“We've
had ... years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out
and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me
out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I
couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table.
Now what is the sense in that?"
As
part of a writing project, I have been immersing myself recently in
documentaries and books and on-line research about the First World
War. It's a dark place to go at the best of times. I have been
especially moved and frankly disturbed by the testimony of survivors
of the trenches who in their final years tried to voice the terrible
experiences of their youth. 'LastPost',
edited by Max Arthur, brought together interviews with 21 of the last
British veterans back in 2005. By now, only their words remain. A
good third of these veterans were BoySoldiers,
amongst the 250,000 recruited during Kitchener's campaign. In film
footage from the Somme and other front-line coverage, these child
faces were all too recognisable. And last night I was watching the
same generation on TV recounting how they came to be caught up in the
'Pals Regiments'
of that war. Raw, heart-breaking accounts of the friends they lost, of
the wounded, of the 'wall
of bullets whizzing by'
as they stumbled over the top.
I
am still trying to take in my feelings about all of this as today our
WW1 commemorations reach one of those milestones with an evening of
broadcasts and the 'LightsOut' campaign.
This symbolic appeal to get the nation to switch off at exactly 11pm
tonight is an echo of Sir
Edward Grey's
famous comment: 'The
lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again
in our lifetime."
Grey, as Liberal Foreign Secretary from 1905-16, was part of the
Cabinet that unanimously signed the British
Declaration of War
– so he knew all about that earlier 'switch-off'.
A
hundred years ago then, our politicians and generals declared war,
along with their counterparts in Europe. As summer waned, they
marshalled music-hall acts and sportsmen, viscounts and ministers,
editors and poster-makers, to bang the war drums. They handed out
white feathers. They promised 'see
the world'
and 'home
by Christmas'.
They said they'd 'make
a man out of you.'
They shamed and applauded and corralled a generation of youngsters
into the Recruitment Office. 'You're
just the Boys we wanted',
said the Sergeant as they arrived. They openly signed up children who
'lied' about their age. (The youngest in this country was twelve.) 'I
thought I was a big man,'
said William
Roberts
who joined up at 17, 'but
I got a shock.'
They
sent Our Boys to the Front often on cattle trains 'with
a little straw on the floor'.
They shovelled them into trenches to crouch and sleep where they
could. Up to their knees in water, under shell-fire, often with
little to eat, for days or weeks at a time. The war broke men into
pieces but the Army patched them up in military hospitals and sent
them back. They didn't only shoot the enemy. They shot men, and
children too, at dawn when they fell apart. 'Age
no excuse'.
'Shell-shock' something that only happened to officers. Cecil
Withers,
one of those Boy Soldiers who enlisted at 17, said: 'Our
people treated us like dogs. They were cruel bastards compared with
the Germans.'
 |
| A memorial modelled on 17 year old victim, Private Herbert Burden |
The
undoubted bravery of those who enlisted and their comradeship and
lifelong friendships were smothered under horror. Men left crying for
help in all languages in No Man's Land. Veterans' descriptions of
those scenes will stay with me a long time. And the living too eaten
by rats and cockroaches and the inescapable lice. Harry
Patch
describes how the men clung together and depended on each other:
'I mean, these boys were with you
night and day … we belonged to each other. We were a little team
together and those men … carrying the ammunition got blown to
pieces. It was like losing part of my life. It upset me more than
anything.'
The
Armies of this 'Great
War'
invented new weapons and these boys and men on both sides were
guinea-pigs for a new technology of killing. Green poison gas. Aerial
bombardment. Tanks. The modern age speeded-up even as the war trapped
combatants in holes in the ground. Another survivor, Albert
Finnegan,
decided after the war never to have children, 'I
was not prepared to produce cannon fodder for the army, not fodder
for industry.'
And
the warmongers put off and avoided every opportunity for diplomacy.
Until starvation at home and mutiny in the ranks and social
revolution across Europe and the collapse of the German Army brought
them to a railway carriage. At 5am on 11th
November they signed the Armistice. And with the Truce agreed, for
another six hours, they still threw men into the line of gun-fire; as
many as 11,000 across all Fronts that finalday,
just to make the German defeat a little more crushing.
This year David
Cameron's call
for a "commemoration
that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, says something about who
we are as a people"
sparked a NoGlory in War
campaign from many of our leading cultural figures. Even Jeremy
Paxman, who dismissed 'conchies'
as 'cranks'
in his own documentary, commented 'Only
a moron would 'celebrate' the war."
Cameron recently published a Letterto the Unknown Soldier
in Paddington Station which says:
'…
our world would have been far darker if you had declined the call to
act. Without your service, our security, our values, our very way of
life would have been lost.'
Darker than this? 16 million dead in 4 years? And who was it who switched off the lights across Europe? This war was planned in gentlemen's clubs, in cabinet rooms, in palaces. They may not have understood what it would unleash but the slaughter was obvious long before Christmas. And still they prosecuted this war for four long years. Today their inheritors stand at Cenotaphs and in Cathedrals and pay their respects. And tomorrow they'll will go back to the business of making war. A part of the 'very way of life' they have never given up. I believe they would do it again. I really do. If We Forget.
Siobhan. Thank you for posting this. I too, watched the programme. I remember , when I was about eight, finding a series of short stories centred on life in the trenches, not the most suitable reading perhaps for someone of that age, but I read anything I could lay my hands on in those days,. I have lived with the horror ever since! Wish I had thought of remembering the author's name as well!
ReplyDeleteThey do stay with you, these accounts. And there's a new series I believe coming up of dramatized readings of WW1 diaries. If we can bear it ...
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