'Gave Themselves Without Idle Words to Death'

Rudyard Kipling was barely twenty years old when he wrote his “Prelude” to Departmental Ditties (1886), which includes these lines: “The deaths ye died I have watched beside, / And the lives ye led were mine.” Eugene Sledge was nineteen when he enlisted in the Marine Corps a year after Pearl Harbor and twenty while serving as a mortarman during the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa. Sledge used the lines from Kipling’s poem as the epigraph to With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), which stands on the shelf beside those other essential American books, Ulysses Grant’s Personal Memoirs (1885) and Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story (1951). 

“Combat is the acid test,” Sledge writes. A recurrent theme in his book is the impossibility of someone like myself, who never experienced combat, ever understanding it. He describes the savagery of the fighting with the Japanese and the esprit de corps among his fellow Marines. Sledge writes:

 

“To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”

 

Sledge is a thoughtful writer, never out to parade his machismo. When I think back on first reading the book, I remember the scene of Marines prying gold teeth from the mouths of dead (and sometimes living) Japanese soldiers. Sledge himself prepares to do the same until a Navy corpsman talks him out of it.

 

In 1934, nearly twenty years after his son John was killed in the Battle of Loos during the Great War, Kipling wrote “Ode: Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance,” commemorating the war memorial built to honor that war's dead from Victoria, Australia. Here is the third stanza:

 

“Thus, suddenly, war took them -- seas and skies

   Joined with the earth for slaughter. In a breath

They, scoffing at all talk of sacrifice,

   Gave themselves without idle words to death.”

 

Sledge was born one-hundred years ago today, on November 4, 1923, and died in 2001 at age seventy-seven.