[Lalwendë]

I was thinking about how we aways draw parallels with WWI but Tolkien was actually writing LotR during WWII, a very different kind of conflict, one on a global scale and one which brought unimaginable horrors. The ways people reacted to these horrors were not always with 'respect' for the enemy, due to some of the things which the enemy did which were beyond the pale. Many Jewish people say they simply cannot forgive what happened during WWII, it's just not going to happen. In LotR we don't see the enemy forces doing the kinds of things which were done during WWII, but these enemies are painted in that kind of light at times, as though they have gone beyond the pale.

What brought me to thinking about this was my dad was telling me the story of a friend of his who was involved in the liberation of Belsen. He was very young, and a bulldozer driver, so you can imagine which task eventually fell to him. But when they first arrived at the camp, apparently it could be smelled from miles away due to the mounds of thousands of corpses left lying around, sometimes in the same bunks as the living. What had been highly disciplined units broke down pretty quickly in the face of this unimaginable horror - the officers simply could not exercise the same discipline over men who were facing such scenes.

The Nazis running the place were still there and were brutally treated by the Allies; some of them kicked to death by Allied soldiers, most of them made to bury disease ridden corpses with their bare hands so that many of them died themselves from typhus; this was done as 'punishment' to deliberately demean and harm the camp staff as there were so many bodies they simply had to be bulldozed into the burial pits. Then the Allies went into the neighbouring villages and forced the local people at gunpoint to march into Belsen and see for themselves the corpses and dying people; they were forced from their homes and all their possessions taken away - the Allied soldiers helped themselves to what they wanted and moved the prisoners from the camp into the houses. The ordinary locals were given no help and made to march out of the area, homeless and with only what they were wearing.

That struck me as very brutal. These people may indeed have known what was happening up the road, but could not say anything as they were also living in fear of a brutal regime. Why then were they punished? The answer is that this was a reaction to something so extreme the Allies could not comprehend how someone could not say or do anything about this horror on their doorstep. That when confronted with an extreme, discipline goes out of the window.

We aren't told what Sauron's forces do, but we must imagine it was something as equally brutal to provoke our heroes to treat the Orcs without respect. We know they are not mere robots or monsters, as Tolkien shows us Orcs chatting about retirement, just as Men might, but like the Nazis, they have been brainwashed and subject to fear which has resulted in brutality in war being 'normal' for them.

So there it is, I think the enemy of LotR stems from a very different era to the enemy of Kipling's day. These enemies are not the ordinary soldiers of WWI but the products of a brutal regime, moulded to be cogs in the machine of killing and the violent, unhinged reactions of our heroes might just be the inevitable human response of soldiers in the face of unimaginably brutalised and hence brutal enemies.