Robert Fisk: As we move towards the Great War’s centenary, it’s time to recognise the reality of its horror
Why do we want to commemorate the centenary of the Great
War? Because it marked the destruction of the “flower of English manhood”? An
odd thought, since it also marked the crushing of the “flower” of French and
German manhood. The war’s ultimate tragedy, of course, is that it led – quite
directly – to the even more terrible Second World War. In other words, the
1914-1918 war was to no purpose. Its unparalleled suffering led the British and
French to believe that they could never fight again; but for the Germans, their
very failure to win convinced them they must have another war to prove that the
Great War was not fought in vain.
Max Hastings has already told us that we were right to go to
war in 1914. But that’s not the point. We wanted to go to war, much as we
wanted to invade Afghanistan
in 2001. Indeed, next year’s appearance of even greater numbers of that
grotesque poppy on the lapels of MPs and television presenters – inspired by
the equally pro-war poem by John McCrae – will be rather like supporting George
Bush in his invasion of Iraq .
“If ye break faith with us who died,” McCrae’s fallen soldiers tell the reader,
“we shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders
fields.” That was exactly Bush’s argument for continuing his war in Baghdad :
if Americans withdrew from Iraq ,
he said, they would dishonour those who had already died.
The Great War was a strange war, in almost every way. Though
it is now called the First World War, it was primarily a European and Middle-Eastern
war. More than half of the Earth remained untouched, though far from
unaffected. Australia
and Canada and
the US (a
latecomer, as usual) remained safe, though their soldiers – like India ’s
– died in their tens of thousands in Mesopotamia (Iraq ),
Gallipoli and in France .
Indian battalions were among the first to fight in Flanders
and one of the first major naval engagements was fought off the Falklands ,
now of Thatcher fame. Who now remembers that long before Saddam, Allenby used
gas in the Middle East , in a Sinai-Gaza battle against
the Turks? Or that the Brits brought almost 100,000 Chinese workers to service
the armies of the Western Front?
I fear we will concentrate on the Somme
and Passchendaele next year, forgetting the millions from other lands who died.
Many a camera will pan across the Great War cemeteries and on the headstones of
British soldiers “known unto God”. In their neat lines with their fresh roses,
it’s easy to believe that beneath these graves lay the perfect skeletons of
those “glorious dead” whose identities were, somehow, mislaid. Alas, beneath
these particular headstones, there are sometimes just bits of human beings,
torsos without heads, legs and heads without bodies, mere scraps of bones.
It’s worth reading the two-volume history of the Canadian
army in the Great War by Ottawa historian Tim Cook, who describes the horrific
circumstances in which soldiers crouching under fire were often hit by pieces
of their own dead, long decomposed friends. One soldier of the time told how he
was wounded in the back of the head by the teeth of the comrade decapitated
just behind him. After that, beware any comforting cenotaph solemnity.
Strangely, while our poets and painters became masterly
artists of this war after 1916 (Owen, Sassoon, Nash), our novelists never
caught up.
The best novels came from French soldiers: Henri Barbusse, for
example, or Georges Duhamel, who so impressed Sassoon. As that wonderful
observer of war-time English-language literature Samuel Hynes was to observe,
no novel by Galsworthy or Conrad or James was published in 1916. In fact,
Galsworthy spent much of his time declaring war on the avant garde. Masefield
and Hardy were silent. Yet in the Second World War, the poets – save for Keith
Douglas and a few others – did not capture a world at war. Auden bravely wrote
from neutral New York .
There were photographers, of course, in the American Civil
War and in South Africa ,
but pictures – and especially film – turned the Great War into “our war”. The
soldiers look like us and – more to the point – they relate us to the Second
World War whose survivors are among our dads. The invention of the steel helmet
for British troops on the Western Front turned the helmet itself into an art
form. Minus their puttees, the soldiers we see at Ypres
look almost identical to the soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force on the
beaches of Dunkirk . The familiar
rimmed helmet, which saved so many tens of thousands of lives, made them men of
the same generation, which they sometimes truly were.
And then there were the veterans. Among those who shaped our
own destiny just before our birth, many had also fought in the Great War:
Churchill and Hitler, Eden and Montgomery and Rommel and de Gaulle and Attlee,
who introduced the health system which is still so much a part of Britain ’s
political iconography.
See also:
The military spending map of the world
Annihilation as world religion
Banks in front line of nuclear arms campaign
Rare First World War documents go online + Unseen photographs
Paul Fussell, ex-soldier, literary Scholar & critic
Book review: War Is Still a Racket
Book review - An Enduring Condition: On War Time
Eternal war (Chapter n+1) - Panetta’s Pacific Vision
Albert Camus: 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'
'Military Inc' by Ayesha Siddiqa:
Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir by Arif Jamal
What war does to us: Afghanistan - a soldier's view
The End of the new world order
