This chapter investigates how Faulkner uses the figure of eyes as inkwells in his depiction of Temple Drake in his sensationalist 1931 novel Sanctuary where she is raped with a corncob by an impotent gangster. The ink represents the various narratives men imagine themselves drawing from her – she is either too sexual or not sexual enough, the victim of a crime or its instigator. Faulkner wrote Requiem for a Nun (1951) as a sequel to Sanctuary that in many ways recapitulates this sadism, but he suggests the possibility that Temple herself could achieve a new kind of agency as a paperback writer in the manner of Faulkner penning these salacious novels and eventually profiting from them. The topic of masculinity in Faulkner’s work is also fraught terrain. In Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Margaret Powers surprises the young Robert Saunders swimming naked; his body, the narrator says, looked like the color of old paper. This marks on Robert’s body a female gaze. Throughout his career, Faulkner wrestled with the idea that writing connotes effeminacy over and against masculine action, but spiritually and physically strong women become connected with writing in ways that defy a strict gender binary.

In her review of Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Francine D’Amico writes: “War is constructed as a test or signifier of manhood/masculinity: victory is confirmation of male identity, defeat is emasculation. Femininity is constructed to reinforce the ‘man as warrior’ construction, both in support roles as nurse, mother, or wife and in opposition as peace activist: all confirm militarized masculinity.” Building on this observation, this chapter asks whether war fiction and poetry support and reinforce these popularized conceptions, or whether they offer opposing or more complex views. Examining some of the most classic and popular war novels of the twentieth century such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, this chapter shows that these popular war novels of the twentieth century do not promote “militarized masculinity” but focus instead on the physical, psychological, and emotional cost of war by portraying its devastating effects on both men and women.

In Milton's sonnet "When the Assault," in Aereopagitica, and in Paradise Regained, Milton juxtaposes a series of deliberately reluctant and ambivalent soldiers as his heroes, protagonists, and spokesmen. Creating a military culture which disavows its own violence, these works carefully balance aggression, warfare, and militarism against ethical martyrdom, seclusion, and hermit-like devotional withdrawal. As Jesus in Paradise Regained alternates between mercy and judgment, assertion, power, and resignation, his manhood is at stake. Aereopagitica likewise imagines both a soldier and a martyr, a fighter and a mourner, as Miltonic personae. As a white knight who reluctantly fights, Milton makes himself the perfect ethical warrior.

This chapter focuses on human targets. It foregoes the traditional division into civilians and combatants in order to address lawful targets in both international and non-international armed conflict, and the notion of 'combatant' has no application to the latter category. For maximum clarity as to who can be lawfully attacked in armed conflict, it discusses – separately with regard to international and non-international armed conflict – the situation of several categories of persons such as members of the armed forces, members of the police, members of non-state armed groups, civilians, and peace operations personnel.

Chapter 8, “Spoiling for A Fight: Armed Opposition,” begins a two-part examination of violent resistance and how, when, and why Poles embraced or rejected it. This discussion is deliberately postponed in the story, as much of the existing literature focuses on military resistance as a shorthand for resistance as a whole, which it was not. Polish military resistance efforts, initially launched by officers and soldiers of the Polish Army in hiding under occupation, remained fractured and hamstrung by vicious Nazi reprisals until 1942. Despite its danger, myriad groups organized around plans for insurrection, spanning the political spectrum from orthodox communists to the fascist far right, and including Polish-Jewish participation. After the destruction of many such initiatives and the merging and reformation of others, one increasingly grew in size and strength: the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) eventually dominated a chaotic resistance landscape through the support of the Western Allies. This chapter argues that violent resistance was initially a disorganized catastrophe, and only late in the occupation did a few surviving underground militaries achieve the ability to influence the Polish population or threaten the German occupiers.

Chapter 9, “Home Army on the Offensive: Violence in 1943-1944,” dissects mature intelligentsia military resistance. As the tide of war turned and the Germans endured their first battlefield defeats against the Soviet Union, the consolidated Home Army grew aggressive. Its most effective move was a 1943 assassination campaign targeting Wehrmacht officers, Nazi police, and German administration personnel called Operation Heads. Heads intimidated the Germans and shifted occupation policy. The Home Army’s perceived success and the advance of the Eastern Front toward Warsaw in 1944 convinced underground military leaders that they were facing their last opportunity to launch a city-wide insurrection. Their rebellion, now known as the Warsaw Uprising, failed. Remaining German personnel in the city were reinforced and crushed the insurrection, slaughtered civilians, and destroyed the city. This chapter argues that military conspiracy, like Catholic resistance, had its successes but was ultimately dependent on the international situation and could not secure the practical support of the Grand Alliance in the face of both German and Soviet opposition.

Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but a republican political leader whose success was based on a combination of patrician pedigree with a popular persona built on an extraordinary record of military achievement. He was no anti-senatorial, populist revolutionary but followed in the tracks of Roman heroes of the past such as the Scipios. His astonishing success hardened his enemies' determination to stop him, even at the price of forcing a civil war. His assassination on the eve of his departure for a great war of vengeance against Parthia precluded whatever plans for consolidation he may have had, but also propelled the violence of civil war into the next phase of what would become a decisively destructive cycle. If Gruen was correct to emphasize that civil war destroyed the Republic, not its preexisting institutional weaknesses, then human choices, especially those that brought about the Civil War, provide the most satisfactory explanation for the collapse of the Republic.

Critics have long been puzzled by aspects of William Wordsworth’s “The Discharged Soldier” (1798), such as the abrupt opening, the soldier’s disinterest in telling his story in a genre that requires it, and the speaker’s lack of effusive sympathy. Wordsworth’s theory of desert provides a new way to understand the poem, and a key to understanding the poem’s interplay between capacity and aesthetics. The chapter focuses on the military body and, in particular, the stories about the acquisition of impairments that fictional disabled soldiers are required to tell. Disabled soldiers’ stories often make persuasive cases for desert (in that soldiers are deemed worthy of charity or reward).

María Remedios del Valle was a free black woman from Buenos Aires. After following her husband and sons to the front lines during Argentina’s wars for independence from Spain beginning in 1810, María Remedios del Valle became part of a community of soldiers. First a nurse, and later a military captain, she served in various capacities – soldier, spy, and caregiver – alongside the soldiers who fought for Argentina’s independence. By fighting with the revolutionary army María Remedios del Valle fought for the freedom of her nation. In recognition of her distinguished military service, she received a pension and later became known as the “Mother of the Nation.” But the irony of this designation cannot be underestimated. Remedios del Valle, a black female heroine, is the mother of a country that is still considered a “white” nation.