units today are ethnically and geographically diverse. Yet the military has learned to reinforce the bonds gained in training, and usually rotates entire units in and out of war zones rather than fill in for casualties with new soldiers as it did during the Vietnam War, the professors said."
Interestingly, the book's authors are economists, not sociologists. The data they surveyed, and the ways they worked with the source material might also be useful for others to evaluate as well. One of the recent, though debated, conclusions of PTSD research is that ethnic minorities are at risk for suffering from PTSD at greater rates than the general population. There are various hypotheses proposed as to why, and no general agreement as yet about why this might be. (See "PTSD among ethnic minority veterans," from the National Center for PTSD Research, linked here, for more on this subject. Also Professor Hedley Peach's research with the Australian Vietnam veterans studies as well, previously discussed on this blog.)
(Here's a look at the source material and their techniques for analyzing it, from the same L.A. Times article:)
"They used Internet databases as well as copies of antique paper documents written in the elegant penmanship of 19th-century government clerks. They applied the statistical tools of economic analysis to history, a cross-disciplinary technique increasingly popular in academia. Through those archives, the authors examined service records, ages, birthplaces, prewar occupations, battlefield deaths and prisoner-of-war interments among 35,000 white and 6,000 black Union soldiers. They also tracked census and pension information going back in some cases to 1850 and as far forward as 1910. Similar Confederate records were not available, they said. And to estimate pro-Union sentiment among the troops they studied, the researchers examined support for President Abraham Lincoln¹s elections in the soldiers' home counties."
Dora Costa, one of the book's authors called the source material they used, the Union Army's war records, "a fantastic laboratory for studying how do men behave under extreme stress." For that very reason, I hope other authors and scientists will mine this same trove of information. The book's authors come up somewhat blank on one of the most fascinating themes of all. During the Civil War, "the most ideological of U.S. wars," Costa remarked, "it was loyalty to your buddies that kept men going.id. "But we don't know why there was this loyalty."
Answering that question, we might want to turn to Graves' poem for Sassoon, mentioned above, or the thoughts of America's premier wartime journalist, Ernie Pyle, who we've also talked about at length on this blog. From last summer -- the author of "Ernie Pyle's War," describing Pyle's authentic empathy for the soldier beside him, so well-conveyed in print:
"He knew, too, that it was neither God nor Flag nor Mother that impelled a pimply faced kid to risk, to lose his life in an obscene adventure. He did it for the kid next to him; he couldn't let him down. They needed one another so bad."
In "Heroes and Cowards," Costa and Kahn were surprised to learn that the average Union desertion rate was only about 10%, on average. Says the L.A. Times, "Given the horrific conditions, it is surprising there was so little desertion," Costa said. That was especially true since fewer than one-half of those who deserted were caught, punishment often was not very harsh and execution extremely rare."
In the absence of any other, better sociological explanation, it just goes to underscore the "wet bond of blood" -- or what Pyle referred to as "the powerful fraternalism of the ghastly brotherhood of war."
