The end of the year is approaching and we tend to look at an overview of the year gone by and see if there’s a possibility of better times in the year ahead.
WW I finally ended in this year of 2009 for Britain. Last year in November, Harry Patch and two other World War I veterans, Henry Allingham and William Stone, aged 108, attended the annual Armistice Day ceremony in London. But Stone died Jan. 10 this year and Allingham aged 113 on July 18. Patch followed exactly one week later aged 111.
This year's Armistice Day service with the Queen at the Cenotaph was the first with no veterans of the Great War since 1919. Now it is a matter of history only, not of memory.
Think about that for a moment. In a couple of hundred years time who is going to remember you or anything that you did or thought or said? The most dense symbol in the world is the hyphen between two dates on a tombstone or memorial. That little dash represents the whole of the life and dreams and accomplishments of the one who once used the body whose remains are under it. And that inscription is going the way of weather beaten, eroding mountains.
At the start of the World War I there were still living many veterans of the War between the States¸called the Civil War in the North. Now there are none. No memories, only history, which can be and has been rewritten by politicians for ever.
Since I am not likely ever to return to Britain, and 2009 is nearly over I thought to write a few words about this war in which both my mother and father were involved, and many of my teachers. This is the war that destroyed a complete generation of the best young men that England produced. The fit, strong and well educated people from Oxford and Cambridge went into the War bursting with patriotism. Those who were poets soon found out the reality and those who were officers had life expectancies of twenty minutes in some of the battles.
I remember being shown some old London newspapers dated November-December 1914. They were full sized papers, not tabloids. In some of them the lists of reported casualties extended for four or five pages in small type. From August to Christmas in the first year the British Army, known as the British Expeditionary Force, suffered more than 100,000 casualties. This war was obviously going to be different from any others.
Everybody who read the paper looking for names they knew were familiar with the maps of the area in Flanders, between Belgium and France called Ypres. It was the medieval centre of the Flanders wool trade, Ypres lies in the centre of a shallow saucer, with higher ground to the north.
The names of the ridges became known to every reader: Passchendaele ridge, Menin road ridge, and Messines ridge, all sites of horrendous battles. The area had been swampy marshland that had been turned into agricultural land by a series of irrigation canals, and thereby hangs the reason that every veteran of that conflict would always talk about the MUD, if they talked at all.
Ypres was entered by a German cavalry patrol on 13 October 1914, but the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) arrived the next day. Fighting died away somewhat at the end of November, with losses equal at around 100, 000 each, leaving a substantial Allied salient bulging out into German lines. Did you pass over those figures, about 100,000 losses on each side between mid October and the end of November. The constant shelling had smashed the irrigation works and the whole area became a swampy mess again with mud so deep that horses drowned in it.
The fighting in the Ypres area continued for four years with the armies lurching backwards and forwards, losing and regaining the ridges and yards of mud at the cost of thousands of lives because of the mud and the machine guns. The carnage around Passchendaele, the third battle of Ypres, has come to symbolize the battles of the First World War.
In terms of the dead, the Germans lost approximately 260,000 men, while the British Empire forces lost about 300,000. Some 90,000 British and Dominion bodies were never identified, and 42,000 never recovered. And the amount of land won from the Germans after three months of continuous fighting and at this cost in lives was five miles of shell torn mud, so deep that tanks sometimes just sank and their crews drowned. Over half a million men for five miles of mud. Work it out in deaths per foot. It’s just over twenty one men killed per foot. Some deal!
The last British surviving veteran of the battle of Passchendaele was the Private Harry Patch who died 25 July 2009.
In his honor, the band Radiohead released a single, its lyrics based on his own words: ‘I am the only one that got through The others died wherever they fell . . . Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves.’
That is a sentiment that a lot of people will agree with I’m sure. Our leaders always seem to be bickering in air conditioned buildings about the exact meaning of words while the men they sent to war, usually under false pretenses, are dying or being torn to pieces by bits of flying metal in deserts or on mountain sides.
Neither Patch, who was a combat soldier on the ground specializing in the use of the Lewis machine gun, nor Allingham who flew a spotter plane, talked about the war until they passed their 100th birthdays and suddenly realized that they were the last voices of the experience available. Then they gave interviews and each wrote a book. Their views of war were succinctly expressed. “War’s stupid,” said Allingham. “Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.” “ ’Tisn’t worth it,” said Patch, “War isn’t worth one life.”
Patch and his crew mates realized very early on that both they and the Germans had been compelled to get into the mess they were in and they made an agreement never to shoot to kill but only to wound. When he was billeted with a German couple after the Armistice he gave them the two precious oranges he received from his wife for Christmas. “We were all victims,” was his comment about that.
When Allingham was 110 he went to Germany to meet a German veteran, Robert Meier aged 109. Side by side they were taken to a war memorial where they laid a wreath and shook hands. At age 113 he became the oldest man in the world, as well as the oldest veteran.
Patch went to Germany aged 106 and met the veteran Charles Kuentz who was 107. They exchanged gifts, Somerset cider for Alsatian biscuits. They had both been at Passchendaele. Charles had been conscripted at the age of 19. Both of them had kept silent about the war until after they were 100. They went together to a German cemetery of 44,000 veterans and Patch laid a wreath. Then they sat in silence, thinking the same thing in different languages.
The total number of casualties in World War I, both military and civilian, was about 37 million: 16 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 6.8 million civilians. The Entente Powers (also known as the Allies) lost 5.7 million soldiers and the Central Powers about 4 million.
Since so many people in this country are proud to be bad at mathematics they are not likely to have any concept of 37 million. Here’s a picture that may help. There are 788,280 words in the King James version of the Holy Bible. So there are 37 millions words in 47 Bibles placed together.
Every word in those 47 Bibles represents someone killed or wounded by that war to end all war.
Since I am currently living in America which now has the only survivor of that War in the form of Frank Buckles aged 108, I shall mention the US figures too, though they were only involved in combat from 1917-1918. The total number of members in the services was 4,734,991. The total number of deaths in battle was 53,402 and that of non-mortal woundings was 204,002. (official figures, so precise)
Well, that was the war that my mother and father were in, at a young age. It was to be the war to end all war. Nobody who realized what ‘modern’ warfare was like could possibly start another one, was the naïve opinion. The problem is those who start a war they think they can win.
It’s interesting to me, at least, that a video game (Modern Warfare 2) made $310 million in North America and the UK in its first 24 hours. These types of war games are traditionally released on the week of Veteran's Day. In the first five days the game had generated $550 million. Doesn’t look like 50 million deaths in WWII or hundreds of thousands in the current never ending wars to produce peace have much effect on the popularity of war as a game.
In 1915 in America there was a best selling popular song. Here are the words:
Ten million soldiers to the war have gone,
Who may never return again.
Ten million mother's hearts must break
For the ones who died in vain.
Head bowed down in sorrow
In her lonely years,
I heard a mother murmur through her tears:
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to lay the sword and gun away.
There'd be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier."
What victory can cheer a mother's heart,
When she looks at her blighted home?
What victory can bring her back
All she cared to call her own?
Let each mother answer
In the years to be,
Remember that my boy belongs to me!
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier
To go fighting in some far-off foreign land.
He may get killed before he's any older
For a cause he'll never understand.
Why should he fight in some rich man's battle
While they stay home and while their time away?
Let those with most to lose
Fight each other if they choose;
For I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier!
Ed. Morton's Sensational Anti-War Song Hit,Words by Alfred Bryan, 1871-1958
Music by Al. Piantadosi, 1884-1955, Published 1915
Theodore Roosevelt’s retort to the popularity of the antiwar song was that it should be accompanied by the tune “I Didn’t Raise My Girl to Be a Mother.” He suggested that the place for women who opposed war was “in China—or by preference in a harem—and not in the United States.” Possibly he would have said the same thing for WWII in which 50 million died. (63 Bibles worth)
My own view is that only the woman of the world can do anything about the stupidity of male chauvinism where the only heroes are those in uniform, and there is absolutely unlimited money for war and a scarcity of it it for health care, education, the arts and music, infrastructure and so on. It’s the women who teach their sons to hate some ethnic group or religious group. They are the key to peace in the world. It will never come while men control the minds of those that the rich send to fight their battles. Remember the song from South Pacific…They have to be taught to hate. And the women are the only ones who can alter that.
Happy Christmas once again.
