Oh dear. I think we can already
see how this one is going to play out: mud, futility of war, lions led
by donkeys, a bit of poetry, a nod to the nurses and the munitions girls
and a solemn conclusion that it must ‘never be allowed to happen
again’.
As we approach the
centenary of the Great War, we must strenuously avoid acknowledging that
it actually achieved anything, let alone that we were vaguely on the
side of right. For that would commit two sins.
First, it might upset the Germans. Second, it might suggest that there was actually a point to all that slaughter.
And that would never do.
Thus does
Robert Hardman start his non-PC World War I article in the Daly Mail.
‘There is an intent in government not
to upset the Germans.’ So says a senior source on the Government’s
centenary advisory committee, talking to the Sunday Times.
As usual, then, the villains will be those blimpish British generals and the hard-faced arms manufacturers.
Certainly,
when I called yesterday, the Department of Culture (supervising the
£50 million anniversary) was happy to confirm that the main focus of
next year’s centenary is to be remembrance.
As for history? Well that seems to be secondary. But let no one mention the V word.
Indeed, you can scan the official blurb about the centenary and the word ‘victory’ is barely mentioned.
No one ‘won’ this war, is the subliminal message. It just stopped because everyone had had enough.
Little wonder some military historians on the committee are hopping.
‘For
much of Europe, including Britain in 1918, Germany was a militarist and
imperialist regime which had to be defeated and from that point of
view, the victory is a serious victory,’ says Brigadier Sir Hew
Strachan, Oxford University’s Chichele Professor of War History.
If
the centenary is simply going to reassert the usual message that it was
just a colossal waste of human life, he says, then it would be
‘sterile, a waste of both effort and resources’.
Now, every child is taught,
rightly, about the carnage on the Western Front. And the passage of time
has done nothing to diminish our gratitude and respect for those who
died. Indeed, visitor numbers to Great War cemeteries and Remembrance
Sunday events are on the increase.
… When it comes to the deployment of
poison gas, of attacks on civilian shipping, of genocide on disobliging
colonies and of general brutish expansionist aggression, it seems that
the official line will be: ‘We were all guilty’.
Well,
at the risk of sounding like Basil Fawlty — or the boy baffled by the
Emperor’s new clothes, let me pose a quick thought: who started it?
This is not about gloating. It’s not about jingoism.
It’s about asking whether this epochal loss of life was completely devoid of cause and purpose.
… Everyone is terrified of being called ‘triumphalist’ or, worse still, ‘jingoistic’.
… for Heaven’s sake, let us not have a re-run of New Labour’s pathetic
2005 attempts to mark the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a
‘blue fleet’ and a ‘red fleet’ — so as to avoid offending the French.
The French — who refuse to acknowledge Trafalgar as much of a battle anyway — thought the whole thing hilarious.
Moulding
the Great War to suit contemporary sympathies is not just a case of
historical inaccuracy. It is setting a dangerous precedent.
For
once you start allowing everyone on all sides to be winners, losers and
victims as they see fit, then they will make the most of it.
Just look at the way Argentina is rewriting the Falklands saga to suggest that Britain was the imperialist bad guy all along.
We
might scoff and point to the 1982 invasion of the islands by a fascist
junta. But Argentina’s victim narrative is taking root across South
America.
Who knows? Give it long enough and we may find that we actually lost the Great War after all.
