by Robert Fisk, The Independent
Let them die now. Let the memorials gather grass and the commemorations be over. I wish all those dead men could lose their eternal youth beneath those ever-fresh graves, now that their natural lifespan has ticked past the final Zero Hour, and that the kind old sun would finally go down and spare them another morning, that they may now grow old as we grow old. Close down the annual production line of replacement gravestones. So at least we can get on with the business at hand.
For Little Belgium, Little Gaza. For Flanders poppies, Ukrainian sunflowers. It’s not difficult to imagine what “they” would have thought, the men we should – today – respect, love, remember, but finally leave in peace. For their Horatio Bottomley, we had Blair. For Woodrow Wilson, we have Obama; and Netanyahu, an Austrian Archduke facing a Serbian horde. For Gavrilo Princip, read Khaled Meshaal.
And then there’s Putin. Ah yes, Putin, a truly 1914-18 statesman, the only giant on the stage – which is part of our problem with him – who understands that war is a placebo upon which ambition feeds. And between the dead of the Great War and us – we post-nuclear, globalised, Googled folk – there lies that titanic tragedy whose hundredth anniversary we shall have to face in another quarter century from now. Must we really go through all this again?
We didn’t always worship the corpses. After Waterloo, the bones of the dead – Wellington’s Britons and Napoleon’s French and Blücher’s Prussians – were freighted back to Hull to use as fertiliser for England’s green and pleasant land, military mulch from the 1815 battlefields which also yielded fresh teeth to be reused as dentures for the living. Hence my old Great War soldier Dad used to refer to “Waterloo teeth”. Tears for the departed, but no sentiment for the dead.
Bill Fisk (born Birkenhead 1899, 2nd Lt, 12th Batt. Kings Liverpool Reg, Third Battle of the Somme 1918, died Maidstone 1992), grew tired of it all, threw away his poppy in disgust, refused to pay homage to dead comrades on 11 November.
My Dad survived, of course, and grew very old, and did so with a rage that became ever greater as his enemies – like the British empire he fought for – diminished in size. “Damned fools, the lot of them!” he would say of Haig and Foch, and then of the Appeasers and Hugh Gaitskell, and finally of drivers who overtook him too fast on the A20.
I persuaded the vicar to mention the Third Battle of the Somme in front of the two ancient friends I could find for Bill – before we cremated him courtesy of the borough council. His own Mum had given him a miniature iron Buddha to take to the trenches around Arras for good luck – why a Buddha, I have no idea – but it sits inside my safe deposit box today. I prefer to keep it locked up there lest it becomes too important for me.
READ MORE HERE:
