The trouble with Armistice Day…

November 8, 2018

If I had my way I suppose I would make November 11 an annual national day of mourning. Failing to have everyone think the way I do about its significance and carry the act of remembrance on a daily basis, I would settle for that 24 hours of reflection.

My problem, however, would appear to be in that word ‘reflection’. This is the first time in many years I haven’t been required to write a colour piece on Remembrance Sunday tributes, and the last couple of years my views brought some criticism from local newspaper readers.

I can now write this without constraints, though I would imagine not without condemnation from some quarters,

One of my comments that drew anger was when I said that every politician bowing their head in tribute on Remembrance Sunday, should also be bowing their head in shame. That together with questioning the human sacrifice made was too much for some readers, and I was firmly put in my place and told I was disrespecting the fallen. What was pointed out to me is that those who died in the 1914-18 war were honouring our treaty with Belgium; Britain had shown it would stand by its word and our lads were proud to heed the call to arms because of that.

And there is where the divide opens up. My respect for the fallen, those who continue to fall and those yet to fall grows greater by the day, as does my anger.

As a schoolboy World War One was simple. The Germans, who were bad, invaded Europe, and the brave British lads took up arms and stopped them, at a horrendous cost. Where they lay on those foreign battle fields, poppies sprang up… and we remember them.

Fifty-odd years on and that picture is a great deal more complicated, and becomes increasingly so the more I read, learn or discover. Most of us couldn’t name our allies… or our ‘enemies’, never mind the battlefields across the globe where they met.

Or what they were fighting for.

There was an online discussion quite recently amongst sub-editors about events leading up to the guns falling silent at 11am on November 11, 1918.

“I wish they had told my grandad”, I flippantly, and inappropriately, remarked. The reason behind this was while exploring my family tree on the Polish side I learned my grandfather had been wounded in 1919 as fighting on what was the Eastern Front continued into 1920 and beyond. This doesn’t count as part of ‘The Great War’ as the sides re-aligned. So, the “war to end wars” wasn’t even valid for a single second.

Although an over-simplistic example, it is possible my grandad was one day trying to kill someone and the next was sharing a trench with him as both of them were now part of a politically-decreed ‘White Army’ at war with the ‘Red Army’ of the Bolsheviks, some of its men having been on grandfather’s side a short time before.

Complicated eh? And quite bizarre, representing how armies were moved around as if on some board game.

So what has all this to do with Remembrance Sunday? Well, because the phrase we’d use in 72pt on those newspaper picture spreads of the wreath-laying would be ‘Lest we forget’. The tens of thousands who died after Armistice aren’t just forgotten, they aren’t even known about.

The other view I subscribed to as a schoolboy was that our lads were “lions led by donkeys”. This, of course, was not the case though standing at Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s simple grave at Dryburgh Abbey, Melrose, this summer, it remained impossible to understand how anyone could ever command troops in such a high-powered war of attrition, an arithmetical strategy based on last man standing, or, to put it crudely, who had most cannon fodder.

I’ve been editing the serialisation of the biography of Angus Macmillan, the so-called ‘Hero of Buzancy’. The interviews with Macmillan, later a Church of Scotland minister, reveal the personal restraint of that time. Trench warfare is dealt with matter-of-factly, there is no detail of carnage, no gory descriptions and yet, in that considered prose, there have been paragraphs that have reduced me to tears.

I have no embarrassment over this, just respect, pride and gratitude for our servicemen, as well as the nagging doubt as to whether my courage would have been as great as that which was required.

But nowhere does Macmillan recount the tales of those around him determined to honour the signatures on that treaty with Belgium.

And that’s my trouble with Armistice Day.

World War One was the first conflict where slaughter was continuous and on an industrial scale; where Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s butcherous ‘victory’ at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 was a one-sided vision of what would come, but on a daily basis.

This was a war about empires – crumbling empires, evolving empires, existing empires. A war about power, wealth, control, and lines on maps. It was about expansion, nationalism, racism, capitalism, imperialism, exploitation and regime change. It was a war shaped by politicians and the privileged perched on their thrones.

It was a war in an era when the masses obeyed, if not entirely trusted, their masters; when those masses could create massive fortunes for the few, and increase the strings manipulating the puppets in power. Soldiers don’t declare war, their rulers do and their reasons aren’t always honourable or honest.

This week Allan Crow, editor of the Fife Free Press, wrote a very poignant piece on the letters sent from the front line to families, telling them of a loved one’s death in action.

Yet, for me, the story that probably captures the mood of that era, is one that I came upon in the Fife Free Press a few years ago, and it is an entirely different one. It recounts how a group of Kirkcaldy friends went to sign up. One teenager, because of a medical condition, wasn’t accepted. While his pals celebrated the start of their great adventure, he returned home to the house he shared with his mother on the High Street. She went out to the shops and when she came back she found that her son had hanged himself in the kitchen.

His name won’t be on any memorial, but he was also a casualty.

And, of course, when those wreaths are laid on Sunday, most of these memorials were erected by public subscription. In the main, communities and the local town council honoured their dead, these were not a government-backed tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Yesterday I saw an old postcard on a Facebook page of the St Monans memorial after its unveiling. It was taken by a celebrated local photographer, William Easton. Look closely at the picture and you will see the names of his two sons among the village’s dead.

The Fife Free Press also provided me with another insight I found shocking, this, though, passed without comment in 1916. As the casualty list from the Somme mounted, the practicalities of bereavement needed to be considered. Wives and mothers couldn’t afford a new black outfit so adverts were carried in the local newspapers offering a dyeing service. Pragmatism can be profitable.

Today I look at our politicians with their incorrectly-worn poppies and wonder just what has been learned from the wars and all those millions of deaths.

Is the fact that you’re not putting boots on the ground make it permissible to support putting missiles in the air? Do cash and contracts make it permissible to ignore an ally’s barbarism?

From poison gas in the streets to cluster bombs in the playgrounds, the decisions on death are made around polished tables and carry the echo of Stalin’s words: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

Remembrance Day to me means remembering those who, with trust, dignity, honour and courage, made the ultimate sacrifice for freedom and justice; who gave their lives to protect the innocent, the weak and the vulnerable.

They are the people’s heroes, and they should never be politicians’ pawns.