BY ROBERT FISK, THE INDEPENDENT

Why do we want to commemorate the centenary of the Great War? Because it marked the destruction of the “flower of English manhood”? An odd thought, since it also marked the crushing of the “flower” of French and German manhood. The war’s ultimate tragedy, of course, is that it led – quite directly – to the even more terrible Second World War. In other words, the 1914-1918 war was to no purpose. Its unparalleled suffering led the British and French to believe that they could never fight again; but for the Germans, their very failure to win convinced them they must have another war to prove that the Great War was not fought in vain.

Max Hastings has already told us that we were right to go to war in 1914. But that’s not the point. We wanted to go to war, much as we wanted to invade Afghanistan in 2001. Indeed, next year’s appearance of even greater numbers of that grotesque poppy on the lapels of MPs and television presenters – inspired by the equally pro-war poem by John McCrae – will be rather like supporting George Bush in his invasion of Iraq. “If ye break faith with us who died,” McCrae’s fallen soldiers tell the reader, “we shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields.” That was exactly Bush’s argument for continuing his war in Baghdad: if Americans withdrew from Iraq, he said, they would dishonour those who had already died.

The Great War was a strange war, in almost every way. Though it is now called the First World War, it was primarily a European and Middle-Eastern war. More than half of the Earth remained untouched, though far from unaffected. Australia and Canada and the US (a latecomer, as usual) remained safe, though their soldiers – like India’s – died in their tens of thousands in Mesopotamia (Iraq), Gallipoli and in France. Indian battalions were among the first to fight in Flanders and one of the first major naval engagements was fought off the Falklands, now of Thatcher fame. Who now remembers that long before Saddam, Allenby used gas in the Middle East, in a Sinai-Gaza battle against the Turks? Or that the Brits brought almost 100,000 Chinese workers to service the armies of the Western Front?

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