Its October and, as the clocks go back in more ways than one, scarlet paper poppies begin to bloom on the lapels of MPs and TV presenters. So begins the annual ritual of Remembrance; using the blood of its victims to turn a warning about the human costs of war into a sanctification of preparing for another.
One of the most striking memorials to the outbreak of the First World War in 2014 was the “Blood swept lands and seas of red” installation at the Tower of London; which planted one ceramic poppy for every British and Empire fatality in the war. Estimates for how many of these there were vary. The installation used 888,246 poppies. The figure in Wikipedia is 887, 858. All the same, a lot of deaths. And the installation couldn’t help but numb and sorrow. Such an accumulation of individual losses made collective. Each individual poppy the colour of blood, and an echo of the scarlet of the state, as seen on phone and post boxes, London buses, the Brigade of Guards outside Buckingham Palace, and lost in it. Theirs had not been to reason why. And they had died.
On the Cenotaph in Whitehall, with an “unknown soldier” buried beneath, they are commemorated as “The Glorious Dead”; regardless of how they died or how inglorious it may have been.
Photo by Richard Croft. Creative Commons.
It is perhaps characteristic of a certain kind of British national narcissism that the only deaths commemorated were “ours”. Which underlines the limits of this sort of “Remembrance”. It becomes acelebration of victory sanctified by “sacrifice”. It tries to make it impossible to think past that sea of poppies to the losses suffered by other countries.
A commemoration of all the service personnel killed in the First World War would require a moat more than twenty times bigger, to register the 20 million or more of them killed. If you were to separate it out into national contingents, the French and Austrian sections would each be one and a half times the size of the British; that of Germany and Russia each more than twice as big. Having them all mixed up, in different colours perhaps, might underline their common humanity and the horrifying waste of it.
Civilian deaths in the First World War were a fraction of the military deaths, unlike the Second World War and most wars since. These are now running at about 67% of the total. Significantly more in Gaza. Commemorations that focus on WW1 tend to obscure that.
Civilian deaths from World War 3 would, of course, be total.
We are now in a period in which people who should know better are agitating for European NATO countries to prepare for a war with Russia by the end of the decade by doubling military expenditure (even though they already outspend them by 3.5 to 1) – a war that could not help but go nuclear – and it is a commonplace of US Foreign Policy thinking to envisage a war with China in the South China Sea – another war that could not help but go nuclear.
And, as Tom Lehrer once remarked, “if there are going to be any songs about World War 3, we’d better start writing them now”.
If we are foolish enough to allow our light headed and light minded leaders to make us collectively “pay undaunted the final sacrifice” in such insane adventures, age shall not weary us, nor the years condemn and at the going down of the sun and in the morning no one will be left to remember us.
Urban ramblings 