Here's a little Armistice Day treat for all you tough-talking celebrants of armed struggle. This is from today's UK Guardian:
General Julian Thompson, Falklands War commander, knows about the first world war because his father, Captain Arnold Thompson, told him what it was like: 'A trench would be quite deep, say the depth of this room and two or three feet wide, and people lived in what were called dugouts, which were little caves dug into the front edge of the trench. Not the back end because that was where the shrapnel would go. Of course, later on, they built more sophisticated dugouts into quite large accommodation but it was all below ground - the fetid smell of unwashed bodies, sweat, fear, cooking, and then, of course, the smell of the lavatories that had been dug out into the back end of the trenches. The trenches flooded when it rained and so they would be anything up to waist deep at times - so you waded along through the filth of sewers of excrement, dead bodies rotting in the parapet, dead bodies out in front of you, turning black in the sun, some of them your friends, who you had to watch this happening to.' There was plenty more like this in the first part of The Day The Guns Fell Silent (BBC1), narrated to perfection by Timothy West. We can know far more about the first world war than those who set out to fight in it did. The disillusionment that followed the war was expressed by CEM Montague, a Manchester Guardian drama critic and leader writer who was 47 when the war began but who dyed his hair and joined up. After the war he wrote Disenchantment, in which he said: " 'The Freedom of Europe', 'The War to end war', 'the overthrow of militarism', 'the cause of civilisation' - most people believe so little now in anything or anyone that they would find it hard to understand the simplicity and intensity of faith with which these phrases were once taken among our troops, or the certitude felt by hundreds of thousands of men who are now dead that if they died their monument would be a new Europe, not soured and soiled with the hates and greeds of the old. For this they have willingly hung themselves up to rot on the uncut wire, or wriggled to death, slow, hour by hour, in the cold filth." Those who tell us that we don't believe in anything nowadays - besides being plain wrong - might reflect on where believing in the wrong things gets you.
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Carl Remick