The Great War

'Tug of war', Jean Stead, Wednesday September 17th 1969.

        Edmund Blunden once painstakingly explained to me why he went on his regular pilgrimages to the Flanders battlefields - the effect on him when he saw the relics of old boots and helmets, as remote to most people now as Iron Age skulls; what he felt when he saw flowers growing over the ancient trenches. It was a phenomenon familiar to me. Blunden is a man of peace and I have known many others who have this odd combination of fear of another war and a compulsion to retread yard by yard their old battlegrounds. Some are even members of CND.
        It has nothing to do with the sort of jingoism that formed part of a television film on Arnhem last weekend: thousands, we were told, had died that others might live. As I remember it - I was very young at the time, though expertly informed - it was a massive failure of intelligence which caused the doomed men to parachute straight into the perfect trap set for them by the Germans.
        It is not that "noble war" stuff, but a curious ambivalence towards war shared by those who were in the worst battles. Perhaps it is because they thought they were seeing qualities of courage and fidelity displayed that could never be repeated in peacetime, because the necessary conditions would not be present.
      Yet they felt such horror at the waste of life, such premature consciousness of their own mortality, that they felt war was not worth it, for however high-seeming a principle. Siegfried Sassoon is probably the best example of this ambivalence? He was utterly involved in war, deriving all his greatest poetic inspiration from it, until he rejected it entirely.
      My childhood, in one way and another, was dominated completely by two wars. Looking back, it seems always to have been coloured by khaki and myself crying because people were going away. The stories I was told at my father's knee were unsuitable ones about Passchendaele and the Angel of Mons and by nine I was being reared on "Undertones of War", Sassoon, and Wagner. Later, the stories were about the dreadful defeat of Dunkirk because my father's regiment hadn't managed to bring its guns back with it.
       I realise that this is why when I once found a trench in the country, I flattened myself professionally against the bank and showed my small son how to look along the sight of a rifle and start shooting at the counter-attacking hordes. At least we didn't call them Germans.
       Yet the fear if war overshadows my family, as it did my parents, as no other calamity. I used to take the children as uncomprehending babies to Committee of 100 demonstrations. It has left them with a healthy fear of being bombed, which I share. But in spite of this, an artillery gun remains one of the homeliest objects in the world to me.
        A friend of mine is married to a poet who was in every bloody campaign of the last war, hated Monty and lived to be a militant pacifist. So struck was she by his tales of grisly death and poems about the dead hanging on barbed wire, that she has dug a large hole in her garden in the country and hidden in it quantities of corned beef and Marmite, in case they are ever attacked by the enemy. For his part, he went on a lone holiday for a tour of the Normandy battlefields.
          This is a dangerous ambivalence, more treacherous than ignorant jingoism. When schoolchildren were asked before the showing of the film of the Battle of Britain what they knew of it, they said nothing at all because they hadn't yet got to it in history. That is as it should be. And even so, it isn't worth more than a few paragraphs. There is little children can learn from it.
         The most peace-desiring of people, most of them ex-combatants, can be a threat to peace. War, they feel, is where all the playing with politics in fantasy-land stops and self-knowledge really begins. Perhaps they are right, but they should keep the secret to themselves.