On the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the 11th 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 requires preparation, planning, cunning, and the deliberate intent to kill thousands. By suggesting that war, any war, is inevitable it takes responsibility away from those who should be held to account for their actions. A generation of men were led to the front by arrogant field marshals and posing monarchs to die for oil and imperial prestige. Forget the heroics, the glory, the jingoism or the played up patriotism, this is the true face of war. It is the face of suffering, of pain and of death. For soldiers and civilians alike War is about choking to death as lungs disintegrate from mustard gas, screaming for your mother as you lay cold and dying in the mud, its about becoming forever a corner of that far-flung foreign field. It’s about more suffering then we can fully comprehend living as we do today in the luxury of peace, and for that mercy we must be grateful.
This is as true today as it was in 1914 and by forgetting the horror of the Somme, Gallipoli, Verdun or Flanders it makes it so much easier to ignore the horror of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Darfur, Congo or anywhere else in the world when good men, women and children are being sent to die. For ignoring suffering is something we are led to do, from the clinical language of military spokesman to the reality smothering phrases of the mass media. The deaths of innocents has become “collateral damage”, battlefields have become “target rich environments”, killing is referred to as “neutralisation”, it is this Orwellian use of language which has made War acceptable, an issue for the middle pages of newspapers to be glanced over and then forgotten. We are people of education and intellect and we must use these tools to look past the linguistic camouflage and the lies, we must remember and we must refuse to allow it to happen again.
So as the last call echoes around the cenotaph this afternoon and the few remaining veterans shuffle past your TV screens don’t just remember the dead. Instead remember why they died, remember that these motives haven’t changed and then say, never again.
11/11/2007
