From the Latin bellicus, the word warlike is an adjective that makes it possible to refer to that which belongs to war. A war conflict, for example, is an armed conflict that reveals the scale of events.
A war is a fight, a battle, a confrontation or a fight. The warlike, therefore, implies violence. A bellicose person is aggressive or quarrelsome, seeks confrontation.
The policy can also be pugnacious. Many analysts consider that the foreign policy of US President George W. Bush has been bellicose, since, under his mandate, the country intervened in various wars.
International relations, since ancient times, are usually marked by wars. It is an uncivilized way of settling conflicts, but it is usually imposed by pressures of all kinds. The destructive power of today’s weapons means that each war involves the death of thousands or even millions of people.
War movies are those whose plot is based on a war. The most common war films are those that refer to World War II (the bloodiest war conflict, with more than 50 million deaths), although there are other conflicts that have also been portrayed in the cinema.
There are different kinds of war: the civil war involves the inhabitants of the same town, the preventive war is one started by a country with the argument that another nation is about to attack it, the dirty war is the one that is carried out outside of any legal framework and the holy war is the warlike conflict that is promoted for religious reasons.
War novel
In literature the genre of the war novel, in some cases named as military fiction, is one that encompasses all those stories that take place during combat, both on the battlefield and outside; It is a work in which the reader can get closer to the feelings and experiences that people who are affected by a war must face, both those who are going to fight and those who stay and must ensure their safety and suffer for those who have gone to war, thinking that one of the possibilities is that they will not be able to see them again.
The origin of this genre goes back to the epic poetry of the classical period; in fact, “The Iliad” is considered the first story that could be located in this genre, followed by Virgil’s “The Aeneid” and many others. Later, chivalric stories were introduced, such as the many legends surrounding the figure of King Arthur.
The objective of these narrations was to tell the story and preserve those important features of the culture to make them known not only among the people of today but also in the future, as an indelible tool of conscience and culture that would feed the collective memory of the people.
The authors who later linked this genre with world wars and current conflicts, without a doubt, laid their eyes on these fantastic stories and gave them a greater realism; Despite the thousand differences that may exist between those old stories and the current war novels, themes such as hatred, revenge and the pain that battles leave in their wake, are common elements between both styles and allow an idea of the tragedy that meant and still means a warlike conflict.
Among the authors of this genre we can name Martin Amis, Elias Canetti, William Faulkner and Evelyn Waugh, although there are many others highly known. It is worth mentioning that the most important novels of this genre have been recovered in the film industry, giving them realism and popularity.
