OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THINGS, AND BATTLES LONG AGO.
So Remembrance Day has come and gone once more, and for a few minutes a majority of people have thought about the bitter misery and destruction that war has brought. For some reason I find it more moving to consider the lot of those who suffered and died in the stinking rat-runs of the the first world war than of any other subsequent conflict, including the second, in which, like so many others, I took part, and from which, unlike so many, so many, I emerged unscathed.
We buy a poppy, we watch the ceremonies at the Cenotaph and throughout the land; or, perhaps, if we keep an eye on the clock, we stand silent, in company or alone. What does this mean? One hopes that it is in part an expression of a sense of the futility of war. Whoever was responsible for the outbreak of the two German wars, and the blame does not lie neatly on one side of the line only, nothing has accrued to the benefit of anyone involved. All that we have left is a sense of the superhuman effort needed to salvage something of the shape of the decencies of human existence from the detritus of the whirlwind that nearly engulfed us all.
The bleak hope is that, in Europe at least, people have at last come to realise that the blind pursuit of honour and glory leads to hollow splendour at the best. Elsewhere in the world men have clearly not arrived at this exhausted conclusion, though women, who carry the burdens and clear up the filth, have realised it for centuries.
Most disturbing of all, perhaps, is the realisation that Americans, whose country has never been invaded, are happy to elect a president and his cronies (none of whom has experienced war at first hand) whose only approach to perceived threats of terrorism is to have launched, in defiance of world opinion, a war that had no legal justification, which was from the start ill-planned and under-resourced, which only increased the imminence of terrorism, which has caused unmeasured destruction and bloodshed, and now leaves its political leaders in shame-faced recognition of the fact that, having got in, they they are left with no honourable way of getting out. Their military leaders, by and large, silently realised this before they began.
And in Britain we are left with the problem of jettisoning a leader who, because of his overweening ambition to appear as a world statesman although he lacks the resources to do so, has led us into appearing to the world as poodle to America, and with a precisely quantifiable increase in our chances of becoming the target of increased Islamic terrorism, which, however one may be revolted by it, is at least a comprehensible reaction to the invasion of Iraq.
It is in these conditions that I find myself gazing with an uneasy eye at the marching troops, the military bands, the royal family dressed up in various service uniforms, the bugles and the wreaths, and all the panoply that has become part of what to me is a recall of a black pit in the history of mankind. 'To Our Glorious Dead' is another version of the same comforting myth. We memorialise the horrors of the past by a display of that very braggadocio which led to their existence in the first place.
As distinguished a figure as Jon Snow refuses to wear a poppy in public. I and many others sympathise with him. This is not to say that we are not prepared to contribute generously to the funds to aid those who still suffer as a reult of accumulated conflict. What we dislike, I think, is the smug conformist pressure to display a symbol which may indicate a care for those in misfortune, but comes also with a clutter of paramilitary overtones which we deplore.
So Remembrance Day has come and gone once more, and for a few minutes a majority of people have thought about the bitter misery and destruction that war has brought. For some reason I find it more moving to consider the lot of those who suffered and died in the stinking rat-runs of the the first world war than of any other subsequent conflict, including the second, in which, like so many others, I took part, and from which, unlike so many, so many, I emerged unscathed.
We buy a poppy, we watch the ceremonies at the Cenotaph and throughout the land; or, perhaps, if we keep an eye on the clock, we stand silent, in company or alone. What does this mean? One hopes that it is in part an expression of a sense of the futility of war. Whoever was responsible for the outbreak of the two German wars, and the blame does not lie neatly on one side of the line only, nothing has accrued to the benefit of anyone involved. All that we have left is a sense of the superhuman effort needed to salvage something of the shape of the decencies of human existence from the detritus of the whirlwind that nearly engulfed us all.
The bleak hope is that, in Europe at least, people have at last come to realise that the blind pursuit of honour and glory leads to hollow splendour at the best. Elsewhere in the world men have clearly not arrived at this exhausted conclusion, though women, who carry the burdens and clear up the filth, have realised it for centuries.
Most disturbing of all, perhaps, is the realisation that Americans, whose country has never been invaded, are happy to elect a president and his cronies (none of whom has experienced war at first hand) whose only approach to perceived threats of terrorism is to have launched, in defiance of world opinion, a war that had no legal justification, which was from the start ill-planned and under-resourced, which only increased the imminence of terrorism, which has caused unmeasured destruction and bloodshed, and now leaves its political leaders in shame-faced recognition of the fact that, having got in, they they are left with no honourable way of getting out. Their military leaders, by and large, silently realised this before they began.
And in Britain we are left with the problem of jettisoning a leader who, because of his overweening ambition to appear as a world statesman although he lacks the resources to do so, has led us into appearing to the world as poodle to America, and with a precisely quantifiable increase in our chances of becoming the target of increased Islamic terrorism, which, however one may be revolted by it, is at least a comprehensible reaction to the invasion of Iraq.
It is in these conditions that I find myself gazing with an uneasy eye at the marching troops, the military bands, the royal family dressed up in various service uniforms, the bugles and the wreaths, and all the panoply that has become part of what to me is a recall of a black pit in the history of mankind. 'To Our Glorious Dead' is another version of the same comforting myth. We memorialise the horrors of the past by a display of that very braggadocio which led to their existence in the first place.
As distinguished a figure as Jon Snow refuses to wear a poppy in public. I and many others sympathise with him. This is not to say that we are not prepared to contribute generously to the funds to aid those who still suffer as a reult of accumulated conflict. What we dislike, I think, is the smug conformist pressure to display a symbol which may indicate a care for those in misfortune, but comes also with a clutter of paramilitary overtones which we deplore.
