Horrors of War Our Leaders
Never Have to Confront
By
Robert Fisk
This article was originally printed in
The Independent on Sept. 13.
25/09/08 -- - Just outside Andrew Holden’s office at
the Christchurch Press off Cathedral Square – and, believe me,
New Zealand’s prettiest city is as colonial as they come, a
Potemkin town of mock-Tudor government buildings, Scottish
baronial churches and wooden versions of Victorian homes – is a
brightly coloured, cheerful little water-colour. Boarding a big
steamship, thousands of New Zealanders in big broad-bottomed
brown hats are lining the quaysides, the gangplanks and the
decks.
For a
moment this week, I thought this might be some annual festival
(perhaps involving New Zealand’s 35 million boring sheep). But
then Andrew spotted my interest. “They’re going to Gallipoli,”
he said. And – fast as the lightning bolt of history – my eyes
returned to the tiny figures on the deck. Off they were going,
another flower of youth, to the trenches and dust and filth of
my father’s war.
I’m
not sure of this, but I think – I suspect and feel – that the
Great War, the war of 1914-1918, is beginning to dominate our
lives even more than the terrible and infinitely more costly
conflict of 1939-1945. As the years go by, the visitors to the
great cemeteries of the Somme, Passchendaele and Verdun grow
greater in number. The Second World War may haunt our lives. The
First World War, it seems to me, imprisons us all.
The
statistics still have the power to overawe us. As John Terraine
calculates, by November of 1918, France had lost 1,700,000 men
out of a population of 40 million, the British Empire a million
– 700,000 of them from the 50 million people of the British
Isles. The British Army, let it be repeated, lost 20,000 killed
on the first day of the Somme. I noticed that in Christchurch
Cathedral, the bronze plaques to the Great War dead had been
newly polished – so that they looked as they must have been seen
by those who came to mourn almost a hundred years ago.
Who
would have believed, even half a century ago, that this year’s
Toronto Film Festival would open in Canada with a film called
Passchendaele – perhaps the most-difficult-to-spell-movie of all
time – the film poster showing just a young man standing in mud
and filth and rain? Who could conceive that one of the most
popular non-fiction books in recent Canadian history would be
the Ottawa War Museum’s Great War historian Tim Cook’s At the
Sharp End, the first volume of his monumental study of Canadians
in the 1914-18 war?
Canada
had its Douglas Haig – a maniac called Sam Hughes ("Minister of
Militia and Defence") who forced his young men to use the
hopeless Canadian-made Mark III Ross rifle which jammed and
misfired and heaped up the corpses of Canadians who could not
defend themselves with this patriotic, murderous weapon. Cook,
despite his occasional tendency to cliché (says Fisk) is
superlative.
His
description of desperately young Canadian men cowering in
shell-holes – showered by the putrefying remains of their
long-dead friends as bodies are again torn apart by shells – is
devastating. So, too, are his quotations from the letters home
of Canadian soldiers. “I went thru all the fights the same as if
I was making logs,” Sergeant Frank Maheux writes home to his
wife in an innocent, broken English. “I bayoneted some (sic)
killed lots of Huns. I was caught in one place with a chum of
mine he was killed beside me when I saw he was killed I saw red
... The Germans when they saw they were beaten they put up their
hands but dear wife it was too late.”
My
God, how that “dear wife” tells the truth about the surrendering
Germans’ fate. And here is Captain Joseph Chabelle of the
Canadian 2nd Division’s 22 Battalion: “Oh! The sensation of
driving the blade into flesh, between the ribs, despite the
opponent’s grasping efforts to deflect it. You struggle
savagely, panting furiously, lips contorted in a grimace, teeth
gnashing, until you feel the enemy relax his grip and topple
like a log. To remove the bayonet, you have to pull it out with
both hands; if it is caught in the bone, you must brace your
foot on the still heaving body, and tug with all your might.”
Private James Owen was to describe how an enraged friend was
trying to bayonet another German. “He lunged at the German again
and again, who each time lowered his arms and stopped the point
of the bayonet with his bare hands. He was screaming for mercy.
Oh God it was brutal!”
Haig,
by the way, was initially dismissive of the Canadians. “They
have been very extravagant in expending ammunition!” he
complained. “This points rather to nervousness and low morale.”
How
the gorge rises at such wickedness. But it rises far more as you
turn the pages of the beautifully produced, desperate collection
of French soldiers’ amateur paintings and sketches of the Great
War – “Croquis et dessins de Poilus” – which, ironically,
includes a set of sad portraits of the poilus’ Canadian
comrades. This magnificent book was produced by the French
Ministry of Defence; why it could not have had a joint
production with the Imperial War Museum beggars belief – does
the Entente now count for nothing? For anyone who wants to
understand the total failure of the human spirit which war
represents – and the utter disgust which must follow the
“arbitrament"of war (a Chamberlain word this – see his 3
September 1939, declaration of war) – must read the extract from
Jean Giono’s Le Grand Troupeau, which accompanies Louis
Dauphin’s bleak, rainswept painting, “Supply Route at Peronne”.
“The
rats, with red eyes, march delicately along the trench,” Giono
writes of the creatures with whom he shared the war. “All life
had disappeared down there except for that of the rats and the
lice ... The rats were coming to sniff the bodies ... They chose
the young men without beards on the cheeks ... rolled up into a
ball and began to eat the flesh between the nose and the mouth
up to the edge of the lips ... from time to time they would wash
their whiskers to stay clean. Then the eyes, they took them out
with their claws, licked the eyelids, and would then bite into
the eye as if it was a small egg ...”
My
father saw these horrors on the Somme. They all did. Of course,
Messrs Bush and Blair did not have to soil their thoughts with
such images. Our boys shipping off to war – Mrs Thatcher happily
endured the Gallipoli-like departures from Portsmouth – is
enough for our leaders. But could it be, perhaps, that we – the
people – know more about horror than our masters? Our history
suggests this is true.
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