Human beings are in fact powerfully attracted to war. The journalist Chris Hedges, in a recent book called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, has described war as a “narcotic,” a “lethal addiction,” a drug that he himself ingested for his many years as a war correspondent. Throughout history, we can find representations of war’s powerful allure in the discourse that precedes and pervades almost every conflict. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, Tennyson enthusiastically anticipated the “sudden making of splendid names” and the “heart of a people” that would beat with “one desire.” Herbert Asquith’s World War I poem “The Volunteer” depicted “a clerk who half his life had spent/Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,” who was now invited “to join the men of Agincourt.” And the American Civil War, fought in the years between Balaclava and the Western Front, generated similar sentiments and declarations. The attorney general of the new Confederacy anticipated that war would “stimulate ... the nobler impulses ... which else had remained torpid in our souls.” The historian Francis Parkman of Boston believed that war would renew and purify the nation, liberating it from its growing preoccupation with “material success.” The Richmond Enquirer saw in war an offer of the joys of patriotism and brotherhood, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the demise of selfishness, and the ecstasy of martyrdom. In New England, Henry Lee Higginson later looked back on his hopes for the conflict, evidently sustained in the experience as well as the anticipation of battle: “I always did long for some such war, and it came in the nick of time for me.”

For all its ubiquity and its universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary—the escape from the gray everyday, from the humdrum into higher things. It is indeed striking how often the language of altitude is used by those describing the allure of war: it will lift, elevate, raise us toward the transcendent, and link us to the “sublime,” a word often repeated in nineteenth-century paeans to war. In the Civil War, civilians rushed to the battlefields when the fighting ceased—many to search for wounded kin, but others to experience a direct connection to what they described as a force beyond themselves and their accustomed lives. That, in fact, was what a number of observers were seeking when they were caught up in First Bull Run and fled back to Washington. After that incident, civilians were more likely to wait to arrive until after the guns were silent. But arrive they did. These battlefield tourists earned the scorn and the resentment of the wounded, and of those struggling to provide aid amid the desolation. Yet the incongruity of their presence only underscores war’s fascination. Their notion of war as sublime was clearly rooted in the nineteenth century’s romanticism. But it nevertheless reminds us that the human attraction to war is about the struggle to surpass the boundaries of the human as well as the limits of human understanding.

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and to repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart. For the Civil War, it was perhaps Robert E. Lee who captured this contradiction most memorably in his often—and variously—quoted remark to James Longstreet as they watched the slaughter at Fredericksburg in 1862. This was a dramatic victory for the Confederates, gained as Union troops charged futilely up Marye’s forbidding Heights in one of the war’s most costly and pointless efforts. “It is well that war is so terrible,” Lee observed, “else we should grow too fond of it.”

Lee’s ambivalence, his complexity, are in one sense surprising here, for he is remembered as the war’s romantic hero, a man of decisiveness and little doubt. Irony would not seem to be available to Robert E. Lee. But there it is, in his revealing and devastating remark to Longstreet, which reinforces the centrality of paradox to any understanding of war. It is terrible and yet we love it; we need to witness the worst of its destruction in order not to love it even more. We must acknowledge both its horror and its attraction if we hope to understand the contradictions in its impact and its presence in human lives. As a British soldier wrote of Gallipoli, “It was a horrible day and a great day. I would not have missed it for worlds.”