We Shall Remember Them.

I was watching a documentary about Pathe News which included war footage from British ships in the Mediterranean. My Father served on minesweepers, mostly in the Med, and as I watched the British ships being bombed by the Luftwaffe I realised that I knew virtually nothing about my Father’s war. He told me he hated dive-bombers, all I knew of his arctic convoy experience was, “When they issued us with woolen underwear I knew we weren’t going to the Med.” and I knew he failed to get into the Fleet Air Arm because he turned up to his flying test still tipsy from the night before. As I watched the old newsreel footage I realised that he just did not talk about the war, I don’t know why, but I suppose like many others he found it an experience of which he preferred not to be reminded.

I am of that generation born just after the war whose culture and society has largely moulded by the wars of the first half of the century and – coming from an East India trading family – the Empire they defended. Perhaps there is a glory in war, but it also leaves its scars not only in those who survived but in the society they bequeathed to their children. I was brought up in Yorkshire where whole towns lost a generation of young men in the Great War, they joined the army together, fought together and died together and their loved ones mourned together and grew old without them. In my youth I knew people who had fought in the Great War, one – my neighbour downstairs – was killed at Paschendale, not killed entirely, but his health was taken from him. Three days after a gas attack he was driving supplies to the front in a field tractor when it began to rain, the rain released the gas trapped in the soil and so he lived as an invalid for the next half century, his lungs burnt by the mustard gas. The scars of war are slow to heal.

We sometimes forget that there are no single casualties in war but every soldier killed or maimed or psychologically scarred shares his or her scars with a family, parents, spouse, children, all of whose lives are changed forever. I sometimes feel that politicians find war too convenient as an instrument of policy, and I have nothing but contempt for politicians like Tony Blair and George Bush senior who are happy to send other people’s children to their deaths while keeping their own sons safe at home (or possibly in the National Guard). I am saddened every time the news reports further casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan, I regret the death toll on both sides particularly collateral damage. “Collateral Damage” translates roughly as dead women and children killed by military carelessness. I am appalled that in this day and age we still so readily turn to violence to meet our foreign policy goals.

Armistice Day will soon be upon us. Although I am a pacifist I have bought a poppy, I may have contempt for the politicians who order wars, and I regret that so many young men and women have felt it necessary to take up arms and go to war. Why have I bought a poppy? Because however much I regret their going to war, I am proud that they went. I’m just ashamed that we have not yet managed to find a way to ensure they never have to go again.