Lest we forget…

Philip Roddis

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Shakespeare – Henry V, Act IV, scene iii

Today marks the hundred and third anniversary of the ending of World War One. That wasn’t its name at the time though. Since it had been billed as “the war to end all wars”, those dictating the terms of the Armistice – signed at 05:15 on 11/11/1918 in the Rethondes Clearing of France’s Compiègne Forest to take effect at 11 am – were already calling it the Great War. But as we know, a Greater War Yet would break out not twenty-one years later.

Forty million people, only half of them in uniform, “gave” their lives in WW1. Its horrors – those of Flanders the most vividly conveyed, though there were other theatres – have been related in countless tomes. On the fiction front, may I recommend Sebastian Falks’s Birdsong?

But “the war to end all wars” was not the only lie. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had promised those who made it back “a land fit for heroes”. (Only the most ferocious had been redirected to Russia, to join the elite killers of thirteen other nations fighting alongside White Cossacks to crush the Red Threat to God and King.)

Instead they returned to lock-out and lay-off. Some, criminal elements from the slums of the north east, signed up with the Black & Tans, sent to terrorise an Ireland yearning for freedom after centuries of British occupation.

My point being that Henry’s imagined words to an English force outnumbered by five to one at Agincourt – and Lloyd George’s to men returning traumatised if not broken beyond repair from carnage now industrialised – form part of a wider pattern.

The wars of those who rule powerful states are always justified in the name of high ideals, and always prosecuted for baser reasons. From this deeper truth, lies – that the veterans of Henry’s land and glory grab would forever be honoured … that the survivors of the first global imperialist war for profits would know lifelong prosperity – follow as night on day.

I won’t be wearing a red poppy this year. I haven’t for decades. You might catch me with a white one, if I get lucky. They aren’t easy to find. I’ve twice visited Beeston Methodist Church, having been told this is the only place for miles around selling them – and twice failed to gain entry.

(Let no man call me, approaching Year Ten of my own epic war with Sheffield Hallam – in which another significant ruling in my favour was handed down just yesterday* – a quitter. No, and no woman either. You see if I’m not at that church door tomorrow and tomorrow for my little white emblem of defiance!)

Meanwhile, in three days’ time, my country’s Establishment – from fourth estate to Westminster Abbey – will lead the annual orgy of sentimentalised hypocrisy we call Remembrance Sunday.

As they do so the bombs will continue to rain on impoverished, brown-skinned men, women and children in Yemen. Each bomb will chalk up a profit for those with shares in Britain’s high-tech and highly lucrative death sectors.

I can’t run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
Leonard Cohen

Elsewhere, in the South China Sea, those stationed on the warships of Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA – probably not France, recently stiffed on that nuclear subs deal – will stand on deck in sombre silence as the mandatory pieties are intoned. Then they’ll go back to patrolling the Taiwan Strait in the name of Standing Up To Beijing Bullying.

(If you don’t deem that provocative, and recklessly so, you might for a second imagine Chinese and Russian warships, some of them nuclear armed, doing similar in the Gulf of Mexico.)

So for me it’s a white poppy or none. But let me leave you with one who, though no soldier, has seen more war than many an enlisted man. Or woman. Here’s John Pilger, eleven months ago – that number keeps coming up – on the subject.

Philip Roddis is an author and photographer, you can read more of his work at his blog Steel City Scribblings