Some short thoughts on Armistice Day

The 11th of November commemorates the end of a painfully long and arduous war where almost 20 million people perished, around half of whom were almost exclusively young men at the front lines.

Erich Maria Remarque wrote in his wonderful All Quiet on the Western Front:

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

It was a war whose morals are ambiguous and the victory tasted bitter and hollow. Wilfred Owen, the great War poet of that conflict, who fought on the front lines, summed up this haunting nullity:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace 

Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; 

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— 

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 

To children ardent for some desperate glory, 

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est 

Pro patria mori.

Owen died in the last week of the War, aged 25. His mother receiving his death notice as the bells in his village were ringing for victory. But even for those who lived through the harrows of the ‘war to end all wars’, many were thrust into the purgatory that was WWII so soon afterward.

Wilfred Owen

Whole generations, those lucky enough to just survive through that epoch, and spent their youthful energy under austerity to rebuild the cities and towns, were suddenly left asking: where did youth go? When did dreams and aspirations melt into a shade? Many couldn’t even summon up the strength, as Joseph Heller suggested in his novel, Catch-22, to ‘live forever, or die in the attempt.’

Plato already resignedly realised that ‘only the dead have seen the end of war.’ Heraclitus goes further to say that ‘war is father of us all’. Casting an eye back on history, one can’t say that isn’t true. Therefore the Utopian view of a world without wars is, while admirable in sentiment, naïve. What’s more, the anti-war hustlers, who inherited a shallow ideology from the 60’s, such as those who advocate for unilateral disarmament as a means to achieve peace, make the mistake of forgetting the tragic nature of life. Perhaps the most unsound manifestation of this line of thought is for some members of this ideology to, while enjoying the freedom and prosperity of modern Western countries purchased by the lives of young men and women, deride soldiers past and present. Kipling wrote in his poem Tommy, addressing this sour duality:

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;

An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit

Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.

    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,

    The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,

    O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

Living in a lucky country, one might be forgiven to lose track of the tragic side of life. However, while we enjoy the fruits of modernity, and the long period of abnormal peace, it would be tragic indeed to allow ourselves to forget that all this prosperity rests largely on sharp pieces of metal meeting the furrowless brows of frightened teenage boys.

Here dead we lie

Because we did not choose

To live and shame the land

From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,

Is nothing much to lose,

But young men think it is,

And they were young.

                               A. E. Housman

Young soldiers from the Royal Lancers in Tonbridge
during the First World War, 1915.
Photo: Popperfoto