Remembering on Armistice Day

A telling anniversary: a century ago, the guns of the Western Front of the First at last fell silent.

We mourn 20 million dead and 21 million wounded on this anniversary. Well, quite a lot of us do, though I note that President Donald Trump only does so if the rain holds off. A fair-weather mourner I suppose we’d have to call him.

That multitude of dead included four I’ve mentioned before: George Edwin Ellison, Augustin Trébuchon, George Lawrence Price and Henry Gunther.

They were, respectively, the last British soldier killed, the last Frenchman, the last Canadian (and last Commonwealth soldier) and, finally, the last American. Indeed, Gunther is generally believed to be the last soldier on any side killed in that war: he died on 11 November 1918 charging a position held by Germans who were shouting at the attackers to stop, since the Armistice would come into effect a minute later.

Maybe it was all down to poorer communications than today, but it seems an extraordinary waste that five hours were allowed to elapse between the signing of the Armistice agreement at 5:10 am and its start at 11:00, however ringing a tone that ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ may be.

American soldiers celebrating the end of the fighting

As well as Ellison, Trébuchon, Price and Gunther, the time gap cost going on for 3000 lives. Which pretty much sums up the futility of the whole war.

Clearly, I know too little about the life of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister of the time. I learned from the ‘Guardian’ that he, like US President Woodrow Wilson, argued that imposing excessively hard conditions on Germany would only mean that ‘we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years.’

Harsh conditions were imposed, and indeed the whole thing had to be done again not 25 but 21 years later. With the additional spice of totalitarianism and a Holocaust.

I’m not quite sure what my relatives were doing on Armistice Day in 1918.

One grandfather may have been working with other members of his unit to dismantle an artillery emplacement, preparatory to heading home and demobilisation. He would be taking shrapnel with him, embedded in his hand, as well as the memory of falling victim to a gas attack.

His brother, on the other hand, would soon leave for Russia, to continue fighting, this time with the small British contingent supporting White Russian forces battling the newly-installed Bolsheviks. His experience provides a vivid illustration of the fact that fighting in Europe didn’t end on 11 November, it merely ended on the Western Front.

That great uncle of mine had joined up, illegally, at the age of 15. His mother wrote to his colonel to demand that her son, far too young to serve, be sent home. The reply came from a junior officer informing her that Private Beeson had assured him he was nineteen, so they wouldn’t be sending him back.

Next time you meet a fifteen-year old boy, try to picture him in uniform with a weapon he’s been trained to use to kill people.

As for my other grandfather, he must have been thinking that he’d be released from prison quite soon. He’d been sent there because he refused to fight, but with the war over he could get back to ordinary life, his career as a lithographer and even to finding a possible wife with whom he could start a family.

She, however, would not at that stage have been a potential life partner for him. She was already engaged. However, many of the men returning from the war barely had time to feel relief at having survived the carnage before they were caught up in one of the world’s worst epidemics, Spanish influenza. He’d survived the shelling and the gas, but my grandmother’s fiancé succumbed to the flu. So in the end she married my grandfather instead. Leading to several lives, including my own, which wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.

Like many others, they picked up the threads of a civilian existence. That meant facing different problems: finding jobs, finding housing, educating families. Barely over ten years later, with the great crash of 1929, that became a great deal harder. And ten years after that, each in their own way, my grandparents were doing it, as Lloyd George said, all over again.

An experience worth remembering as we celebrate the centenary of that Armistice. The war it ended wasn’t the war to end all wars. Just the beginning of a lot more problems that persist to today. And between then and now, there have been plenty more wars.

Which is perhaps the most important thing to remember on Armistice day.


Postscript: the First World War was by no means the first world war. Arguably, that would have been the Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in America) of 1756-1763: it pitted European powers against each other, but alongside combat in their own Continent, it was fought in the Americas, West Africa, India and the Philippines, as well as at sea in many parts of the globe. That seems to fit any sensible definition of a world war, doesn’t it?

Dread anniversary

Amidst all the centenary anniversaries for the First World War, 4 November is one of the more dismal. And one not to be missed.

Picture a young man choosing to join the British army in 1915. In December 1916, as a second lieutenant, he goes with his men to France to experience both the slaughter of action and the sapping horror of the conditions. He suffers concussion by falling into a shell hole; later, he’s blown up by a mortar and spends several days hiding in a hole with the dead body of a friend a few feet away.

He wrote to his mother, ‘for twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might put us out.’

In the summer of 1917, he was diagnosed with shell shock and sent for treatment to Edinburgh. There he met one of the outstanding war poets, Siegfried Sassoon. Was it the meeting with Sassoon or some other cause that turned him, without warning, into one of the finest poets in the English language, and certainly the greatest composer of war poems? For thirteen months, he wrote and wrote, always basing himself on the horrors he met himself: a man gassed, with ‘white eyes writhing in his face’; a sentry blown by a shell from a ladder, crying ‘oh sir, my eyes – I'm blind – I'm blind, I'm blind!’; the search in no-man's land for a man overcome by exhaustion, with its bleak view of the outcome of war, ‘shame of success, and sorrow of defeats’.

Sassoon returned to the front but a serious wound brought him back to England on permanent sick leave. His younger friend may have felt that this put him under an obligation to rejoin the fighting, because a poet should be there to continue chronicling the war – ‘I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part’. By now, he was convinced the war was something that had to be stopped – ‘nations trek from progress’. No one was pressuring him to go and he might have remained in England for the rest of the war. Sassoon tried to dissuade him from going back and even threatened to come himself and wound him in the leg to prevent it. But that only meant that he went without telling his friend.

He was back in the fighting in July 1918. In October, he distinguished himself so conspicuously that he was awarded the Military Cross. The citation read:

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.

To him, this was a validation of his chosen role: he was a soldier as well as a poet and his denunciations of the war were no reflection of unwillingness to expose himself to danger.

The Sambre-Oise canal in November 1918

Then came 4 November. He led a raiding party crossing the Sambre-Oise canal. It came under heavy fire and, with many of the party, he too was killed.

He’d been preparing an edition of his poems for publication, and had begun to draft a preface. In it, he urged his reader not to mistake his intention:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

November the fourth. One week before the Armistice that ended the war. One week too soon to save one of the most remarkable poets the English language has produced: Wilfred Owen.

A young man heading to war. And becoming a poet

Sassoon found Strange Meetings Owen’s best poem. Certainly, it’s among my favourites. It ends:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...

The other Grandfather

As I’ve said before, one of my grandfathers was Nat Bannister, a Jew, a lithographer, and a radical at least in his early days. He spent two years in Dartmoor Prison rather than fight in the First World War.

And then there was my other grandfather. He was far more conventional and definitely not Jewish. I knew him less well, but that makes tracking him down all the more interesting.

He was the son of Mary (or possibly Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson. Since there's a lot of name-sharing to come, let me make it clear at once that Alfred (without a ‘Leonard’ to his name) was my great-grandfather, my father’s paternal grandfather. I think I would have liked him. The photo I have of him shows him with a winning smile, I find, and though I know this was a studio portrait, I like to think it reveals something of the man within.

Mary (or Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson
My great-grandmother and great-grandfather

My great-grandfather had an ingenious idea. Britain, when he was a young man, prohibited the importation of live cattle. So Alfred moved to Brussels. He imported cattle from Argentina to Belgium, had them slaughtered there and then re-exported the carcasses for the British butcher’s trade. He did well at it until, sadly, the law in Britain changed and live cattle were allowed directly into the country.

It’s always dangerous to build a business on the current state of any law. It can be changed so easily…

Alfred died in 1903, before he’d even reached the age of 40. That left his elder son, Leonard Alfred, then just 15, as head of the family, still living in Brussels. A huge burden for a mere boy to take on, especially as his mother, grief-stricken, was unable to help.

He rose to the task and saw to the education of his three surviving siblings (one brother had died at age eight, some five years earlier). Though he didn’t believe in too much education, especially for women: his sister Irene told me many years later that she had hoped to go to university, but he had peremptorily forbidden her doing so. A university education? Unnecessary for a woman, he told her.

‘His decisions were final,’ she explained. ‘There was no appeal.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Artillery
and his sister Irene Beeson, cheated of university

When grandfather Nat was in gaol for refusing to fight in the Great War, grandfather Leonard was in the Artillery, serving at the front in France. He was injured twice, once by gas. Yep. You know all the fuss our Western powers make, rightly, about the use of gas as weapons? It was, of course, our ancestors in those Western Powers who first made indiscriminate use of them in World War 1.

The second injury was from shrapnel, and he carried bits of it until his death. Surgeons decided that they couldn’t extract some fragments from his hand, so it kept slowly closing on him for the rest of his life. Keen golfer that he was, in his latter years he had to push the handle of his club into the affected hand because it could no longer open to receive it the usual way.

My father told me that Leonard Alfred’s wife came to visit him in hospital after one of his injuries. She was certain that he had lost a leg, and refused to believe him when he said he hadn’t, thinking he was merely trying to comfort her. Eventually, he had to pull the hospital bed sheets back to reveal two intact, working legs before he could convince her.

She was Eleanor Eileen, whose father was Serbian. He claimed to be a Prince related to the Serbian royal family, although most of us think he was probably a waiter who felt life might treat him better in Britain.

Leonard and Eleanor had to leave Brussels when the German Army invaded Belgium, but they were back there after the war and busied themselves raising a family of three boys and two girls. The last of the boys was called Leonard Alfred though, to distinguish him from his father, they tacked on a Malcolm as his third forename; Leonard Alfred Malcolm Beeson would eventually be my father and my brother’s.

Sadly for Leonard Alfred and his family, having had to flee Brussels once ahead of the Germans in World War 1, they had to do the same all over again in 1940, when World War 2 moved from its ‘phony war’ stage to something much hotter. So unlikely did it seem that things would turn so nasty, that Leonard had gone to England for a golfing weekend in May, only to find himself stranded there with only the clothes in his cae (and presumably his clubs) when Hitler’s troops moved in and Brussels fell again.

Eleanor Eileen Beeson
at 34 rue du Japon, Brussels in about 1936

My father had to get out with his mother on the last train before the Germans arrived. They packed as much as they could, but that wasn’t a lot. Their bags were in the taxi waiting to take them to the station for, I repeat, the last train out when my grandmother suddenly cried out for them to wait. She rushed back into the house and came out with the dustbins. Presumably, she didn’t want to find the house smelling of rubbish when they returned.

They did make it back, after the war, and there certainly wasn’t any rubbish in the house. In fact, there was nothing at all. The place had been completely looted while they were away.

My father was pleased they caught the last train.

‘The second-to-last train was strafed by German fighters,’ he told me, ‘and there were a lot of casualties on board.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Fleet Air Arm

My father never understood how this happened, but Leonard Alfred Beeson, with his artillery background, somehow managed to join the Fleet Air Arm in World War 2. That’s the air branch of the navy. He was 52 in 1940 so he was in an administrative position, but had plenty to do. When my father visited him on his air base in Scotland, he found that he’d laid out a nine-hole golf course on a patch of waste ground at the back of the aerodrome.

In their hurry to get out of the house in Brussels, one of the belongings my grandmother and my father left behind was my grandfather’s manuscript of the great book he’d written. Its subject? The solution of the ‘Jewish Problem’.

As kids, my brother and I saw little of our paternal grandparents. Certainly far less than of our maternal ones. It may be that they weren’t that interested in their grandchildren; they may have seen just as little of my cousins. But might it have been because my father had contributed to the ‘Jewish Problem’ by marrying a Jew?

Who knows? There’s certainly no way of finding out now. Leonard Alfred died in 1967, Eleanor Eileen in 1971.

All I know is that when a non-Jew, particularly in that era, proposed solutions to the ‘Jewish Problem’, they were seldom of a kind to bring much comfort to the Jews…

Still, I suppose it’s sad his book was lost, a tragedy I’m told he always felt. Sad, for him I mean. I’m not sure it was such a loss for the rest of us.

LAM Beeson, my father, with his mother Eleanor and his father LA Beeson
The warrior torch handed on a generation.
By sheer good luck it didn’t reach me

Progress of a rebel freed from gaol

The young man who was released from Dartmoor Prison at the end of the First World War, and who would later be my grandfather, had been a radical even before he went in. It was what led him to the pacifism for which he was gaoled. And he emerged, after a year or two in the company of such men as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, even more radical than he went in.

Radical Nat on the right. On a postcard from
'yours rebelliously Henry B Offell'

A radical though not quite a Communist. My grandmother, Yetta, had joined the Party and had become quite an activist. My grandfather, Nat or Norman, did attend some meetings though he never joined. One of the meetings he went to was chaired by Yetta. She was an attractive young woman and he decided he wanted to get to know her better.

She had, however, emerged from the aftermath of the war a woman saddened well beyond her eighteen years. She’d been engaged to a young man who managed to survive the entire war, only to come home and succumbing to the terrible flu epidemic that followed. So,  when Nat approached her, Yetta was still recovering from a devastating loss. 

Did that make her more or less open to his advances? Perhaps a little of both. They were engaged relatively soon, but the road to marriage was a stormy one. She told me that on one evening they had such a row in a street on the way home that she tore off her engagement ring and threw it on the pavement at his feet, before storming off.

He, instead of following her at once, got down on his hands and knees and searched for the ring. It was a good ring and he wanted her to accept it. He could settle the argument later.

They were married in 1921. On 8 September, just one week before Yetta turned 21. A week later and she wouldn’t have needed her parents’ consent, but she insisted on getting it, though they were more than a little reluctant: Nat was from a far poorer background than hers, daughter as she was of a skilled craftsman, a shoemaker specialising in orthopaedic shoes for injured or otherwise deformed feet.

Yetta and Nat at their wedding in 1921

He’d picked up the profession in which he’d started before the war, lithography, and had reached a level of expertise such that his company asked him to go into sales and represent them to clients rather than simply do the lithographs himself. It meant that he was able at last to emerge from the backbreaking poverty in which he’d spent his childhood. He still got off his bus from and to home a stop early to save a penny on the fare, but he was soon earning enough to be able to clear the mortgage on a house within four years, something that’s practically unthinkable in England today. He moved his family into a modest house in the new outer London district of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where many Jews entering a middle-class existence were moving.

A Jewish boss of mine once said that to make a man a Conservative, you had to give him something to conserve. Rebellious Nat may once have been, but as the years rolled by, he found himself in ever greater sympathy with the British Establishment. Besides, when it came to the Second World War, he felt that the nature of an enemy led by Hitler meant that a Jew had to abandon pacifism and do what he could to overthrow that violently anti-Semitic regime.

He was too old for combat, but he could volunteer for the Air Raid Protection service, which he enthusiastically did. He knew what Air Raids meant, if only as a result of attempting to travel in to his office in the City of London one day, only to be turned back four stops before his on the Underground. The city had taken a pasting the night before and most of the buildings had been burned out, his company’s included. There was no way through to it.

So, at the end of the Second World War, unlike the First, Nat was far closer in sympathy to the mainstream of British society. And the process continued, notably after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. My grandparents were never practising Jews (a more religious uncle refused to visit them because they’d allowed bacon into their house), but their sympathies were with the Jews of Israel nonetheless. The result was a continued drift away from the radical Left to which they had both belonged at one time.

A good grandfather with his grandsons in the fifties
Just a bit more staid...

‘I’ve given up reading The Guardian,’ Yetta once told me to explain why she was taking the Conservative Daily Telegraph, ‘because the Guardian keeps writing pieces so critical of Israel.’

I haven’t the hard data to support my view, but it feels to me that this has been a trend in the Jewish community. Radical in the 1920s, strongly pro-Labour in the fifties and sixties, its centre of gravity is with the Tories today – perhaps their more liberal wing, but Tory nonetheless.

I’m not sure where they would stand on the scandal over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party today. I imagine it would only have been the last straw for them. Among those of us who remain linked with the Jewish community, however tenuously, only a minority stay loyal to Labour.

For my part, I wish we could recapture the time when Jews like my grandparents could be counted on to support the Left. But I regret still more that many Jews no longer feel comfortable in the Labour Party. I’d like to see the first problem solved, but I believe something will have died in Labour’s soul if it can’t solve the second.

From Hard Labour to London Transport

Bureaucratic records are dry to the point of dullness.

Record of a condemnation

Some poor fellow, 27 years old, appeared before a court martial on 13 April 1917. He was resisting mobilisation on the grounds of conscientious objection (in other words, pacifism); he was condemned to two years gaol with hard labour.

From 16 April to 14 July he served at Wormwood Scrubs, still a high-security prison in West London. My work involves hospital visits and I’ve frequently been to Hammersmith Hospital. It’s right next door to ‘the Scrubs’ and seeing that huge wall would make me think of Oscar Wilde, “all that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong”.

But this prisoner didn’t stay long at the Scrubs. In July 1917 he was transferred to an even grimmer destination, Dartmoor prison in England’s South West. I was at school near Dartmoor and one of my best memories of my time there was walking on the moor, which occasionally led us to Princetown where the prison stands.

This story all sounds a little dire, doesn’t it? What makes it more powerfully personal is that it happened to one Norman Bannister – also known as Nathaniel Bernstein – who was my grandfather.

Nor does the record wholly reflect his experience, as he would tell it, about the transfer to Dartmoor. They went by train and with him were an officer and a private soldier, both armed, with a uniform laid out on the bench beside him. All the way down, and the train trip took some four hours then, they threatened him with their weapons and demanded he put on the uniform.

He refused. It’s a decision for which my admiration only grows each time I think of it. And it all came back to me again the other day.

No need to ask a policeman
Poster promoting the classic Underground map

The object that reminded me of the story may seem wholly unrelated to it. It came from a book we rescued from clearing out our former flat in Germany. It was a collection of London Transport posters put together by an architecture historian, Harold Hutchison, in the 1960s. Not, in itself, a particularly significant book, you may feel, but it includes a dedication from its author:

To N. Bannister who has served London Transport so well and so long

My grandfather left school at the earliest moment after the end of the obligatory (and free) period of schooling – at 13. He was apprenticed to a lithographer and, by the time he was 24, when the First World War broke out, he was a fully qualified master of his trade. But war interrupted all that, taking him eventually to prison.

Striking view of Charing Cross station

However, with peace he was released and returned to his career. The skill he had developed was an ability to look at a painting and determine, by eye alone, how many colours it would take to print a good copy of it. He spent the majority of his career as a salesman for a lithography company one of whose major customers was London Transport.

The Underground to greenery

I don’t imagine my grandfather contributed much to society with his hard labour at Wormwood Scrubs or Dartmoor. But he did defend a principle that matters as much today as it did then. On the other hand, in peacetime he contributed to the production of art – popular art but art nonetheless – that brightened the lives of millions of commuters and produced some iconic images.

Glorious sketch of Chiswick to the west of London

Which I was delighted to leaf through when I came across the book.

Deadly centenary

A hundred years ago today, nearly 60,000 British young men – not for the most part soldiers, but civilians in uniform – who had been reasonably fit and well in the morning, were injured or dead in the evening.

Nearly 20,000 of that number had been killed. It remains the worst single day's losses by the British Army in its long and not always glorious, but usually bloody, history. The French, heavily engaged on another part of the front, at Verdun, were less involved but still lost 1500. The Germans, on the other side, lost 10,000 – 12,000.

This was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. It was the British Army’s first massive engagement of the First World War. In the end, the battle would last another 140 days and cost 1.3 million lives. Both the French and the British lost 400,000 and the Germans 500,000.

To set that 1.3 million in context, the English city of Birmingham has a population of 1.1 million, the German city of Munich 1.26 million and the French city of Marseille 800,000. The four-month battle had the equivalent effect of wiping out the entire population of any of those cities, and in the case of France, you could chuck in Lyon too.

Achievements of the Somme offensive

At its greatest extent, the Allied advance was five miles.

It was unfortunate that Lord Kitchener, probably the only British officer whose authority might have imposed a different plan from the one carried out, was drowned at sea. But even Douglas Haig, who had direct responsibility for the offensive, wasn’t anxious to attack on the Somme. He preferred an offensive near Ypres in Belgium, where the Germans were far less well dug in. He got his way a year later, in what came to be known as the Second Battle of Ypres, by which time the Germans had much improved their defences, so the battle was again a massacre and failure.

At the Somme, it didn’t help that the seven-day artillery barrage that preceded the offensive had little effect on the German trenches of even the barbed wire in front of them. Indeed, because the shells cut some paths through the barbed wire, it gave the Germans a clear indication of where to concentrate their fire when the British came.

It also didn’t help that the barrage stopped ten minutes before the assault started. Ten minutes were more than enough for the Germans to emerge from their deep dugouts and be ready to greet the British advance with the deadliest of fire.

Still, the battle wasn’t an entire failure. One of the aims was to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun, and it achieved that. But did it achieve anything else?

Should the Germans or the British govern Tanganyka? Or isn’t it better to leave it to the Tanzanians?

Should the Germans or the Japanese hold on Tsingtao in China? Or is it best to leave it to the Chinese, so that the only legacy of that foreign occupation is quite a pleasant, light, German-style beer served in Chinese restaurants?

Is it appropriate that a government in Vienna should run Prague? Or could it be left to the Czechs?

For these things, the civilians in uniform died or were maimed. I suspect few people feel today that the cause they died for was worth the sacrifice. And the worst of it is that twenty years later, their heirs were called on to fight out the conflict again.

Leaving the only real lesson to learn today, the hundredth anniversary of that great killing, is that we should never, but never, do it again.

From 8 May to 23 June: a link which shows what matters

Seventy-one years ago today, something remarkable happened. Remarkable for Europe, or at least the Western bit. Remarkable even for the rest of the world, since it kept getting sucked into European quarrels.

What happened on 8 May 1945? The Second World War in Europe came to an end. That moment marked the end of centuries of conflict, constantly erupting anew, ever since the Roman Empire collapsed.

Field Marshal Keitel signs the military surrender of Germany,
ushering in seven decades of peace in Western Europe

Take the last three centuries. In the 18th, we got the War of Spanish Succession out of the way, only to see the outbreak of the War of Polish Succession twenty or so years later and, blow me down, a decade after that, the War of Austrian Succession.

Tired of this succession of wars of Succession, we next had a go at a war based on the passage of time – the seven-year war. After all, the thirty-year war in the previous century had been such a good lark, and this one packed in almost as much excitement in a much shorter time. It was also the first world war waged by the European powers, with major theatres in India and in North America (where the locals called it the French and Indian war).

We also had some impressive colonial conflicts, most notably between the British and the same Americans, with the French joining in to give their rivals across the Channel a bloody nose (which they successfully did).

Little more than ten years after that, we got stuck into the Napoleonic wars which managed to last nearly a quarter of a century and cover pretty much the whole of Europe, right out to Moscow.

That left people tired for a while, but we still managed some colonial battles within Europe – notably the Austrians in Italy, with the French getting involved. Meanwhile, the Prussians, beginning to exert their new-found power, fought the Austrians, the Saxons, the Danes – basically anyone who seemed in their way.

Which led neatly to the Franco-Prussian war. That meant France losing territory to the German Empire which, to add insult to injury, was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The bitterness made inevitable the First World War (which was far from the first) forty years later; it didn’t get sorted out, so the Second World War broke out to wrap up the loose ends twenty years after that.

Those two wars were so close together that a great many fought in both. One of my grandfathers was in the artillery in World War One, taking an injury that gave him bother for the rest of his life; in World War Two, he was back in service but in the Fleet Air Arm, though serving on the ground, since he was too old for combat.

My other grandfather spent two years in gaol in the First World War, in company with Bertrand Russell among others, for refusing to fight. In the Second, however, as a Jew he felt he had to do what he could against Hitler, and joined the Air Raid Precaution service.

Through most of my childhood, I fully expected that when I reached adulthood, there’d be another conflict of this kind in which I, like my father and his father, would be called on to take part.

Well, it didn’t happen. Seven decades on from that remarkable day in May 1945, France, Britain, Austria, Italy, Germany have managed to remain at peace. Unheard of. Unprecedented.

Why is it so important for the rest of the world? Well, look at what happened in WW1 and WW2: so many other countries found themselves sucked in. Even those that remained neutral were affected by the disruption the world suffered, many having to impose rationing on foodstuffs and other essentials.

A French friend of mine was four when he saw his father for the last time. The Gestapo called to arrest him in 1940. The family never heard of him again.

He told me that story soon after the Euro was introduced. With tears in his eyes, he said that he would never have believed before that he would use the same currency as them, over there – gesturing towards the Rhine, just a few kilometres from his front door. He said it with a relief so strong that it bordered on joy. The Euro represented to him the latest brick in a wall between our nations and war – a wall built by tearing down the one that had previously separated the nations themselves.

That’s what we tend to lose sight of when we debate European construction in Britain. We talk about trade, or the movement of production and jobs, or immigration. We sadly don’t talk about all the good that has come from the longest period of sustained peace our countries have seen.

Make no mistake. The European Union is merely the expression of the efforts we have made over seven decades to secure that peace. To put an end to that long, dreary, destructive and bloodthirsty succession of wars that have afflicted us.

If on 23 June Britain votes to leave the EU, be under no illusion, it will be turning its back on all that painful work of peaceful construction.

Think of the bombing of Coventry or Dresden, of the extermination camps, of the Battles of Passchendaele or Jutland or Cassino or the Bulge, of the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ask yourselves: is that really such a smart move?

Remembering the loss of war

2014 is the start of a four-year period of centenaries, as we mark the hundredth anniversary of each of the main events of the First World War, as it turns up. 

We commemorated the outbreak of war back in August; for the war as a whole, in Britain we had the moatful of poppies at the Tower of London; now we’re on the brink of celebrations for the Christmas truces, with their attendant football games and exchanges of gifts between the front lines, a moment of hope which soon gave way to deeper despair than ever.

Poppies for the British dead at the Tower

As this process unfolds, there will be increasing debate on the war, on what it achieved, on what it cost in lives. 

There was a radical revision in assessments of the war back in the sixties, perhaps best characterised by the musical and then film, Oh What a Lovely War. The tone of the time is summed up by Adrian Henri’s line “Don’t be vague, blame General Haig”. That parody of an advert of the time (“don’t be vague, ask for Haig”) was particularly neat since the General owed his wealth to the Haig whisky business.

Where Haig's wealth came from
Judging by the results, perhaps his inspiration too

Now, though, there are signs of a new mood that would revise the revision. The war wasn’t all bad, the domination of Europe by Germany had to be broken (ironic, given where we live now), the victory was one for democracy and not just for imperialism. 

In the face of that backlash, it was illuminating to learn this week about Käthe Kollwitz (and my thanks are due, for far from the first time recently, to Neil MacGregor’s series Germany: memories of a nation). Kollwitz was an expressionist painter and sculptor and the first woman to be admitted to the Prussian Academy of Arts, though when the Nazis came to power, she was driven out as a creator of “degenerate art”.

Back in 1914, on the outbreak of war, her son decided to enlist in the German Army. Because he was under age, he needed his parents’ authority. His father refused, but Käthe came down on the boy’s side and persuaded her husband to let their son go. Within days of his reaching the front line, he was dead.

Käthe’s grief was made far more bitter by her harrowing sense of guilt. She decided to sculpt a monument to her son. The torrent of emotions she had to contend with made her reject idea after idea, and in the end it took her seventeen years to finish her work. it was unveiled in 1931.

The memorial she produced now stands in a Belgian cemetery, not far from where her son is buried. And what does it show?

Her son doesn’t appear.

There is no reference to war, neither the glory and courage of a warrior, nor the bitterness of injury and death.

All we see is two figures, for which she took herself and her husband as models, both kneeling and mourning.

Käthe Kollwitz. Grieving parents

It’s an image worth calling to  mind, especially each time we’re told that the losses of the war were a cost worth paying.



Postscript

I’m indebted to the Plough website for quoting from Käthe Kollwitz’s diary, towards the end of her life, days before the end of the Second World War, in April 1945.

One day, a new ideal will arise, and there will be an end to all wars. I die convinced of this. It will need much hard work, but it will be achieved... The important thing, until that happens, is to hold one’s banner high and to struggle... Without struggle there is no life.



Second postscript

Adrian Henri’s Great War Poems from which I quoted above, is worth reading in full. I particularly like “the ghost of Wilfred Owen selling matches outside the Burlington Arcade”. I have a childhood memory of old soldiers selling boxes of matches.

Great War Poems

I. The same old soldiers walking along the same old skyline

2. Dead hand through the sandbags reaching out for the cream­and ­white butterfly

3. Mud/water under duckboards/mud/rats scamper in starshell darkness/mud/smell of shit and rotting bodies/mud/resting your sweaty forehead on the sandbags OVER THE TOP the first men in the lunar landscape.

4. “What did you do to the Great Whore, Daddy?”

5. Poppies slightly out­of­focus and farmcarts bringing in the peaceful dead.

6. The ghost of Wilfred Oven selling matches outside the Burlington Arcade.

7. Seafog. Red flaring lights from the shore batteries. The roar of shells rattle of machineguns. Water running in the bilges. My feet slipping on the damp cobbles of the quayside.

8. DON'T BE VAGUE ­ BLAME GENERAL HAIG.

9. Four white feathers clutched in a blood­stained envelope

10. A skull nestling in a bed of wild strawberries/boots mouldering green with fungus/saplings thrusting through rusting helmets/sunken barges drifting full of leaves down autumn rivers.

For Remembrance Day: the Pity of War

In recognition of Remembrance Day, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning broadcast an item on Rudyard Kipling. One of the guests quoted the passage:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Remembrance Day

It struck me as a coincidence to hear Kipling mentioned on Radio 4, for the second time in a fortnight. But then I wondered whether it wasn’t a coincidence at all, but a reflection of something in the air today, a changing attitude towards the Great War. It does sometimes feel as though we’re shifting emphasis from its wanton, wasteful butchery, to something older, extolling the qualities traditionally associated with warriors. 

“Go to your God like a soldier” seems to encapsulate a certain ideal of military valour, doesn’t it?

Not that Kipling was at all impervious to the notion that a soldier wasn’t a breed apart, but merely another human, in uniform. In Tommy, he denounced the attitude of a society which despised its often ill-behaved, drunken, riotous soldiers in peacetime, but was only too quick to push them into the front line in war (“Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?, But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll”). Kipling countered:

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints…

Even so, this still feels too much like a eulogy. These are the homespun, unsung men who defend us uncomplainingly and with hard steadfast courage. With no question asked as to what right British soldiers have to be in “Afghanistan’s plains”, a matter we clearly still haven’t satisfactorily settled today.

So when it comes to questioning the notion that soldiers are heroes, rather than plain men and women suffering harrowing inhumanity, I prefer a writer I’ve not heard quoted at all in the last few weeks. He wrote a draft, incomplete preface to his poems, before he was killed just a week from the end of the Great War:

This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, dominion or power, except War.

Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.

The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

The poetry’s in the pity. Kipling’s verse (he refused to call it poetry) is stirring, often moving. But as we think of the Great War, it seems to me the most appropriate emotion is pity, above all at waste, “the undone years, the hopelessness.”

For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled…

…I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .

It’s good to rediscover Kipling, to marvel at his verse. But when we look at World War One, let’s prefer the eyes of Wilfred Owen.

Commemoration of a futile war – and a peaceful victory

We went to take a look at the moatful of poppies at the Tower of London yesterday. 

Sea of poppies at the Tower of London
For the (British and Commonwealth) dead of WW1

It’s been criticised powerfully for being so fixated on Britain: the monument is made up of a ceramic poppy for every British and Commonwealth soldier to have been killed in the First World War. It’s true that ignoring the many millions from other nations to have died seems to be another case of putting nation above humanity. And I’ve often wondered whether in any case we focus too much on the dead: there were many survivors who suffered life sentences of mental or physical suffering as a result of the war, and far too little is said of them.

On the other hand, it was impressive. And beautiful. That flood of red beneath the walls was powerfully moving.

Oddly, today combines two commemorations. The British don’t like letting people’s noses off the grindstone, so while France has a public holiday on Armistice Day, 11 November, to mark the end of the First World War, but in Britain we have Remembrance Sunday, today, so that we can commemorate the event without having a day off.

The other commemoration? The 25th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. Interestingly it too has been marked with flowers. Not poppies, but roses, one each for leading figures who placed them in cracks in a remaining stretch of the Wall.

Angela Merkel placing a rose in a stretch of the Wall

A still more interesting contrast is in the substance of the events commemorated. 

After all, these days few of us feel the First World War achieved much that we now value. We in Europe live in a continent dominated by Germany. I’m not convinced it would have been much worse, by now at least, had we in Britain stood back and let Germany win a Continental war. The war would probably have been short and cost far fewer lives. In all likelihood, we wouldn’t have been at each others’ throats 25 years later.

In 1961, the East German government, puppet of the Soviet Union which owed its existence to a revolution precipitated by the First World War, set up a wall through Berlin, ostensibly to protect the East from Western Fascists in the West. By happy coincidence, it also prevented people from the East falling into the trap of the West and defecting to it. 

It took 28 years for it to be breached – pretty much a generation. But it cost several hundred lives not several million. On the night the wall fell, that night of 9 November 1989, not a single shot was fired and not a single man or woman was killed. As a commentator told the BBC, a member of the then politburo of the GDR has admitted that the leadership was ready for anything at that time – except for candles and prayers, which is what they got.

Despite the many failings of the present German Federation, few of us look back on the Fall of the Wall with anything but joy. Mixed with relief.

Today we in Britain stand on the brink of the first year since the outbreak of the First World War that this country has been at peace. 101 years of continuous warfare. A big moment. Of course, there are still many opportunities to screw it up and get back into some fighting somewhere. But at least we can reflect today, day of two commemorations, of how much more we seem to have achieved by not going to war with the Soviet Union, than we did by going to war with Germany.

We wouldn’t have got that moatful of poppies. But that might have been a price worth paying. 

Part of the line of balloons set up in Berlin on the line of the Wall
before they were released to mark its fall

The anniversary of D-Day: might a little shame be appropriate?

Today, the seventieth anniversary of the D-day landings in Normandy, got me thinking about how we remember and respect our soldiers. 

In the US, the message is generally a variant on the theme “they gave their lives that we might be free”.

Do we exercise our freedom to pay for them?

Though other motivations also played their role, the Second World War genuinely removed a major threat to freedom. My grandfather refused to fight in the First World War and spent two years in gaol for his pains, but joined the Air Raid Precaution service (he was too old for combat) in the Second: as a Jew, he felt the fight against Nazism had to be won, where the Great War clash of imperialisms seemed no concern of his.

And since World War 2? The Vietnam War? The invasion of Iraq? I’m not sure how they served freedom. It was by defeating the United States that the Vietnamese gained some freedom. And it’s not clear how replacing a vicious but stable Iraqi dictatorship by a war-torn regime prey to vicious terrorists, and under the domination of Iran, serves any cause of freedom.

To suggest solders “died for freedom” in those wars seems a travesty. But it isn’t just the word “freedom” that bothers me in that phrase. It’s also the word “died”, because huge numbers of soldiers don’t die, though, sadly, many of them come later to wish they had. War memorials show the names of the dead; they don’t name the crippled either in body or, far worse, in soul.

Fit, young, brave and strong: in short, heroes

Americans like to produce uplifting, inspiring images of soldiers, with messages of gratitude and admiration for them. The soldiers appear as heroes: fit, young, brave and strong. We don’t see the far less heroic picture many present a few years later: unkempt, sleeping rough, their minds addled by drink or drugs, estranged from friends or families. Many of them are in prison: in Britain and the US, a disproportionate number of convicted criminals are veterans.

And, above all, these fallen heroes receive little or no support from the society that salutes them so warmly while they’re still well.

Perhaps our war memorials ought to contain inscriptions along the following lines:

“Private such-and-such, who died not in the fighting but nonetheless of its consequences, four decades later, uncared for, unloved and alone, abandoned by the society that claims to thank him for his sacrifice but feels no shame over its failure to rescue him.”

All this went through my mind as I listened to a radio interview with Tim Radford, now 85, but believed to have been the youngest person to have taken part in the D-Day landings. He was a fifteen-year old galley boy on a tug on 6 June 1944.

“There was a most tremendous bombardment taking place...” he told the BBC, “it was like Dante’s Inferno...”

“The water was full of dead men. A very sad memory of D-Day is all the poor devils who never made it to the beach, who were in the water with life jackets on, floating, and we hadn’t time to pull them out...”

For Radford, these weren’t scenes of glorious endeavour. In fact, he told us:

“I’m very much opposed to war as a means of settling differences, but there’s no question in my mind but that war had to be fought, we had to defeat Naziism otherwise we’d all be enslaved for generations.”

The war was justified, he felt, but nothing to exult over. And what about since then?

“... most of the wars there’ve been since, I can’t think of any exceptions, have seemed to me to be unnecessary and avoidable.”

So in his view, as in mine, they had little to do with any essential freedom that could not have been defended some other way.

Asked whether what he saw on 6 June 1944 had any glory to it, Radford was unambiguous:

“I don’t think it was glorious. You should respect the courage and self-sacrifice of people who give their lives for others. Of course. But there’s no glory in it.”

No. There isn’t. In Britain, we have what we call a ‘Covenant’ with our servicemen: we ask them to be ready to put their lives on the line for us, and in return we commit, firstly, not to call on them to do it except for a cause worthy of the sacrifice and, secondly, to look after them when they return (or of their families if they don’t).

In reality, we demand that sacrifice for reasons that are often at best dubious. And then we redouble the injury by failing to look after the ones who come back or the bereaved families.

That’s why all the rhetoric about our gratitude to those who died for our freedom disturbs me. It seems to me to draw a veil of sentimentalism over something much uglier that we ought to face up to. It’s a denial of behaviour on our parts, not theirs, for which we ought ultimately to be profoundly ashamed.

Perhaps a thought worth taking a few moments over on the anniversary of D-Day.