George Orwell, the most celebrated former tenant of this column, got it right in “England, Your England” about militarism and the English. We’re just not very good at it. Whereas other nations – most other nations, as it happens – make a fetish of their armed forces, our emotions are mixed, mingling pride, ingratitude, sentimentality and a certain level of embarrassment.
Despite our extraordinarily bellicose history, since medieval times we’ve only tolerated one military dictator, in the person of Oliver Cromwell, even though there have been any number of candidates for the post – all the way from Marlborough to the madmen who wanted to stage a coup against Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in the late 1960s.
This is all rather odd, given our status as all-time top warmongers. Over many centuries, we fought each other (at the Battle of Towton on Palm Sunday 1461, the number of dead at the end of the day equalled roughly 1 per cent of the country’s entire population, and the River Ouse ran red with blood through York for a month). We also fought our neighbours and eventually conquered, and then held through military subjugation, a quarter of the land surface of the Earth. And yet, apart from school children once upon a time parroting the dates of battles, or the preponderance of eligible, marriageable, but apparently non-combatant army officers in the novels of Jane Austen, ours is not a particularly militarised culture.
In England you’d never witness the kinds of scenes I saw, aged 16, in Toledo the year Franco died, of jackbooted cadets from the Guardia Civil’s Staff College outside town pushing respectable citizens from their tables in cafes in the main square. In fact, the closest you get to anything like that is round midnight in garrison towns on Saturday nights, before the military police turn up with the billy clubs and marshal the drunks back to barracks.
Of course, there’s a healthy dose of English hypocrisy in all of this. Rudyard Kipling, too often dismissed as merely the jingoistic laureate of the British Empire, caught it perfectly with the lines “It’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that an’ ‘Chuck ’im out, the brute!’/ But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country!’ when the guns begin to shoot”. Nor should we forget the last verse of “The Young British Soldier”: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains/And the women come out to cut up what remains/Jest roll on your rifle and blow out your brains/An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier…”
Which might lead you to conclude that nothing much changes, whether it’s the perpetual lot of the poor bloody infantry, the harsh but enduring realities of geopolitics or the eternal capacity of civilian politicians to get young and, if non-commissioned, usually poor men to do their fighting and dying for them.
However, you also might choose to reflect on the timelessness of the poignancy and the pathos; that our failure to embrace militarism as much as we might – and as much as a powerful cabal of generals and journalists might want us to – arises, albeit inconsistently and with typical muddle-headedness, from our grief and our sense of shame trumping all those baser emotions triggered by a good parade.
The grief we feel at the death of the scantily-equipped teenagers recently killed in Afghanistan is different from that we might have felt on hearing of the death last weekend of Harry Patch, more than six times their age and the last surviving serving soldier from the Great War.
But it’s also, in many ways, identical. Patch, merely through his longevity, came to embody all the ordinary soldiers of that war, particularly the million who, unlike him, were dead by the time he was 18. True, these days the shame and the grief kick in quicker, and just dozens of dead over a week can now fuel thoughts about the futility of the whole enterprise.
In Harry Patch’s war, the generals and the journalists could easily accommodate 66,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme without complaining about the equipment or thinking that maybe, just maybe, they should call it a day.
And maybe it was that degree of steady callousness – although it’s always a mystery whether our ruling elite are motivated by malice or idiocy, or both – which inspired Prince Charles to describe Harry Patch, a conscript who railed in great age about the pointlessness of the whole war, as the last representative of “our noblest generation”.
How nobility manifests itself in industrial carnage is anyone’s guess, although I imagine Prince Charles, happily embedded in the gilded heart of the military-monarchical complex, thinks he means vague and vaguely uplifting things such as sacrifice, honour and patriotism – those words which, along with human corpses, compose militarism at its most mawkish.
Although I can’t stop myself from thinking there’s a higher nobility, whether 90 years ago or last week, in following George Bernard Shaw’s notorious advice written in 1914: that the troops should probably shoot their officers and go home.
