By John Knox
As I get older, Remembrance Sunday becomes sadder and more and more moving. I see soldiers falling to the ground like autumn leaves from the cherry tree outside my kitchen window. The gold and red and yellow and khaki of their uniforms lie in patterns on the dark green grass. Why do we do this thing called “war”? And why is it always a mess?
We do it because, in the end, we have to. Because there is more to life than flesh and blood. And there is more to the spirit of Man than mere existence. There are certain standards below which we will not fall, whatever the cost may be.
We fought against Hitler because he was an evil man in charge of an evil empire which was murdering six million Jews. Could we have stopped him in any other way? Possibly, but we left it too late. I am always puzzled by these two thoughts: Why did the German people put up with Hitler and his Nazi regime? Why didn’t we send in the SAS to assassinate him?
My parents’ generation were magnificent in the way they endured the second world war, but why did they allow it to happen in the first place?
What is even more puzzling is why my grandparents’ generation allowed the first world war to happen. Was it a war over mere territory or was it – as the Americans believed – a war to end the unacceptable practice of aristocracy? A war to end wars?
The answer to these questions are the lessons for this season of remembrance. They are bitter questions, when you consider the sheer scale of the killing. In the first world war, the Allies lost five million soldiers, the Germans 3.5 million. Over 21 million were wounded.
In the second world war, Britain lost 264,000 soldiers and 92,000 civilians. Germany lost 3.5 million soldiers, 780,000 civilians. The Soviet Union lost 11 million soldiers and seven million civilians. Japan lost 1.3 million soldiers and 672,000 civilians. The USA lost 292,000 soldiers and 6,000 civilians. And these awful numbers are translated into human form when you see the names written on local war memorials in towns and cities across the country.
Not that wars are over. There have been over 130 wars since 1945. Britain has participated in 21 of them, not counting the war against terror in Northern Ireland. We are still losing soldiers in Afghanistan, 385 so far. “Their families have been told” is the all too obvious, but telling, phrase used in the newscasts almost every other day. This huge sacrifice, made by the dead and by the wounded who survive, deserves to be remembered. And honoured.
They are doing it for us. We sent them to Afghanistan to do the fighting on our behalf. We are not brave enough or strong or skilled enough to do it ourselves. And our weakness often turns to hypocrisy when we do not support the mission we have sent them on.
In the last vote in the House of Commons, in September 2010, MPs voted by a majority of 296 to stay on in Afghanistan. But many people outside the Commons have questioned our involvement there. The questions which should be asked of the doubters are: What would you do to stop the Taliban getting back into power in Afghanistan? Are you prepared to see a regime of terror back in charge in Kabul and watch the country fall back into medieval brutality?
Pacifists would say we should march unarmed against the guns, as Gandhi did against the police horses in South Africa or the students did in Tiananmen Square. Neither protest succeeded in toppling an evil regime. And, in any case, most of us do not have such courage. Some among the Arab Spring protesters did have such courage. But in Libya, at least, the revolution needed an armed uprising and the aid of NATO air forces to succeed in bringing down the Gaddafi regime.
Releasing the dogs of war should never be done lightly, of course, as we found out in Iraq. And there are supposed to be safeguards, lessons learned over the centuries. Is the war justified? Is it proportional to the evil you are trying to get rid of? Is the war “legal”, ie does it have international sanction? Does it have a good chance of success? Those safeguards have so far persuaded us out of wars against other evil regimes in Syria, Iran and North Korea.
In the case of Iraq, 78 per cent of Labour MPs thought those “just war” conditions had been met; 90 per cent of Conservatives thought so, too. Only the SNP and the Liberal Democrats voted against.
The difficulty those in the minority against a war find themselves in is that they have to honour the bravery of the soldiers while disapproving of their mission. This is not easy for those holding those opinions or for those in uniform. As I say, it can lead to doublespeak. It is one of the thorns of war. I suppose all we can do is be honest about it and act on the judgement of the majority.
One thing we can all do is to ensure that our 191,000 armed services personnel are properly treated, with good equipment and a good home for their families, despite the planned 8 per cent cut in the defence budget. Let us hope that the 1,800 troops being drawn back from Germany will be given decent accommodation in their new bases back home and that the air support engineers' regiment will be well housed at Kinloss.
In the words of the first world war poet John McCrae: “If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields.”
Armistice Day, this year on the eleventh of the eleventh of the eleventh, says a lot about the spirit of Man. While we wrestle with the intellectual questions of whether war is justified or not, we know deep down we are dealing with something dearly human, the balance between our personal lives and the life of our species.
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