 |
| Royal Irish Rifles during the Battle of the Somme |
About 14 years ago, Clara and I lived in England. We lived in Beck Row, a tiny village outside
of Mildenhall High Town. People we would
meet, mostly in and around London would ask us:
Where is Mildenhall? What is
it near? Well, it’s in
Suffolk. And in truth, it isn’t near
much of anything.
Unless, of course, the person to whom we were speaking liked horse
racing. Then, we could say it was near
Newmarket, which is a big centre for breeding and training of racehorses. Then they would understand where it
was. Or, if the person we were talking
to was one heads out on summer weekends to the Norfolk Broads. Then they’d recognise Mildenhall as the town
adjacent to the Five-Way Roundabout on the A11.
The Five-Way is a driver’s nightmare on the A11. I used to kid people that Five-Way was the
name of a roundabout in England, but in Cincinnati where we had lived for a
time, it was a way to eat chili. (Chili, spaghetti, cheddar cheese, onions and
beans.) And if we had been in
California, there Five-Way would be…oh, never mind!
So we lived just off the A11, the highway that carries traffic from
London and Cambridge, northeast across the East Anglian countryside to Norwich
and ultimately, The Broads. On a Sunday
afternoon soon after we arrived in England, we got into the car and took a
drive up the A11. We wanted to see
Norwich Castle, which is actually a medieval prison and a popular attraction in
the area.
Driving up the highway just before Thetford, we came upon a very
tall column, clearly a memorial of sorts, placed at the side of the road in a
rural spot. When we reached it, I pulled
off into the car park to take a good look.
It was a monument to the sons of the three townships that meet on that
spot, who died in The Great War.
Now, I knew immediately that ‘The Great War’ is what nowadays we
call, ‘World War One.’ And as an
American, even though we give it ‘world war’ status, in truth we seldom think
about it much. After all, appending it
with the Roman numeral ‘I’ is tantamount to saying, ‘Well, it’s just the first
chapter of a multi-chapter book.’
Americans tend to think of World War II was the real world
war. I knew that my father’s father had
fought in World War I, but because of the spacing of the generations I never
knew him well enough to ask about ‘his’ war.
And I don’t remember ever meeting another veteran of that war. After all, the Americans’ involvement came
fairly late in the war, even though it was arguably quite decisive to the
outcome.
We Americans only have one major monument to the World War I dead,
at least that I know of. And there is
a museum dedicated to that war, co-located with the monument. But it’s in Kansas City, for goodness’
sake! Who goes to Kansas City??!
So, being something of an armchair historian, I contemplated the
monument on the A11 that day, and then I began learning about why The Great War
weighs so heavily on the public consciousness in England.
Australians don’t have to wonder about it at all, because The Great
War weighs heavily on your public consciousness as well. And how could it be otherwise? From a national population of less than five
million at the time, Australian casualties of the war were 60,000 dead, and
156,000 wounded. Such losses are
staggering when you think about it. They
defined a generation. They practically wiped
out a generation. So Australians’
consciousness of World War I is a memory of sadness and tragedy. Of young men shipping off to fight a war half
a world away, whose causes were murky at best.
Of the youth of Australia being cut down by the Turks in a place called
Gallipoli.
But if truth be told, very few who are alive today anywhere, unless
they are military history buffs, have a firm idea what the war was about. And please don’t tell me about man’s inborn
need to destroy one another. Or the need
to prove oneself superior to another. Or
the pride of Empire. Perhaps all that
psycho-babble is interesting on a certain level. But I mean the immediate cause of the
war.
It was the murder of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian terrorist-or
freedom fighter, whichever you prefer.
That hardly sounds like a likely cause for a war that set into motion
two great alliances. And eventually drew
in all the world’s great powers and cost nine million lives all told.
That aside, it’s hard to talk rationally about the ugliness of war
without advocating pacifism, but I’m going to try. As you know, I am a retired military
man. True, I was a chaplain and not a
combatant. But that was only the second
half of my military career. Before that
I was in intelligence. I have over a
thousand flight hours in real-world intelligence collection. I was definitely a war-fighter.
There is a popular notion of soldiers itching for a fight. For glory.
For medals. For promotions. To satisfy their blood lust. It would be silly for me to deny that any soldiers
display such attitudes. But those who do
are exceptional and rare. Really, I
can’t remember meeting a single one personally in my 26 years of service. Sometimes military men talk in a
jingoistic way. This is a device for
getting themselves in the mindset necessary for what they have to do. But they very seldom really think that
way.
No, the truth is that most soldiers, whether professional or
conscript, loathe war. Their first
prayer upon waking in the morning, and their last prayer before retiring in the
evening, are one and the same. And
soldiers tend to pray a lot. No offense
to my atheist friends, but the old saw, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’ does
jibe with my experience. That’s hard
to understand here in a contemporary Australia where religious faith is definitely
on the wane.
Anyway, the soldier who is worthy of the title, prays constantly that
his skills and preparedness will be enough to deter a war. Because when a war does break out, the
soldier might be called upon to pay with his own life. Or, face the rest of his life as an
invalid. Or at least, scarred emotionally
by the experience of seeing others killed and maimed. It’s the rare soldier who thinks that glory,
or medals, or promotions are worth that.
So there’s no argument that war is ugly. For the war-fighter. For the civilian caught in war’s tide. And for everybody else. And that’s regardless of whether there’s a
justness to the cause of the war.
But I keep coming back to what John Stuart Mill said about
war. And having been in war myself, it
rings true for me:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of
things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which
thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for
which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own
personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless
made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
There are a lot of things I wish I had had the
clarity of thought to have said first, and this is definitely one of those. War is ugly.
But not having anything worth fighting for, is far uglier. For a young man or woman to die is
tragic. But for people to live under
tyranny, is far more tragic.
It is easy today, here in Australia, to take these
words for granted. True, Australia has
been involved in two wars over recent years: in Iraq and Afghanistan. The former ended without making much apparent
difference. And the latter is now
winding down to probably the same lack of tangible result. And Australia’s involvement is so small –
really Australia’s armed forces nowadays are so small – that few Australians
are personally touched by the casualties of these conflicts.
And that’s why we need Remembrance Day. Why we need to take even a moment to remember
our war dead. And contemplate the
sacrifice they made. And why they made
it. And why the country sent them to
make it.
Now, Frank Selch and I are going to make a musical
offering of two songs in a medley. The
first should be familiar to many of you:
No Man’s Land-the Green Fields of France, by Eric Bogle. Bogle was an Australian of Irish extraction,
and he wrote his famous song whilst contemplating the tremendous losses of The
Great War. Stephen L Suffitt listened to
Bogle’s song and, as someone who was perhaps less reflexively anti-war, wrote a
response that a Willie McBride might have offered. We offer you the two songs to aid your
own reflection as we approach this Remembrance Day. Shabbat shalom.
(You can find the two songs, sung serially, at the
following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id040EEqbbE)
No comments:
Post a Comment