In warfare, arms are far more than just the tools of combat. In short, through weapons, one grasps soldiers and their world.
And as to crew-served weapons – cannon, machine guns – they, too, carried great affective significance. Even if the soldiers of the Great War were in all probability less attached to their hand weapon than Napoleon I, Emperor of the French’s (1769-1821) soldiers to theirs a century earlier, they were still on intimate terms with the tool that was destined to take their adversaries’ lives and protect their own. Even in modern warfare, soldiers make their individual weapon theirs. Nor is the range of experiences sensory only: the bonds between soldiers and their weapons are affective ones, too. Weapons also open up a range of sensory experiences: one grips them, one feels their weight, one handles them. They also inflect the way it moves, even if we do not know enough about soldiers’ range and modes of motion during combat in 1914-1918. Individual weapons – the kind that the soldiers of the Great War lived with day and night – do not just extend the body. Weapons are tightly linked to the body-at-war in yet another, less immediately obvious way. It is no coincidence that neglect of the issue of weapons has gone hand in hand with neglect of the issue of war medicine (which has been passed over for a long time, with the exception of war psychiatry).
For weapons are inseparable from bodies, and from the injuries inflicted on bodies – and what are combat and war all about, if not the human body? Overlooking weapons means overlooking the violation of anatomic barriers, it means overlooking injury and death, and, more in general, it means overlooking suffering. Yet this blind spot leads Great War scholarship into an impasse. As a result, knowing a great deal about weapons, at least modern ones, does not net one a great deal of academic credibility – rather the opposite.
The field of weapons expertise has long been left to specialists lacking scholarly legitimacy, whether collectors or adherents of the most traditional kind of military history. Quite a few reasons explain this avoidance. Yet many scholars of war – including scholars of the First World War – have skirted the issue of weaponry. It would be absurd to study war without studying combat – and to study combat without studying weapons.
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