The worst of human failures
David Lockyer reflects on the changing symbolism of the red poppy
‘Support our Heroes’ the poster, emblazoned with the poppy logo, declared. On it there was a photo of a gun-carrying soldier in battle fatigues, striding manfully. How different, I reflected, to the earlier Remembrance Day parades that I recall, at which those who really had cause to remember collected in the cold and damp of dull November mornings to truly spend the silence remembering: those they had known; the horrors they had seen; the deaths too immediate and violent to bear; the tortured wounds of those who only half survived. For them remembrance was real. They knew war as a place of remorseless carnage that made no distinction between the brave and the rest.
When the wreaths were laid they were laid in grief, grief for all those sons and lovers destroyed, for the fathers who never came home, for the comrades and friends who suffered and died. It was the mourning for the dead: it was the knowing of the darkness of war.
Now those who truly remember are fewer each year and, in place of remembrance, I see a pageant emerging. It has become a ritual performance, invoking a pride in the warriors of now and of then in their deeds of destruction and death. I am worried that we are blinding ourselves to the tragedy of war and to the truth of it as the worst of human failures.
The soldier as hero is an icon that we should fear.
I wrote this on Armistice Day 2013. The shift in meaning has continued since then, shifting from collective grief and remembrance towards celebration and lionisation; associating the current military and its operations with the sacrifices and losses of the past; encouraging the viewing of the military as heroes, regardless of where they are deployed or for what purposes. A subtle nudging of our critical faculties: to question what they are doing is to question their heroism – they are risking their lives for Britain – ask no more, question no more, think no more. Framing the military as ‘heroes’ stops us thinking beyond the label.
I fear we heard much the same when any dared question the use of our military to coerce recalcitrant populations throughout the length and breadth of our once extensive empire. ‘Our brave soldiers’ defending Britain by wreaking havoc and violence on the reluctant subjects of empire were portrayed as heroes, defending Britain and its honour.
The death of two British service personnel in Afghanistan announced on Monday 12 October reveals that we still have some 500 military personnel engaged there. We have also learned that, in spite of parliament ruling out the deployment of British forces in Syria, we have RAF personnel flying missions there by being ‘embedded’ with other forces. We also learn of British drone strikes – over 200 so far this year according to Drone Wars UK – in Iraq and Syria. (Can we regard drone strike operators as heroes, or do we view them as office workers with unusual jobs?) Are we witnessing the normalisation of war? Making it just part of the routine operation of government and no more exceptional than the collecting of rubbish.
I worry about the effect on the young of this shift in meaning from the collective expression of grief and loss to lionising the military. ForcesWatch are concerned about the embedding of military values in civilian society and I think the shift in the symbolism of the poppies reflects this process. It is a process that means that the war dead are no longer viewed as victims of war but as heroes, as icons of manliness, as those who sacrificed their lives; but those who served in the two world wars knew there was little heroism involved, but masses of suffering – you did your bit and prayed to survive.
On 9 October The Independent reported on their website that George Evans, a survivor of one of the worst battles in Normandy in 1944, where rifle companies reported that seventy per cent of casualties were sustained, has, according to the organiser from the local Royal British Legion, ‘offended many people’ and that ‘most people were horrified’ when he read his anti-war poem at last year’s Remembrance Day Service. So, this year he will be banned from reading it or any similar digression from their agreed script. His poem The Lesson read:
I remember my friends and my enemies too
We all did our duties for our countries
We all obeyed our orders
Then we murdered each other
Isn’t war stupid?
George Evans is reported as saying: ‘I still don’t know who I offended, or what I said to offend them. I have no intention of upsetting anybody. I’m a pacifist – and pacifism isn’t supposed to upset people.’
The young need to hear George Evans’ words and need to see through the hero images if we are to really honour those that died.
When we are encouraged to stand in silence at eleven o’clock on the eleventh, we should also remember those millions who died at the hands of our military in so many parts of the world, for only when we have that real honesty about what our ‘heroes’ have done can we say that we have truly learned from their deaths.
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