Ben_Norman's diary

On the 11^th hour, of the 11^th day of the 11^th month the guns of the western front fell silent, and so ended the most brutal conflict the world had yet witnessed with over eight million men left dead and forgotten.   This weekend the queen will dutifully lay a wreath of poppies as the military bands play, the flags will be lowered and those who died to preserve and defend this pomp, this ceremony will be lionised for another year.  

In the trenches of France, the landing fields of turkey, the great plaines of the Russian steppes and the deserts of the middle east the world sacrificed an entire generation on the alter of imperialism. The two main combatants, Germany and Britain lost 1,773,700 and 908,371 men respectively, and that’s before the crippled, the missing or those who would carry the scars of war internally for the rest of their lives are counted. These deaths are one of the great scandals of history, eight million men butchered and damned in the name of imperial greed. If we truly wish to remember their sacrifice then it is crucial that we understand the true reasons why they were sent to die. In the process we must abandon the glorious rhetoric, the war memorials and the marching bands whose only purpose is to camouflage mass murder under a cloak of jingoism.

Traditionally we are taught the rosy narrative of war, we’re taught of the stiff upper lip approach to the trenches, of the football matches at Christmas and of brave British “Tommys” doing their duty for King and Country. Believe this and believe that Britain was standing alone against Prussian militarism, defending plucky Belgium, bashing the heathen Turk and liberating the French, albeit with some late in the game assistance from the Americans. Here war is quaint, it’s a sport, and it’s an opportunity for glory.  The true horror is lost amongst the poetic prose or metaphorically transformed into the rugger pitches of Eton.  As always, the reality was very different.

 When war broke out in 1914 the first British forces to be deployed were not into Belgium or northern France but into Iraq. The Dorset regiment was deployed into the Iraqi town of Basra to join fifty one other British military divisions, positioned in the desert to safeguard and defend the oilfields, needed to service the ever growing dreadnought fleet.  Where is the Dorset regiment in the glorious narrative? Where are the troops deployed into Archangel and Vladivostok to fight and lose to Lenin’s Russian Bolsheviks?  Where are the infamous black and tans, deployed to Ireland to savage the population into submission? These men, fought with the same steely conviction and courage as their comrades at Ypres or the Somme, it would simply be too difficult to remember them or the dark motivations of their paymasters.

This perhaps leads us to the greatest myth of the War, that it was inevitable. No war is inevitable, it is a human construct and it takes men, conscious of their actions to create the conditions and issue the orders. Soldiers don’t simply turn up to battlefields; war require...