No sooner had I opened the garden gate this morning for my walk than thoughts came to me that were inevitable on this day, their subject unavoidable. Thoughts of war. For today is the one hundredth anniversary of the commencement of the third battle of Ypres, known to the English speaking world as Passchendaele. It was to last until November 10th. It was an attempt to take vital ridges above the town of Ypres, the last of which was the site of the village of Passchendaele. It involved troops from the UK, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, France and Belgium. And, of course, Germany. It was conducted during the heaviest rains in the area for 30 years. Shelling caused huge craters in the mud, mud on an overwhelming scale, mud that made every physical movement forward an exercise in extracting feet from a sucking, viscous mire that stank, was slippery. And cold. Large numbers of men - and horses - drowned. Drowned in the meadows of Belgium. And at its end, half a million men were either dead, injured or missing. Missing as in blown to smithereens, rotting in vast ponds, sinking into the mud to oblivion. Untraceable. Unknown. Gone.
But not forgotten. Not unmourned. Since 2014 which marked the anniversary of the start of the war, this appalling blot on humanity, there have, thankfully, been regular ceremonies at the passing of each relevant date, recalling those names that have lodged in my memory since I was a child. Names that would have no interest to me, create no echoes, were it not for their place forever in the memories and tales of my grand parents. Somme. Verdun. Vimy Ridge. The same thing was to happen to me. My father served in the Second World War, with the 8th army, the Desert Rats, fighting Rommel through north Africa. And he came home with names so exotic that they were thrilling to hear. Tobruk. El Alamein. Wadi Akarit. And I find I can more easily recall the sites of disasters, names that float unbidden into the mind, Agadir (earthquake 1960), Aberfan (fatal landslide 1966), Katrina (hurricane 2005) than any joyful events.
I'm sure that the majority of families in the UK have a relative, near or remote, who perished in the Great War. My mother's maiden name was Scriven and Charlie Scriven, my grandfather's brother, and hence my great uncle was among them. I am sure the same is true of our German friend who we have met in Karpathos for many years. And all for what? What did anyone achieve? This was the war to end all wars. Unfortunately the men who negotiated the peace at its end on the allied side proved to be so vindictive and narrow minded that they punished Germany with such savage and demeaning reparations that a repeat performance a mere twenty years later was almost inevitable.
But hey! When did a war ever do any good? OK. Maybe there's an argument for the last one. A win by the Nazis would have been a human catastrophe beyond contemplation. First the rest of the Jews, then the Slavs etc etc etc. The LGBT community. Who knows? If they wanted to they would have found a justification for anything. But the two wars that I remember after my dad came home are those fought in Korea and Vietnam. Both to combat the Communist threat. Hundreds of thousands dead, injured, maimed. And the results? Half of Korea lost to the most fundamentalist Communist regime. Vietnam abandoned to the government the US had fought after bombing the populace with napalm that stuck to the flesh while burning and Agent Orange that not only decimated most of the vegetation but left deposits that will continue to cause deformed babies for generations to come. Lately Iraq and Libya. Think the West sticking its nose in has done any good? But that comment is too political. My point is that the human instinct that means in the final analysis, when all else has failed, we fight, makes fascists of us all. Governments pursue all diplomatic avenues, sign treaties, exhaust rhetoric. Then out come the guns, the bombs and ultimately the bayonets, hand to hand, just like we did in the park when we were kids. Might is right.
The dreadful historical conditions that caused the First World War to be so horrible included the fact that the last wars fought in Europe had been fought by infantry and cavalry. Of course there had been canons but they had nowhere near the same destructive power of the immense weapons that had been developed by 1914. And battle had been a fluid affair, charges, skirmishes, attacks, repulses. Suddenly the horse was only useful as a pack animal and the awful effects of the machine gun, heavy artillery, tank and gas on men exposed on open land led to trench warfare, stasis, attrition. And no worse example exists than Passchendaele.
Last Saturday I went to London to see a performance of 'Hamlet'. the lead being played by an actor I have come to know and admire from his appearances on tv and radio. Andrew Scott, known on tv as Sherlock's nemesis Moriaty and on radio for several dramatic roles including Stephen Daedalus in the BBC's dramatisation of James Joyce's Ulysses. There is a scene in the play where Hamlet encounters an army of 20,000 Norwegian soldiers crossing Denmark to fight against the Polish army. He questions a soldier as to the purpose of the war. Land, he says. Hamlet says must be a big piece of fertile land. No, says the soldier. I wouldn't farm it if you paid me. Then surely the Poles will not defend it! Don't you believe it! It's garrisoned already. The problem is that the piece of land is too small for the likely dead to be buried there. What better illustration of the stupidity and futility of war!
The Latin tag at the head of this essay means 'It is sweet and proper to die for your country'. It was coined by a Roman poet called Horace who lived from 65 to 8 B.C. in an attempt to gee up troops about to go to war. But it was used by a Great War poet called Wilfred Owen as an ironic reflection on the truth of the war, which had been so ardently supported at the outset, with mothers being encouraged to send their sons off for slaughter. Owen's poem ends :
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 was killed one week before the war ended. As the bells rang out in his home town, his mother received the telegram.