THL 121 Victory and Death
“War is hell.” So goes the oft repeated statement attributed to General William Tecumseh Sherman.
In Cormac McCarthy’s brutal classic Blood Meridian, the character Judge Holden expounds on his thoughts on war and its centrality to human existence. Some excerpts I’ve edited down from a passage are, “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
A few lines later he adds, “All other trades are contained in that of war.”
Another character asks, “Is that why war endures?”
Judge Holden replies, “No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.”
The other man responds, “That’s your notion.”
McCarthy then writes, “The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”
Whether or not these words written by McCarthy are wholly true is up for debate, but one thing not up for debate is that in 1836 the Texian revolutionaries and the volunteers that had flooded their army were in the game of their lives with the army of General Santa Anna. And at stake, to again quote William Barret Travis, was “Victory or Death.” But that is not completely accurate. In the end, when all the moves in the game were made, the game of war would end with both. Victory and death. Mucha muerte.
It is well known that Sam Houston had a lifelong love for Homer’s Iliad, so it might do well to borrow from the ancient poets works. There would be killing till the score was paid. Death and the strong force of fate were waiting. Slaughter and blood and the agonized groans of mangled men had been and would soon again be the price paid to the god of war in the Texian and Mexican struggle.