4 BATTLE

Mads Daugbjerg

The recreated battle is the iconic form of reenactment. Indeed, the popular interest in and growth of the broader phenomenon of reenactment has largely revolved around the battle—the spectacular confrontation of quasi-historical armies comprised of devoted hobby historians performing for an audience.

Even in cases when the grand battle itself is not actually dramatized, an interest in war history and warfare is very often a main motivation for reenactors—for instance, among World War II living historians who concentrate on the daily life in camp or the maintenance of historical vehicles. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that a set of martial, GENDERed (male-dominated), and patriotic ideals and values saturate many hobby reenactment milieus, implicitly or explicitly (Turner, 1988; West, 2014). The widespread fascination with reenacted war reflects broader trends and conceptions of history and testifies to the general mass appeal of wars, which many understand as (the) pivotal events of the past. In certain popular-cultural contexts—for instance, magazines or TV channels devoted to historical themes—the very notion of history often implies war history. This is paralleled in the heritage sector, for instance in European museums and sites connected with World War I and World War II, where the rendering and commemoration of armed conflict and its consequences remain central.

Battle reenactment is often considered a modern-day phenomenon. It is certainly the case that a particular surge can be identified from the 1980s onwards, so that nowadays all imaginable past conflicts are being performed again, including very recent or even ongoing ones. Battle reenactment societies are organized according to the conflict or period in question, with major groupings focusing on the Viking and Medieval periods, the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

However, antecedents of modern-day battle reenactment date back to antiquity. In ancient Rome, imperial victories in faraway territories were routinely re-staged for the public, including elaborate naval battles—called naumachia—in which rivers, artificial lakes, and amphitheaters flooded for the purpose were used as stages for full-scale recreations involving thousands of participants (Hammer, 2010; Coleman, 1993). Much later, medieval pageants and “mystery plays” across Europe blended sacred and secular elements in dramatic performances of biblical episodes and struggles, linking these with aspects of everyday life (Rogerson, 2017; Aronson- Lehavi, 2012). During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as new paradigms of exhibition and entertainment developed across the Western World, the use of reenactment-style demonstrations became increasingly popular. The Great Exhibitions of the period often included folk displays in which “savages” and other colonial subjects were enlisted to typify exotic cultures under Western domination, supporting the racialized hierarchies of the era (iNDiGENEiτγ).The traveling Wild West shows, organized by entrepreneurs like William “Buffalo Bill” Cody from the 1880s onwards, unfolded along similar racist and colonial rationales, as key battles and episodes from the American Indian Wars were replayed in a circus-like framework in which both the white protagonists and Native Americans performed essentially as (stereotypes of) themselves (Rydell and Kroes, 2005; Ashby, 2006). Similar trends can be seen in other former colonial societies, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Namibia. New technologies and media, including large-scale panoramas and magic lantern shows depicting key battles, and of course, later, the cinema offering moving pictures, revolutionized the ways audiences could experience and immerse themselves in bygone events, including dramatic battles (Griffiths, 2003).

An interesting example of a spectacular “battle” reenactment at the nexus of mass culture, politics, and early cinema emerged during the early years of the Soviet Union.

In 1920, just three years after the October Revolution, theater director Nikolai Evreinov staged a grand recreation of the 1917 Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd (today's St Petersburg). The event involved some 10,000 participants and an estimated 100,000 spectators—more than a quarter of the city's population at the time. The reenactment dramatized and exaggerated what had originally been a rather unspectacular takeover in “a performance that not only recaptured, but became greater than reality” (Geldern, 1998, p. 139). In turn, this simulation would inspire key scenes of Sergei Eisenstein's 1927 propaganda film October, which, over the years, came to be pedestalled in the USSR as a key representation of the revolution.

These circus-style and cinematic spectacles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not organized or driven by hobby groups like those dominating today's battle reenactment scene. Yet they are obviously related to modern-day reenactment societies and to their urge to memorialize and revive violent moments and significant upheavals while also possessing dimensions of both entertainment and education. The birth of modern-day battle reenactment is most often understood as having grown out of the anniversaries of the American Civil War (1861—1865), with the 1963 centennial of the Battle of Gettysburg constituting a particularly key event (Figure 4.1). Historians have noted that the Gettysburg Centennial rested on a problematic political outlook stressing the reenactment as a “white” reconciliation between North and South, while largely ignoring the issues of race and segregation so central to the original conflict (Blight, 2001; Weeks, 2003; Jordan, 2011). Certain tenets of such reconcilia- tory rationales—the idea of the American Civil War as a brother's war with white heroes on both sides—can still be found among contemporary reenactment groups insisting that they seek to honor the war participants of both sides equally. This is part of a wider discourse of heroism and purity, in which participation in the recreated battles is sometimes proposed as a patriotic duty or pilgrimage and the sites of battle understood as sacred or “hallowed” ground (see Daugbjerg, 2014).

Such a stance is very often coupled, on the American Civil War scene and elsewhere, with a conviction that the common privates portrayed by reenactors were but pawns in a political game, with little individual interest or complicity in larger ideological concerns. For instance, Daugbjerg found that American Civil War reenactors often deflected questions regarding political and moral dimensions, such as those connected with the role of slavery; their responses circled around the celebration of the typical, average, or common man, uninformed in politics and merely “fighting for what he believed was right” (Daugbjerg, 2014, p. 727). This parallels the findings of Jenny Thompson, who studied World War I and World War II reenactment groups and identified a widespread “fascination with this mythic common man” (2004, p. 88).

Figure 4.1 Rifles and other American Civil War reenactment equipment arrayed between battles at the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 2013. Source: Mads Daugbjerg.

The idea of the real and unfiltered experience is central to battle reenactors (Handler and Saxton, 1988; Daugbjerg, 2014, 2017). A widespread conviction exists that the physical re-animation of battles can provide real glimpses unattainable through more conventional approaches to learning about history. One thus finds a dominant idea that “history as it is found in books” (Handler and Saxton, 1988, p. 243) may be interesting or even necessary but ultimately cannot provide the insights promised by physical presence and bodily experience. In some cases, this is coupled with disdain toward more traditional didactic institutions, such as the school or the museum, which many reenactors see as presenting boring or elitist versions of history. In contrast, reenactment is stressed as attractive because it provides a sense of being in history, a sense of ownership, of having a go or “a say” in the production of historical meaning (Thompson, 2004; de Groot, 2009).

This is the fascination of the past as “unfinished” business or, in Rebecca Schneider’s formulation, as “never complete, never completely finished, but incomplete: cast into the future as a matter for ritual negotiation and as yet undecided interpretive acts of reworking” (Schneider, 2011, p. 33, original emphasis).

In the quest for the ultimate reenacted experience, the so-called “magic moment” upholds a special and almost mythological status. Also known among battle reenactors as “period rush”— and, in some cases, constituting something akin to a “wargasm” (Horwitz, 1999, p. 209)—these rare experiences constitute reported flashes of almost revelatory temporal connection. One American Civil War reenactor reported:

I remember coming out on the field for the Sunday battle. And the way the smoke hung in the air, there were so many muskets firing you couldn’t hear the individual shots. You couldn’t distinguish them in your ear. It was just a roar, and you could see the battle flags waving in the breeze, with everyone yelling and screaming. And in the background, there’s a band playing Dixie over it all. Just for a split second it was a surreal moment.

(Daugbjerg, 2017, p. 161)

The chaotic moment of battle confusion, the perceived immersion in the fog of war, is a recurring motif in such descriptions, entailing a lack of overview and often a misty or smoky haze in which temporal registers are felt capable of blurring. Steven Cushman has described these yearnings among reenactors as an urge “to lose track of time, to fool themselves, to experience a mystical moment when the seemingly impermeable boundary between the present and the past suddenly dissolves” (Cushman, 1999, quoted in Amster, 2008, p. 21).

When it comes to the actual organization and planning of battle reenactments, a key distinction is made between so-called scripted and tactical battle scenarios. As the name suggests, the first type of engagement is governed by adherence to an already agreed-upon script modeled over the course of a specific historical battle.

Hence, the scripted version of the Battle of Waterloo aims to be a reconstruction of the original event, with maneuvers, breakthroughs, casualty records, and outcomes decided in advance and in relative accordance with the historical record (Figure 4.2). Scripted battles are usually staged to audiences fenced off from the action by rope or, in the case of the largest events, situated on grandstands. In practice, scripted battles almost inevitably involve several alterations and adaptations of various elements—or parts of the scripted scenario which simply go wrong—so that the final show rarely lives up to the script; however, its principle is to remain faithful to the course of the historical battle. In the case of the

Figure 4.2 Artillery crew reenactors engulfed in smoke at the 2005 Battle ofWaterloo, Belgium. Source: Stephen Gapps.

tactical scenarios, on the other hand, a much more liberal perspective on historical fact is upheld. These events are often performed out of public sight. The main idea here is that, while remaining observant of historical structures and logistics of battle organization, order giving, and so on, the officers in charge are given more of a free rein to steer and “fight” the battle as they wish, and outcomes are not predetermined.

These two different setups matter in how they facilitate certain atmospheres and experiences. While in a certain sense of the word, scripted engagements are certainly (meant to be) more authentic, and while they are often couched in a more solemn and commemorative context— paying due respect to those who fell in the historical battle, for example—reenactors often describe them as less exhilarating and absorbing than the tactical ones. The main reason for this is the pre-inscribed knowledge of the scripted battle's outcome, which is, of course, radically different from the confusions, fears, and thrills of the soldiers who fought in the original event (see also Kelly, 2009). This fixed feature of the scripted battles thus lends them an artificial quality of temporal overview and reassurance that differs from the relative openness and insecurities inherent in their tactical counterparts. These two key battle modalities can be said to reflect deeper debates at the heart of the hobby, including the ever-present quests for and debates over authenticity so prevalent in heritage and tourism studies more generally (MacCannell, 1973; Handler, 1986; Wang, 1999). While scripted battles seek a visual or material correspondence to the event in question—“mimetic credibility,” as Edward Bruner has put it (1994, p. 399)—the tactical engagements instead provide participants with an introspective “authenticity of experience,” in Handler and Saxton's (1988) terminology. Perhaps ironically, given the zealous strivings for authenticity so widespread among its practitioners, the field of battle reenactment continues to be steeped in accusations of misrepresentation—as well as commercialization, political bias, and sometimes outright jingoism. Even so, battle reenactors persist in their quest for realness, physicality, and “magic moments,” as they seek to nurture, emulate, and connect to the past by reperforming its wars once more.

4 BATTLE

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