'…young men of every nation are simply used as pawns in the "games" played by our elected leaders…' Photo: Till Westermayer / flickr CC.
The games people play
Bill Bingham reflects on the time he spent in the army
Degerndorf is a lovely little German village surrounded by majestic mountains, beautiful rivers and sparkling lakes, and is set amongst picturesque farmland. It is also the location of a barracks built in the mid-1930s for the German army.
The military barracks at Degerndorf was later to play a significant part in my life as a national serviceman but, at the time of its construction, I was in that mysterious place of human wonderment and not yet born. I was not, as it were, ‘under construction’ myself. It seems it was not yet my ‘time’ or indeed my ‘season’, as the Book of Ecclesiastes puts it (Rabbinic tradition tells us King Solomon wrote this particular work).
‘No Mean City’
My mother, in 1934, was a fourteen-year-old girl playing in the back streets of a very socially deprived area of Glasgow. The young man who was destined to be my father then saw himself as a young and tough citizen of ‘No Mean City’.
The term ‘teenager’ had not yet been invented and both of these young folk experienced nothing of the high-tech lifestyle we each enjoy today. There was no wonderful National Health Service in those days and many babies and young children died in infancy in the slums of ‘The second city of the Empire.’
My parents were lucky to survive the crumbling and decaying tenements of the old city, and my father toiled in this environment until the consequences of one of Hitler’s bombs eventually ended his life in 1955. He was forty-two years of age and had been severely wounded in 1942 whilst serving with the RAF. I entered the world in 1938, a year before the world went insane for the second time in a century.
The Degerndorf garrison I was destined to visit was originally the barracks of an elite regiment of the German Wehrmacht. Elizabeth II invited me to join her own military organisation when I reached the age of seventeen, and, in all honesty, I quite looked forward to the experience.
Degerndorf
I saw it as something of an adventure at the time, but I was, of course, just a child and understood very little of the ramifications of serving in the armed forces.
After some training in England, I was posted to Degerndorf, knowing nothing of the history of the garrison. The unusual thing about the barracks then was that the post-war German army, which was known as the Bundeswehr, shared it.
The camp was divided into two individual sections with a wire mesh fence separating both groups of young servicemen. My duties in the army involved me in a shift rota; so I often had time to watch the new recruits of the Bundeswehr arriving with their little cases, just as I had done in Catterick Camp a year or so earlier.
I observed these young lads going through a similar type of basic training that I had undergone previously in Yorkshire.
Two world wars
We were soldiers, and all that made us different was our language and the colour of our uniforms. We were each being taught to kill people. Although we occasionally met in the local tavern in the village, we usually stuck to our own group, and viewed each other with some suspicion.
We were not encouraged to ‘fraternise’ with the new soldiers of Germany, as the two world wars were still fresh in the minds of military men. I often look back to those days when I was a teenage soldier and think of the young Germans who had been recruited into the army just like me.
We each assumed we were doing what our countries asked of us; we were ‘doing our duty’, as had our fathers before us; fortunately for us, however, providence saw to it that we each missed the ‘Great Wars’. These were the wars that had destroyed generations of our predecessors. Now, in 1957, we were being trained to face the young men of the Soviet Union.
Live by the sword…
Time changes everything, and it changes nothing. In his book The Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, published in 1964, the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne tells us that we (as human beings) ‘play games’. He defines a ‘game’ as a series of ‘transactions’ in which somebody ‘wins’ and somebody ‘loses’. During these psychological games, people get hurt.
In his book Eric Berne makes it very clear that the most deadly game we play is called ‘war’, which is one of the reasons I left the Kirk thirty years ago to join the Religious Society of Friends. ‘Live by the sword and you will perish by the sword’ – how clearly did the young Jewish rabbi of Nazareth understand the follies of men and of ‘the games people play’.
We have only recently stopped throwing rocks at one another (a deadly enough ‘game’ in itself) in favour of using much more sophisticated implements of death that are now quite capable of destroying the planet entirely.
We are brethren
Our political leaders are, in my view, threatening to annihilate everything that supports and sustains life on Earth. Some of them apparently think that ‘God is with us in our endeavours!’ Such a claim was, of course, once embossed on the belt buckles of the Kaiser’s army in the first world war.
The truth is that young men of every nation are simply used as pawns in the ‘games’ played by our elected leaders. Some of us may scorn the Bible, but in Genesis 13:8 we read: ‘Let there be no strife between me and thee… for we are kinsmen’ (ESV).
Violence has no part to play in civilised societies, and most certainly no part to play in the contemplative life.
