Men who march away

BangaloreMirror: Men who march away

by Eunice de Souza
Every war is an irony because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends

One thinks of the First World War (1914-18) as far away and long ago, so it was somewhat disconcerting to read, a few weeks ago, about the death, at 110, of the last known combatant, Claude Stanley Choules. (A woman called Florence Green who was 110 in February, and served in the Royal Air Force canteens, is the only person left from that time).

He joined the British Royal Navy when he was 14, and was present at some of the decisive events of that time: the surrender of the German fleet at the Firth of Forth in 1918, the scuttling of the German fleet by the Germans themselves in 1919 when, despite the terms of the Armistice signed in November 1918, they found themselves interned in Scapa Flow which was not neutral territory.

Interestingly, though Choules served in both World Wars, and continued in service even after he migrated to Australia, he, like the British poets of the time, was an ardent pacifist, did not like to talk about the wars, and refused to take part in any memorial services. He did, however, publish his autobiography when he was 108.

Paul Fussell writes, in The Great War and Modern Memory, “Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two people, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot… The Great War was more ironic than any before or since… It reversed The Idea of Progress… which had dominated the public consciousness for a century.”

The poet Wilfred Owen pointed to a poignant irony in his poem Strange Meeting. The soldier speaking in the poem thinks he recognizes someone in the vast underworld his spirit now inhabits. The other certainly recognizes him. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” he says. The idea is that it is not the young men on opposing sides who are enemies. War is the enemy, and the politicians who wage it for their own selfish reasons.

In Siegfried Sassoon’s poems, Religion, in the form of an Archbishop, commends those going out to fight the “Anti-Christ,” and Majors and Generals who give faulty orders who talk of a jolly good show and then “toddle off, to die safely home in bed.” Think of General Haig who ordered eleven divisions of British soldiers to climb out of their trenches and start walking forward. “Of the 120,000 who attacked,” Fussell says, “60,000 were killed or wounded on this one day.” Haig was elevated to the rank of Field Marshal.

British trenches in Flanders and Picardy, we are told, were dug where the water-table was the highest and the annual rainfall the most copious. Fussell quotes from a letter which Wilfred Owen wrote to his family, “In two and a half miles of trench which I waded yesterday there was not one inch of dry ground. The soldiers were plagued by lice, and by rats that were “big and black, with wet, muddy hair.” Ultimately, Fussell says, there was no defence against the water but humour. A soldier noted in his diary, “Water knee deep and up to the waist in places. Rumours of being relieved by the Grand Fleet.”

After such experiences, few used the words “Glory” and ‘Honour’ without irony. Romantic words depicting war began to disappear. The blood of young men is no longer what Rupert Brooke called it, “the red/Sweet wine of youth.” Especially at the beginning of the War, it was a different world, with different values, so there is no reason to condemn Brooke as a patriotic romantic, or a jingoist for saying, in his most famous lines, “If I should die, think only this of me/that there is some corner of a foreign field/is forever England.”