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Armistice Remembered

First Published in BusNet on 11 November 2010

In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row. These lines by John McCrae, helped establish the poppy as an icon of remembrance of the Great War of 1914-1918.

Few horrors can match the intense, interminable misery of this grinding war of attrition – fought in wet trenches, in fields of mud so thick they bogged down hundreds of tanks and drowned thousands of soldiers. The Trench line changed very little between 1914 and 1917. In the Battle of Passchendaele, the Allies captured 8km of territory at a cost of 140,000 combat deaths, only to concede it again 5 months later.

Few blunders can rival those of the ‘bite and hold attacks’ intended to capture so-called critical terrain. Dissociated by distance and by class, Generals in London and Paris ordered infantrymen ‘over the top’ to clear the barbed wire and forge through the mud under a shower of bullets from the three lines of German trenches. The Battle of the Somme resulted in 57,470 casualties on the first day alone, most of these in the first hour.

The scoreboard of nauseating statistics helps explain how Europe had to come to terms with the sudden loss of their best and their brightest. Towns and villages would never recover. Young girls would never find another love. Nations would not rebuild the wealth squandered on warfare.

More than 9 million combatants were killed before the cessation of hostilities on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. In the aftermath, disillusioned populations sought the misguided comfort of extreme policies (nationalism, fascism, or communism – each the cause of further misery) while some enlightened leaders cooperated to form the League of Nations and pave the way for the United Nations as insurance against further wars.

Historians give engaging accounts of how the war was sparked by imperialistic foreign policies, and how the world’s great powers of the day assembled in two opposing alliances, the Allies and the Central Powers. The rhetoric still persists that this was ‘La guerre pour la civilisation’ or ‘The war to end all wars’. Perhaps through honour or patriotism, we feel compelled to uphold the respectability of this conflict. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country).

Once a war begins, it runs by itself. The most honourable moment in any war is the moment in which we are still able to avoid it. Our world needs fewer Field Marshal Haig’s or Joffre’s and more Mandela’s and Obama’s. Building bridges beats digging trenches.

Perhaps, over time, we should be allowed to airbrush the whizzbangs and shrapnel from our collective consciousness. The enduring symbol is the poppy – a Warhol-like pop art image, naive and surreal amidst the dizzying geometry and scale of the fields of white crosses. Today, possibly even as you read this, a profound act of remembrance is taking place – dignitaries lay wreathes at the Cenotaph in London (or closer to us at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Vevey), and millions worldwide observe two minutes of silence to commemorate the sacrifice of fallen soldiers.

But if we are truly respectful of their sacrifice, we would do better to offer our silence for past wars, and to speak out against proposed ones.