Today, 11 o'clock caught me unawares when the presenter of the Radio 6 show I was listening to at that moment said something like, 'and now we remember those who gave their lives for the sake of freedom and peace'. As the prescribed period of silence proceeded, I put on the telly and watched the Cenotaph ceremony. There was Queen Elizabeth placing her wreath, as did maybe half-a-dozen others of the royal family, in their various capacities as officials in the British armed forces. It then hit me that they were of the very same spawn of Queen Victoria and her Germanic husband Albert as the initiator of those two major bloodbaths of the twentieth century, Kaiser Wilhelm. What an irony that the monarchical clan of Europe, of Britain, Russia and Germany, who ruled the common working people of that era, are the very same set we have leading the memorialising of the millions that they themselves as a species had sent to annihilate each other. Of course, the Romanov tyranny was overturned in 1917 by the class that formed the masses of the armies of Russia; a post-war upheaval and revolutionary movement in Germany that, although it got rid of the Kaiser and the royal family, was brutally suppressed allowing the seeds to be set for the cultivation of Nazism in the 1920s and thirties. I was set to wondering what would have been achieved had this nation thrown off its ruling classes and had been able to travel a republican road towards our present.
What I am exploring in this piece on what Remembrance Sunday means to me seems bound up with the following categories and others which we might bring to mind when we brainstorm the connotations of remembering fallen service-people each year:
The Cenotaph in Whitehall: The Great and the Good on display in common sobriety, their pacing and saluting and their walking backwards and th
eir donkey-jacketless[1] apparel. Patriotism: we have a [insert your own adjective] country of which to be proud. In what way is this not pejorative nationalism, even considering all the different skin hues we'll see in remembrance? I insert here a pertinent piece from George Orwell who had experienced being shot through the neck in the Spanish Civil War in the pursuance of freedom from fascism and wrote this in 1943 in the midst of WWII:
Tribune, 24 December 1943Sacrifice: a noun readily thrown around by those caught up in remembrance, which might, I reckon, be defined in connection to our forces of the two world wars by one or more of my following statements, but less comprehensively applicable to the current conflict: to give up one's life or limb for a cause; to be sacrificed for a cause; to be part of an aggregated offering to maintain or obtain or attain something, maybe freedom; to be a sacrificial offering whereby one is led to a place (altar, maybe) and where one becomes the helpless or willing (Isaac-like) sacrificial unit to placate a higher power such as a god, a king, a government, a general, the markets - in short - in furtherance of an ideal. In its analysis, the word 'sacrifice' becomes more nebulous of meaning in the context of Remembrance, except in its more accurate application when the memorialised dies to save others by falling on a grenade, for example, thereby giving his or her life to attempt the saving of the lives of others (the kind of sacrifice that we might associate within the Christian context of Jesus's crucifixion). Applying the self-sacrificial description to all our war dead cannot thereby work, and so beggars the question of who bears the responsibility of any sacrifice... who is the modern-day Aaronic heir who would demand such sacrifice? Stand up and come forward if you dare, with the same bravura you displayed at the outset and before it all started to fall apart.
Attacking me in the Weekly Review for attacking Douglas Reed, Mr. A. K. Chesterton remarks, "'My country -- right or wrong' is a maxim which apparently has no place in Mr. Orwell's philosophy." He also states that "all of us believe that whatever her condition Britain must win this war, or for that matter any other war in which she is engaged."
The operative phrase is any other war. There are plenty of us who would defend our own country, under no matter what government, if it seemed that we were in danger of actual invasion and conquest. But "any war" is a different matter. How about the Boer War, for instance? There is a neat little bit of historical irony here. Mr. A. K. Chesterton is the nephew of G. K. Chesterton, who courageously opposed the Boer War, and once remarked that "My country, right or wrong" was on the same moral level as "My mother, drunk or sober."
Before I saw the flaws in the liberal use of the word 'sacrifice' I applied it readily to those of my ancestoral family of whom I knew had given their lives (or more accurately had their lives taken): a great-grandfather and two great uncles in the 1914-18 conflict and a cousin of my father's (himself a naval serviceman in WWII), who had been on the ill-fated HMS Hood [2], are just some examples; there will have been more.
Courage: as an Aristotelian mean, courage falls somewhere between fear and confidence; the virtue that separates the coward from the foolhardy, perhaps.
Heroism: Someone, help me clarify what this is please.
Honour: in certain discourses of power we value a standard of conduct that is unshakeable in measuring our actions, or those of the societal unit to which we belong, and which can effect changes in the perceived opinion in which we are held by our peers should we fall short of that standard.
Poppies: the red blooms associated with the fields of WWI Flanders, but more so the coloured paper emblem of the Royal British Legion and seemingly indispensable appendage for anyone wishing not to be singled out for criticism while parading themselves on tv at this Remembrance time of year.
I was affected by this week's fatalities, particularly of the five soldiers shot to death by the Afghan policeman whom they were training. The cold-blooded nature of that action is in a similar category, if not magnitude, as a suicide-bombing or the bombing of Dresden or Coventry or Nagasaki and, as such, has some bearing on how we view the protagonists and particularly the victims: in contrast, perhaps, to the racing passions that patrolling in a hostile area at risk of roadside bomb or being involved in a 'firefight' might engender, to die so passively and by such treachery, robs the victim of more than they might expect as action-ready combatants prepared to put themselves into the path of danger as part of their job; the manner of one's demise in this case is metaphorically without 'one's boots on', or with one's Viking axe in one's hand nor like the 300 Spartans against the might of Persia or the Light Brigade charging into the Russian cannon at Balaclava. How does such a death bear on the concepts of 'honour' and 'sacrifice' above? And how, indeed, does the attitude of our young men who in the bloom of youth merely want to go out and see some action, impact on all these categories? The same considerations might apply to those instances of death from 'friendly fire'.
I'll leave the subject, unresolved in my mind but possibly quite clear-cut in yours, with the usual and now cliched coda as used after Horace by Wilfred Owen in his Great War poem, still so relevant:
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori
(The Latin bit translates as 'It is sweet and right to die for your country'. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country).
[1] Michael Foot (see pic), the left-of-centre Labour leader in 1982 was lambasted by the right-wing press for wearing a practical, if inelegant, overcoat, which they labelled a donkey-jacket and described him as looking like an out of work navvy. I'd be pleased and probably sobered to know how many navvies gave their lives in the service of their country during the last century.
[2] HMS Hood sunk May 1941. Of the 1,418 crew, only three men survived.
