A slightly more cheering take on World War I
I’m not a historian, not an expert on World War I, so maybe it’s just that I’ve overlooked it. But it seems to me that there was something missing from last night’s first episode of the BBC’s Great War extravaganza – something, in fact, that’s been missing from all the moving reportage of the horror, terror and bloodshed that started a hundred years ago.
And I’m not about to start a Michael Gove style patriotic rant.
Some years ago, when I was researching my biography of the 19th Century Arabian explorer Charles Doughty (God’s Fugitive, published by HarperCollins) I came across a deeply moving memorial in a Suffolk churchyard. It was in the village of Theberton, where Doughty had been brought up, and what made it different was that it was erected in memory of the crew of a German Zeppelin that had been shot down.
It’s the Biblical inscription that has stayed with me. “Who art thou that judgeth another man’s servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth.”
Minutes before the Zeppelin was shot down, these men would have been dropping bombs on the countrymen of these Suffolk villagers – maybe even on the village itself. And yet the villagers not only gave them a decent burial, they had a memorial carved to remind succeeding generations that those who fight on the other side are soldiers too. That “the enemy”, in fact, is more than just the enemy.
Though I admire Doughty immensely as an explorer and a writer – oh, buy the bloody book if you want to know why – it has to be said that he bought into the officially-sponsored blind jingoism of the day with enthusiasm. One particularly revolting play that he wrote has smiling mothers joyfully throwing their babies on the fire as sacrifices to Holy Britannia. There were lots more like him, handing out white feathers and bullying boys into going out to die.
No doubt there are other memorials hidden away around the country like the one in Theberton, similarly bearing witness to the decency and humanity of the people who put them up – the ordinary working people by and large, the ones who did most of the fighting and the dying. Certainly in the churchyard at Wareham in Dorset, the graves of those who died in the Second World War lie side by side, Allied and German fighting men together in death as they never could be in life.
Is it overly sentimental to suggest that, for all the fear, for all the official hatred, for all the bloodcurdling stories of atrocities, there was and probably still is an undercurrent of humanity and decency among ordinary people, who see behind the flag-waving and the government propaganda?
Well, maybe, but it’s a slightly more cheering thought about a bleak and depressing subject.
