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

Misty's diary: into every life a little rain must fall. But why at every door?

Another entry from Misty’s diary. In which he makes clear that he has no intention of being mocked, and will take action to prevent it.

November 2014

He's got a real cheek, has domestic number 2.

He keeps making what he thinks are smart comments at my expense. Smartarse comments, more like.

Maybe he thinks I don’t understand them. Maybe he realises I do and thinks this is a clever way of getting back at me for my judicious use of claw and tooth on him. Unwise, if that’s the case. I still have my teeth and claws, and I keep them in good order.

His latest wheeze started when the weather turned rainy. He thinks it terribly funny that I don’t like to go out when it’s chucking it down. Well, who would? He doesn’t. He grumbles about it all the time. And he’s got jackets and umbrellas to protect him. All I have is fur and let me tell you, when it gets wet it stays wet a long time.

Why, both domestics comment on it.

“Oh, poor Misty,” they say, stroking my damp back, “are you all wet?”

Yeah. Right. Duh. I’ve just been outside in the rain. Can’t hide anything from observers as acute as you guys.

That isn’t what makes Domestic 2 laugh though. He watches me get half out of the cat flap on the kitchen door and then come back in. He thinks that’s quite amusing. I suppose he thinks I’m undignified, wriggling backside first into the house.

But what really tickles him is when I ask him to let me out of the front instead.

“What?” he says, “you think conditions might be different there? That it might be raining at the back but fine, warm mousing weather at the front?”

OK, cut out the smartarse remarks
Just open the door. The weather might be nicer here

Oh wow, he thinks that’s so funny. He’s just so caustic. So bloody superior.

But I ask you? How can he actually know the weather’s going to be the same at both doors? I mean, until he’s looked?

OK, sure, it always has been. I admit that. But who’s to say it always will be? And wouldn’t we look stupid if we missed out, on the one occasion it was just glorious at the front, though it was chucking it down in the back garden?

In the meantime, let me make one thing clear.

I don’t appreciate being dissed, OK?

Now I’m going back to sharpening my claws. And making sure the teeth are filed and ready for action just as soon as I need them.

Winsome? Don't be fooled.
Just taking a break from keeping teeth and claws sharp

Happy birthday, Lise. Or how it's a man's world out there.

7th November. As well as being the 97th anniversary of the October revolution (yep, it happened in what the rest of the world thought of as November), this is the 136th birthday of Lise Meitner. Elise Meitner when she was born, but she later that she preferred Lise.

It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense wishing someone who’s been dead 46 years a happy birthday, but Meitner was a bit special, so why not? And I suppose we can have a happy birthday for her, can’t we?

Why was she special? To start with, she was an Austro-Hungarian Jew, not the most propitious of launchpads for an international career in science. Particularly for a woman. She set out to put that right quickly: she was the second woman to obtain a Physics PhD from the University of Vienna, and later she became the first woman to hold a chair of chemistry in any German university.

Lise Meitner at work

Working with a number of others, including in particular Otto Frisch, Meitner came up with the explanation of an observation of her fellow chemist, Otto Hahn’s. He had found that Uranium he was working on had a tendency to convert into the much lighter element Barium. He rightly concluded that some kind of fission, splitting, was happening, but it was Frisch and Meitner who came up with the theoretical explanation of the process.

They, indeed, came up with the notion of the “strong force” that holds protons together in the tiny space of an atomic nucleus, despite the massive repulsive power between them, caused by their all being positively charged.

After Hitler came to power, most Jewish scientists were driven out, but she was given a little breathing space because of her Austrian nationality, and stayed on right till 1938. It was a decision that nearly cost her dear: she only escaped to Holland thanks to Otto Hahn who talked the border guards into her letting her through.

She took up a scientific post in Sweden where she continued to work on the problem of fission. Many of her colleagues and fellow exiles from Germany, gravitated to the States, and eventually into the Manhattan project, designing the atom bomb. She refused to join, on the grounds that she had no wish to see her discovery used for the construction of a weapon.

In 1945, the Nobel Committee announced that the 1944 Chemistry prize was going to Hahn.

Yes, just Hahn.

Meitner didn’t get a look in.

“Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry,” Meitner commented. “There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Otto Robert Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission – how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn.”

Yes. But she was a woman. A worse handicap, it seems, even than being Jewish in the scientific world of 1944.

Still. She won a lot of other awards and honours. Not least would have been Einstein's description of her as the “German Marie Curie.” It seems not unreasonable to add one more, however late, so: Happy Birthday, Lise.

NHS Savings: where they could really be made

Britain, with its quaint attachment to the style monarchical, likes to organise its medical professionals into “royal colleges”. And there is an organisation of these organisations, called the “Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.”

This morning, we learned about its report on a possible savings in the NHS.

It seems that as much as £2.3 billion a year are being wasted on over-testing and over-treating patients. £466 million is accounted for by over-prescription of cocktails of drugs – which are associated, according to the report, with 6% of hospital admissions and 4% of hospital bed days. So reducing this kind of prescribing, far from damaging patient care, should actually improve it.

From the Academy of Medical
Royal Colleges report

The report also identifies areas where savings can be made by changing working practices. For example, according to the Guardian, the Royal Liverpool hospital has halved lengths of stay simply by requiring senior medical staff (consultants) to switch from twice-weekly ward rounds to twice-daily.

On the other hand, I’m not so sold on the idea that we test too much. I’ve watched too many conditions fail to be diagnosed, in Britain, for want of carrying out simple tests. The price has been avoidable suffering or even death.

In any case, today’s Guardian quoted Dr Ian Wilson, of the doctors’ union, the BMA, who pointed out that the NHS is a world leader in cost-effective medicine. “The Commonwealth Fund, a respected American health thinktank,” the paper paraphrased him, “recently rated the NHS top for both value for money and patient care out of 11 healthcare systems worldwide it studied.”

So maybe there isn’t quite as much space for saving as the Royal Colleges believe. Perhaps only part of the £2.3 billion can really be achieved.

That’s why it was fascinating that it was also today that I read a letter sent by an MP to a constituent who had asked about the interest being paid by the NHS for “PFI” projects. The Private Finance Initiative was, shamefully, introduced by a Labour government. It was designed to push the NHS to raise finance from the private sector, for such projects as building new hospitals. It had the convenient effect of removing the loans from the total of government borrowing. 

Sadly, this wonderful advantage in pure bookkeeping was offset by a bit of a downside in the real world: it cost a great deal more in interest.

Labour introduced this wheeze, but the Conservatives, so keen on privatisation, though they denounced it in Opposition, haven’t touched it in office.

And what did the MP’s letter say?

In 2014/15, the NHS in England had an estimated £1.89 billion to pay in PFI unitary charge payments, and £1.95billion in 2015/16.

I’m sure there are savings to make by cutting out over-treatment and over-testing, or from changing work patterns. But how about eliminating that charge? It buys strictly nothing. And costs a lot.

So here’s an idea for government: suck it up and absorb that borrowing into the public debt, to free the NHS of the interest payments.

Don’t hold your breath.

Do we really want to give up on privacy?

Robert Hannigan, head of Britain’s GCHQ, the equivalent and partner of America’s NSA and therefore our principal snooping organisation, has declared that there’s no “absolute right” to privacy. Since his organisation has quite a track record for invading privacy, his is probably a remark worth taking seriously.

GCHQ: protecting us. But from itself

At one level, as it happens, I think he’s right. In my view, there is no absolute right to privacy. But that’s because I don’t believe there’s an absolute right to anything. Rights are granted by people to each other or, still more frequently, wrested by one group from another who make every effort to resist them.

Not everyone believes that. People of faith, for example, might well hold that rights are a gift from God. Certainly, the signatories of the US Declaration of Independence seem to have felt that way:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It all flows from the Creator, you see.

On the other hand, I think we’re probably better-advised to be guided by what people do than by what they say. And from that point of view, it’s instructive that the man who drafted the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave-owner, as were numerous other signatories including, most notably, George Washington.

So I take with a pinch of salt the notion that Liberty is some kind of absolute right. If it were absolute, how could some men (or women) deny it to others? The US founding fathers were apparently able to alienate the allegedly unalienable.

It took a long and bloody war – still the costliest in lives ever fought by American forces – to establish that no one could be enslaved in the US. A hundred years on, it took a bitter struggle to win Civil Rights for the descendants of the freed slaves. Even today, few can pretend that American Blacks enjoy the same degree of liberty as their White compatriots.

All this confirms me in my prejudice that rights aren’t absolute, but have to be fought for and then defended.

So I agree with Hannigan that privacy isn’t an absolute right, any more than any of the others. But, though we agree on the premiss, I draw the opposite conclusion. Precisely because it isn’t absolute, the right to privacy needs to be defended, above all against such as he who would trample it if he could.

His motivation, inevitably, is the fight against terrorism. Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, he claims, are now “command-and-control networks for terrorists”. It is his duty to spy on what’s said on the web to keep us all safe.

It’s all the more vital, and all the more difficult, to resist that kind of thinking now that so many seem anxious to give up their rights. As frightened as Hannigan of terrorism, and hostile to Europe, many British voters seems intent on dropping adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights – nasty foreign meddling with good British custom, championed by such as Hannigan. 

Curiously, it’s article 8 of that Convention that guarantees:

…everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life.

Nothing absolute about that guarantee, though. We can give it up, if that’s what we decide we want. But with the likes of Hannigan out there breathing down our necks, is that really what we should wish for?

Benign racism: the most pernicious form

There’s such power in Rudyard Kipling. 

The characters in Kim, for instance, are unforgettable: the red-bearded giant of a Pathan horse dealer, Mahbub Ali; the Babu, Hurree Chunder Mookherjee, self-declared a “fearful man”, but staking his life on serving the British Raj; and perhaps one of the most endearing figures in literature, Teshoo Lama from Tibet, seeking the river that will wash him clean of all taint of sin.

To say nothing of Kim, the epitome of the lovable rogue, constantly in mischief, whether his own or other people’s, a white but able to pass himself off as any of half a dozen Indian types. At least.

And yet, the pleasure of reading Kim comes with an uncomfortable trace of embarrassment. Because Kipling constantly refers to “the Oriental” way of being or doing things, and to certain characteristics as somehow “white.” Kim, for instance, is able to resist powerful, perhaps hypnotic, suggestion and see things the way they really are, and there is a strong implication that it is his European blood that gives him the strength.

Rudyard Kipling: fine writer, but the racism's no less toxic

Besides, it was Kipling who wrote a poem about the “white man’s burden”.

Take up the White Man's burden – 
The savage wars of peace – 
Fill full the mouth of famine 
And bid the sickness cease; 
 And when your goal is nearest 
The end for others sought, 
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly 
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Doesn’t that sound like Bush and Blair in Iraq? We fought a savage war for peace, and look what those lesser beings have done with what we gave them…

Perhaps one of Kipling’s greatest gifts was the ability to give the common soldier a voice, not something writers had tried before him. Who can forget Gunga Din?

Though I've belted you and flayed you, 
By the livin' Gawd that made you, 
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

How enlightened is that? The white soldier admits that the Indian water carrier isn’t merely his equal, but his superior.

Except, except… he belted him and flayed him. And one can’t help feeling that it was Gunga Din’s darker skin that entitled the soldier, and Kipling who spoke for him, to do so. Indeed, when we look a little closer, the puzzle is solved: Gunga Din was a superior sort of man because, despite his brown skin, inside he was white:

An' for all 'is dirty 'ide 
'E was white, clear white, inside

There’s no denying the love Kipling had for India, and for Indians: it shines through powerfully in Kim. But it’s the love of a superior for an inferior. And the superior is there to rule the inferior. In the interests of the inferior, that’s Kipling’s message in The White Man’s Burden, but with a rule of iron (“though I’ve belted you and flayed you…”)

There’s something benign about the racial view propounded by Kipling. But that only makes it more pernicious. There’s nothing to wonder at in Gandhi’s swift denunciation of the notion of the “white man’s burden” as a yoke for colonial peoples.

Bas relief by John Lockwood of a scene from Kim

So when I re-read Kim recently, I rediscovered the pleasure I’d had as a child, at the spellbinding story and above all at the compelling characters, but with an acute sense of unease at the underlying message.

I suppose in a sense we’ve progressed since 1901, when the book appeared. The pretence that the Raj served the Indian people has been well and truly punctured, and the Raj itself ended; whatever the problems India still faces, and there are many, its people have made great advances since Britain left.

No ruler looks after the interests of the ruled as well as they would look after their own, if only he’d stop ruling them.

Back in Britain, we can take some satisfaction from the fact that racism is at least no longer hidden behind any kind of pernicious nonsense about its being good for the oppressed. 

When UKIP attacks Bulgarians or Romanians, it at least doesn’t pretend that it’s doing them some kind of favour. Instead, it makes it clear that it is targeting them as a group, just because they are Bulgarians or Romanians (“I was asked if a group of Romanian men moved in next door, would you be concerned? And if you lived in London, I think you would be,” said Nigel Farage to a radio interviewer).

They try to disguise their xenophobia behind an economic smokescreen: immigrants take our jobs (they don’t: they do jobs we can’t find native Brits for) although, somehow, at the same time they come here to live off our benefits (immigrants are 60% less likely to be on benefits than the native born). Underneath it all, they just don’t like people from abroad, and they know there are plenty of Brits who share their view, so they push it.

At least we can see the racism for what it is these days. Kipling disguises his poison, but in Farage it’s openly displayed. And there’s nothing benign about it: it’s wholly malignant.

It’s better to be able to recognise the toxin than for it to be hidden. Doing away with it altogether would, of course, be far better still. That would mean living in a world in which people were judged not as white or black or “oriental”, not as British or Bulgarian or Iraqi, not as Christian, Jew or Muslim, but as individuals. There’d be no space in such a world for the likes of UKIP.

Unfortunately, there might be no space for Kipling either. That would mean the loss of some great writing. Which would be sad, but if that’s the price, it’s worth paying.