[PEN-L:29586] The problem of war veterans in an historical context

[Michael Pollak <mpollak@xxxxxxxxx>]

[This is an email from a friend of mine who has spent a lot of time
thinking about the relation of military and nation in Europe from the
French revolution onwards, and spent a lot of time travelling around
Africa and hanging out at Oxford during the early days of
de-colonialization.  I thought she had an interesting perspective.]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 15:36:17 +0000
From: mado spiegler <madospieg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: mpollak@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: a requiem for Zimbabwe's political elite?

Re-integration of war veterans is a common problem/question following
long/bloody wars, whether victorious or not.

In fact, it might be an interesting little piece to write to frame the
current Zimbabwe situation--

Sometimes it is resolved successfully:

The resettlement of war veterans was a major aspect of the Roman Empire's
real estate policy after peace; all over Western Eurasia, land was donated
to veterans to colonize and the ones who didn't benefit from the land
grants and returned to Rome were a pain in the butt.

The GI Bill was a particularly successful example in modern times.  The
lack of problem from US victims was the dog that didn't bark, or rather
bite.

I think the Soviet Union was successful also in a different way and it
made the post-'89 disintegration particularly bitter for WWII veterans

Sometimes it wasn't successful:

The Vietnam War and even more so the Gulf War are examples of unsuccessful
reintegration, except for a very small minority .

Post WWI Europe generally speaking was a disaster, partly because of the
large numbers of walking dead, and not-so-dead wheelchaired recruits for
mass political movements of various ideologies not satisfied with
receiving medals and twice yearly public ceremonies. One common feature of
the recollections of people who were children in the 20s and 30s is the
presence everywhere of aging cripples with past misfortunes for their
country to avenge -- although there were also many of them in the pacifist
movements (most people thinking of appeasement, by the way, are blinkered
in that respect -- WWI was a huge visible presence on the street still
memorialized by the signs in the metro reserving seats to "invalides de
guerre").

Still, by the 20s-30s the idea of welfare states is well established and
there are policies in place everywhere for the compensation of crippled
veterans. There is no policy of rewarding able-bodied veterans with land
grants but there are semi successful lobbies for veterans' pensions pegged
to the rise in cost of living and inheritable by their widows -- as far as
i know all over Europe

Now going back to post-Napoleonic France -- the revolutionary wars (and
Napoleon's wars are part of that of course) had enrolled millions of
people; those were considered democratic wars, and they definitely created
a pool of expectations regarding the respect of material reward owed
veterans as sacrificed citizens, servants of the public (civil servants in
a way)

While the going was good, there was some extent to which returning
veterans would be allowed to settle on confiscated Church or Aristocrats'
land. but increasingly that land is put back into the markets, out of the
reach of returning soldiers.

Some effort was made to help the most disabled veterans by opening
"Invalides' Hospitals." The best known is in Paris the Hotel des Invalides
fittingly Napoleon's tomb was eventually established right around the
corner from the Invalides -- but there was nowhere near the number of
places that were needed, and in any case, they only accommodated the
really extreme cases, not the "Valid" soldiers who could more or less cope
-- the lucky ones were given the concessions for tobacconists' shops
(tobacco allowances were until recently a sacrosanct item in veterans' pay
and to this day many tobacco shops are run by the widows of veterans) --
there was not however any general scheme for paying every veteran a
'living wage' --

in other words, it left a large and growing population of embittered old
men with a tobacco box given them by Napoleon personally on some distant
battlefield (there is one in my family, handed out in Russia to my
g-g-g-g-grandfather Jacques Meny also know as Pegleg Jacques -- you had to
add the first names because there were a number of peglegs in the village
in that generation -- we still have it, along with another cousin's
Medaille de St. Helene, but then two other of Pegleg's cousins were
deserters)

there was also a problem because many of those aging veterans were
Bonapartists. they had won their medals, their tobacco concessions
fighting against the rightwing regimes of monarchical Europe and were
theoretically at least hostile to the restoration regimes -- but all they
really had were their medals, their tobacco boxes and their Beranger songs
hence the need to appease them...

the easiest sources for this, aside from archives, is in fact literature:
Vigny, de Maistre which is a right-wingish version, Victor Hugo talking
about his father who fought with Napoleon in Spain, Balzac and Flaubert
where the embittered veteran with or without tobacco shop but always with
a pipe is a central type, representative of lost illusions, the betrayal
of dutiful servants by profligate masters, faithfulness to an ideal of the
Nation

Going Back to Zimbabwe

In East Africa, there was an original promise to give land to anticolonial
war veterans -- in all countries, as far as I know there was a genuine
effort to keep the promise --

in all countries, to the extent that White farmers' property was
respected, the land was -- in true colonialist fashion -- found and
confiscated in so-called wasteland, in practice land belonging to bottom
of the pecking order ethnic groups -- part of the general problem of
people being shunted around, migrating, taking refuge from this or that or
the other thing and taking their neighbors' land (a la Hopi-Navajo) -- one
big dispute which has been studied from that angle by some Scandinavian
researcher was over 'empty' coastal land in Tanzania which was given to
displaced former Mau Mau fighters --

some of the supposedly 'ethnic' conflicts have in fact been land disputes
involving land grants of that type --

the problem has been compounded,when, as in post-revolutionary Europe (or
pre-Bushian Houston :-) confiscated land was given to well-connected
people, cronies of the politicians, INSTEAD of veterans who expected to
receive it --

furthermore, many of the veterans were given small parcels which in recent
years have fallen prey to the multinational takeovers connected with
cash-cropping to pay the Debt,

so all of sudden there is a swelling number of veterans who didn't get
theirs in the first place, or got theirs only to lose it to "White"
extensive farmers, or Black extensive farmers working for the foreign
markets -- and clearly land will not be taken back from the Black cronies

a sub issue of all that, BTW, is women's land which has also been getting
lost -- there were many women veterans, BTW, in the 70s-80s it was a big
item in the Zimbabwe women's movement


NOT REALLY a FOOTNOTE : see where it fits

Thirty Year War or War of Succession veterans, being mercenaries or
dumbfucks who'd been caught by the kings' recruiters, were generally
considered sorry (or dangerous) riff-raff, without any connections to the
burghers -- reflected in the late 18th, early 19th century fairy tales
where soldiers are represented as (endearing) crooks with an axe to grind,
out to get the king's daughter they obviously don't deserve but determined
to get her because they've been released at the end of the war with a
pouch of tobacco and 50 cents for pay when they had been promised tons of
loot, forced to make pacts with devils and witches or more commonly to use
the ingenuity developed over many years of living off the conquered land.

(the burgher's idea of the *good* soldier by contrast is the militia man
who is a property owner in the first place -- no need to worry about him
-- he'll find land waiting for him and therefore a good chance of a wife
-- the problems arise later when there's not enough land to go around
between the heirs, but that's a different issue,although maybe not
totally unrelated to the Zimbabwe late 20th century issues)

You know, I think I might have an article in here somewhere --

Mado











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