Mark O'Connell
There’s a moment at about the mid-point of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where Nikolai Rostov – a young and avidly patriotic aristocrat, serving as a hussar in Tsar Alexander’s army during the Napoleonic wars – advances bravely against a French officer in the chaos of battle.
Taken unawares by the horse-mounted charge, the Frenchman is flung from his own horse, and is left fatally vulnerable to Rostov’s sword. Rostov pauses a moment before moving to kill the enemy soldier, and in that moment something changes: the thrill of battle suddenly drains away, and with it any sense of moral legitimacy to the act he is about to commit.
“He was terrified,” writes Tolstoy of the fallen French soldier, “wincing from immediate expectation of another blow, and he looked up at Rostov, recoiling in horror. This pale, mud-stained face of a fair-haired young man with a dimple on his chin and bright blue eyes had no business with battlefields; it was not the face of an enemy; it was a domestic, indoor face.”
Rather than being killed, the Frenchman is taken as a prisoner of war by Rostov’s regiment. Rostov himself, despite being awarded a medal for his supposed bravery in battle, is gripped by a deep and somewhat mysterious shame. He had glimpsed this young Frenchman’s terrified face – his domestic, indoor face, with its bright blue eyes and its dimpled chin – and had come within a heartbeat of killing him.
Face-to-face encounter
Had he not been so close to him, had he slashed him with his sword from behind, the Frenchman would have remained “the enemy”, and he would have killed him, because it is easier to kill an abstraction than a man.
It was the face-to-face encounter that saved the Frenchman, and that prevented Rostov from killing him.
This moment, at the heart of Tolstoy’s sprawling and morally questioning work of fiction, is one that I have found myself thinking about a lot recently.
Obviously, warfare has changed a great deal since the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century, and since Tolstoy wrote about their effect on Russian aristocratic society some 50 years later.
There are no more horse-mounted regiments, and no more swords, just as there are no more Russian aristocrats.
Increasingly, the business of killing is carried out at a technological remove, a distance that permits radical extremes of abstraction. The AI kill-chain algorithm does not see a pale, mud-stained face; it sees only a target.
A contemporary Nikolai Rostov would not be charging into battle on his horse; he would likely be sitting in a windowless room in a hardened control station somewhere in occupied Donetsk, operating a strike drone as it hovers over a Ukrainian army position.
But just as there was a great deal of killing from a distance during the Napoleonic wars (the battle scenes in War and Peace are thick with the smoke of cannon fire), there remain many situations in contemporary warfare in which the enemy must be encountered head-on.
The sniper, for instance, kills from a distance, but in such a way as he must glimpse the face of his target, and must surely risk glimpsing their humanity.
Last week saw the publication of a five-month investigative report by a number of media outlets – among them The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism – detailing the killing by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) snipers of four members of a Palestinian family in a single day in November 2023. An article in the Guardian names two of the snipers.
‘My first elimination’
The article details a recording of one, an American, watching footage of the killings, and speaking to an undercover journalist.
“That was my first elimination,” he says, referring to the death of the Palestinian teenager Salem Doghmosh, whom he shot while he was trying to retrieve a body. “It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that]”, the sniper says, “and also it doesn’t really interest me. I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”
What was so important about that corpse was that it was the body of his older brother, Mohammed.
According to the Guardian report, the sniper acknowledges that his 19-year old victim was unarmed.
He says: “They’re thinking: ‘Oh I don’t think I’ll get shot because I’m wearing civilian clothes and I am not carrying a weapon and all that, but they were wrong. That’s what you have snipers for.”
After Salem was shot to death, his 51-year-old father, Montasser Doghmosh, attempted to retrieve the bodies of his two sons. In the recording, as he approaches the bodies of his dead sons, he is heard to repeat the words “My boys, my boys.” He too, is fatally shot by IDF snipers.
Evidence of war crimes
International law explicitly prohibits attacking unarmed people, and people who are retrieving bodies.
The footage of these killings, and the soldier’s recorded account of them, appear to be evidence of war crimes. Almost as much as his actions, the soldier’s language demonstrates the extent to which he is blinded to the humanity of the people he killed.
In War and Peace, the intractable shame experienced by Nikolai Rostov in the wake of his encounter with the unhorsed French officer has, partly, to do with his sense of his failure to live up to the requirements of the battlefield. He feels shame both because he has come so close to killing the other man, and because he is rendered morally incapable of doing so by the recognition, in the glimpse of his “domestic” face, of his humanity.
His own humanity is at odds with the ideal of the warrior.
He cannot kill the Frenchman, because he has seen his face, and recognised in it the life of a fellow human. The Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who served in the French army during the second World War – and who, as a Jew, avoided the extermination camps as a captured prisoner of war – located the face-to-face encounter between humans as the foundation of ethics.
For Levinas, the face of another human being, in its nakedness and vulnerability, embodies the primary and foundational command of human relations and of morality: thou shalt not kill.
I am not saying here that the American soldier and his fellow IDF snipers would not have killed that Palestinian family if they had seen their faces. What I am saying is that these men had so thoroughly and radically dehumanised their victims that their faces would, on some crucial level, have registered to them only as those of “the enemy”.
And here can be glimpsed a horrible irony at the heart of genocide: it is in the very process of dehumanising their victims that the perpetrators destroy what is left of their own humanity.
