Storytelling Versus The Inhumanity of War by Chelcie Hinders

In Richard Bausch’s Peace, storytelling between soldiers on the war’s front lines is as much a part of their lives as the violence and action they’re immersed in. Not every second at war is filled with action, and in their down time, the soldiers in Bausch’s novel entertain each other, and themselves, with stories about their lives before the war. For some soldiers, remembering and retelling stories of home serves a therapeutic purpose. Stories of home provide not only entertainment, but also remind the soldiers that they are more than soldiers—they are human beings, too.

For others, remembering their homes and past lives doesn’t connect them to their humanity. Rather, storytelling makes them feel even further removed from themselves when compared to the inhumanity of being a soldier at war. This is particularly true for Corporal Robert Marson. “His life there [at home] now seemed a hundred years ago. Or it was worse […] it felt like something he must have imagined. It no longer carried with it the weight of memory but was marbled with the insubstantial feeling of imagination” (73). The happiness and simplicity of his life before the war is gone.

During the war, the tragedies and hardships that Marson has endured, (the deaths of his fellow soldiers, witnessing the death of an unarmed woman, and being responsible for numerous deaths himself, all while trying to survive winter in the mountains) have removed him so far from his humanity that he cannot even imagine having lived a life where he was a semi-professional baseball player with a loving wife and family. The only real thing in his life is the war, and remembering life before the war feels, at times, impossible, and other times downright painful and scary. “[I]t frightened him, as if his mind would not be able to support it. He did not want to think of home now, or of love, or of family, hearth, hope” (156). Rather than serving as a connection to his humanity, for Corporal Marson, storytelling reinforces the disconnection between his past life and the inhumanity of a life at war.