1918 -- worth remembering?

November 11th 2018; a hundred years since the end of the First World War; not that this was the name given to that conflict by contemporaries any more than Henry V might have remarked ' This Hundred Years War  seems to have been going on for a long time ' or Richard III, about to meet his end at Bosworth Field, instead of offering his kingdom for a horse, might have declared the end of the Wars of the Roses. Soon after 1918 the bloodiest four years in European history, passed from being Woodrow Wilson's ' The war to end all wars ' to ' The Great War ' but does that mark the date as being especially significant in the development of our continent or was it just another milestone along the road of progress or perdition?

A profound question indeed; meanwhile so much remembering of these things is associated with churches and memorials in the shape of a cross, what has religion to tell us about the rights and wrongs of war? The picture is confusing. At first sight the Good Book states clearly: ' Thou shalt not kill '; ' Blessed are the peacemakers '; and ' Turn the other cheek '; but alongside these we find, in a piece that tells us for everything there is a season, that there is ' a time to kill '; as well as ' Greater love has no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friends ', invariably interpreted as a justification for whatever conflict happens to come along. Is it really possible to preach a message of peace one minute and the next be opening your hymn books to sing ' Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war; with the cross of Jesus going on before '. This is not to diminish in any way the respect we show for those who make sacrifices for the rest of us but a suggestion that we pause before bringing God into it.

Even the common poppy ain't what it used to be. Only few would question it as an appropriate symbol in support of those who gave their lives in a common cause and those who are still with us but in urgent need. But should newsreaders on television have to wear poppies as a matter of course or whole football teams be expected to express probably not very much by having the emblem added to their team kit? And are we at ease with a white poppy symbolising the importance of peace and now the purple poppy to remember animals which died in war? [ Many more horses than humans perished in four years on the Western Front ]. Perhaps the notion of obliging people to wear poppies isn't quite right, while we should applaud the proliferation of different colours of poppies if they signify that at least we care.

In any event we are approaching the end of four years of fairly intense remembrance and the British people have risen to this important commemoration with admirable balance and restraint. We have seen little by way of glorification or triumphalism but much that has been thoughtful, appreciative and dignified. We have perhaps been more Wilfred Owen ' Dulce et decorum est ', peeping behind the outward signs of self-gratification, rather than openly bullish sacrificial pride of Rupert Brooke's ' Soldier '.

To many people the best known poetry to come from that war are the two verses of  ' I vow to thee my country ', written by Cecil Spring Rice, a leading British diplomat at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a possibly very distant relation of Sir Cecil; my full name being Mark Christopher Spring-Rice Pyper; my father was Arthur Spring-Rice Pyper and his father Henry Spring-Rice Pyper. Our son is Robin Spring-Rice Pyper and his two exceptionally lovely daughters are Willow Spring Pyper and Clarrie Rice Pyper  --  so there you are and that's quite enough of that! I have a handsome beer tankard that belonged to Cecil, awarded to him surprisingly for canoe racing in the Balliol College Oxford regatta of 1879.

Cecil revised ' I vow to thee ' several times which moves from terrestrial patriotism in the first verse to the more spiritual and ethereal world of the second: ' But there's another country I've heard of long ago '. What is not generally known is that there was originally a middle verse, expunged before final publication as being too nationalistic.

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,
I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

This version was sung once in public and indeed on television but that's another story. For now we might just note that the dividing line between patriotism and nationalism is dangerously thinner than the merest wafer.

Many will prefer the more easily remembered soldiers' songs with their carefree, optimistic overtones. Influenced heavily by Victorian Music Hall traditions, even a hundred years later, many of us can hum ' It's a long way to Tipperary ' [ in search of my heart ]; ' Goodbyee ' [ containing the ironic phrase ' tickled to death to go ' ]; ' Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag [ with its invitation to ' smile ' ceaselessly ]. Perhaps they are more memorable than the philosophically romantic songs of World War II, performed for the troops rather than by them: ' Bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover ' and ' We'll meet again '. Eventually the people who mattered in that conflict made up for this with the tune of Colonel Bogey, immortalised by the film ' Bridge over the River Kwai '. There were various versions to which they marched; the most memorable being:

Hitler has only got one ball;
Goerring has one but very small;
Himler is very sim'ler
And Goebells has no balls at all!

Much more exciting for those of us growing up in the shadow of that war than a version, borrowing the tune for an advertisement for a night time drink in the early days of commercial television: Horlicks is good for runny nose .....

Enough digressing; we should return to what has been achieved in four years of remembrance. The answer is a great deal: a vast amount of historical and family interest has been aroused; we have read books [ I particularly enjoyed Wisden on the Great War ]; we have visited beautifully maintained war graves; we have pored over painstaking research [ I found the biographies produced by Winchester College deeply poignant ]. Our newly forged links with the past have been furthered by television programmes [ why did the BBC axe that excellent series ' The Crimson Field ' so suddenly? ] and we are marvelling at the lifelike presentation of Peter Jackson's new film ' They shall not grow old ' but why has he changed the sense of the original quotation, from Laurence Binyon's poem ' For the Fallen ', which more emphatically reads ' They shall grow not old '. At the end of it all we have a wealth of new information and, for a generation that has largely known only peace and prosperity, a real sense of the horror and futility of war.

We might pause to wonder why the average, ordinary person  [ restricting the question to the British ] chose to fight at all. The  working man still had a pretty torrid life at the start of the twentieth century; down the mine or in the factory life was mean, brutish and short. What difference would it make if those at the top of the pile were English or German? Of course the mass of young men eventually fought because they had no choice, they were obliged to do so but, even before conscription, many flocked to recruitment centres. After a long build up to war it was a matter of pride to fight and of shame not to do so. One suspects though that, in the final analysis, they were fighting not so much for King and country, Empire and Church, government and the bosses [ although they were often led inspirationally over the top by young members of more 'exalted' stock who had the shortest life expectancy of any in the trenches ].  They were fighting for their families and their friends and, more subliminally perhaps, for a range of values which they believed made them who they were. And are those values a hundred years later more clearly emblazoned on the hearts of Brexiteers or of Remainers for both would lay claim to them? Not an easy question and certainly not one for now.

But did it matter? Did the deaths of three quarters of a million British [ and countless wounded ] and the vastly larger numbers of allies and foes make any difference? Did that war advance the causes of humanity and civilisation? In the UK slow, halting progress was resumed but not with notable ease or success. The embryonic Labour Party became marginally less embryonic but it was not until 1945 that we had a proper, popular reforming labour government. We had a stab at sorting out Ireland but probably made matters worse and eighty years were to pass before a lasting [ hopefully ] peaceful solution was found. The pleas of the suffragettes were heard with a partial extension of the franchise, although many years were to pass [ some would claim at least a hundred ] before some of the deeply embedded issues of inequality were addressed.

On the greater world stage the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 at least tried to establish a world order body with the League of Nations but it foundered almost immediately. The allies humiliated Germany and tore the guts out of that country but failed to take the steps necessary to ensure that a phoenix did not arise from the ashes; a phoenix, as it turned out, much more powerful and pernicious than its predecessor. With hindsight 1918 can be seen as a barely significant semi-final for the next conflict twenty years later, a prologue to an even more global war which was to change the face of Europe and the  world for at least seventy years.

One can see the course of the history of the First World War through the titles of Shakespeare's plays. It started as Much Ado about Nothing; it was conducted venomously Measure for Measure against the background sometimes of A Comedy of Errors; in 1919 the allies signed off in a spirit of All's Well that Ends Well, with the German people saying As You Like It but this is what we're going to do. Or, put another way:

In '14 there was a Great War;
They hoped it meant peace evermore;
But after four years
Of blood, sweat and tears
To Hitler they opened the door.

And there we might leave it [ 'Enough, enough', I hear you call ] if it were not for an elephant lumbering around this particular room; that is the curse of anti-Semitism. I find this challenging as I have never known who is a Jew and who is not and I don't care. I am pretty sure we shouldn't talk about a ' Jewish problem ' as to me the problem seems to belong to other people rather than they. I don't understand why some feel envy, suspicion and hatred not just towards individual Jews but to all people of that culture and it is totally beyond my comprehension how anyone could persecute people, let alone try to exterminate a whole race, because of their ethnic background.

Conventional wisdom is right to tell us that anti-Semitism was central to Nazi beliefs and, after articulating their horrific and horrible sentiments with complete clarity, they created policies around those beliefs and established the machinery to implement those policies to the point of a complete and successful conclusion. It is important to recognise however that the seeds of that ' Final Solution ' had been well sown and caringly cultivated before and during 1918.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicated at the end of the First World War. For other leading participants in shaping the peace, swept along by a torrent of international competition, seismic conflict and a pressing aftermath, the Kaiser's fostering of anti-Semitism may have been understandably overlooked, while it has to be admitted that there were sympathisers lurking in every corner of Europe. From the mid 1880s he wrote about his ' Kampf ' as his writings become littered with, and dominated by, thoughts of ' racial purity '. At an early stage he wrote ' The Jews are the parasites of my Empire. The Jewish question is one of the greatest problems I have to deal with '. His abdication statement could not be clearer: ' The deepest, most disgusting shame, ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans have done to themselves. Egged on and misled by the tribes of Judah whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their thanks! Let no German ever forget this nor rest until the parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil. This poisonous mushroom on the German oak tree!

Pausing to note that Kaiser Bill's deployment of the exclamation mark is almost as frequent as Donald Trump's a hundred years later, one acknowledges immediately that it is a greater crime by far to act than to speak; to set up and implement the apparatus of genocide rather than just wish it would happen, but at the same time we should not be blind to the deeply rooted sentiments about the Jewish people in Germany in the early twentieth century. How valuable Hitler and his followers must have found such royal encouragement and endorsement.

If Britain was on the side of right [ which has not always been the case ] in the First World War, the country was fighting against national aggression, aggrandisement and expansion. Perhaps at another level we were making a stand for values such as tolerance, consideration for others, appreciation of difference and living in harmony, albeit then from a somewhat imperial point of view. If only these qualities had been applied with generosity and energy to the Jewish people in the aftermath of war, rather than the drifting acceptance that led grudgingly to the British Mandate for Palestine [ and all its problems ], the greatest of modern crimes and tragedies, the holocaust, might at least have been on a smaller scale. 1918 would then have been a thousand times more memorable.

In 1918 we grasped the poppy but not the nettle. Perhaps, for a defining year, we should look instead to what happened fifty years ago in 1968?

28th October 2018