COMMEMORATING WORLD WAR ONE IN MONOCHROME : DIARY NOTES: AUGUST 6TH 2014

Commemorating World War One in Monochrome


It is only two days since the start of events commemorating the start of World War One and I am already beginning to feel somewhat ‘war weary.’ As a passionate amateur historian it is not that I fail to recognise the significance of the centenary, few could fail to understand that. No, it is that I am becoming increasingly tired, indeed frustrated and irritated, by the ‘monochrome’ way in which the events of a hundred years ago are being both reported and commemorated. It is as if the black and white footage in which the period is recorded is being replicated in the way it is being remembered. A just war fought for “British Values,” to paraphrase the Prime Minister.
Well possibly, although one would have to state clearly what precisely those values were/are. Would those values be democracy? Tell that to the Indians, West Indians and Africans who fought and died in their thousands on all fronts, - whilst the Germans had a much wider franchise. Perhaps those values are standing up to bullies, defending the rights of small countries? This might have produced a hollow laugh from the Boers or any number of small African Kingdoms.   Free speech and liberalism perhaps? The suffragettes who had been force fed in prison and the hundreds of men imprisoned for conscientious objection to the war could have bust a gut over that one.
Wartime Propaganda. How much has
the narrative really changed. 

My point here is not to make a political point, but to highlight the lack of nuance and the continued parading of the ‘guilty Germans’ narrative, - a narrative I now believe to have been comprehensively demolished by the likes of the historians such as Christopher Clark and Sean McMeekin.*
 The war was a catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions, with consequences still being felt to this day. Great Britain with its mixed messages and dithering during the July Crisis of 1914 bears some responsibility for this war; though to now watch media coverage in this country you would be hard to find any acknowledgement of this.
Put another way there was a moral case for going to war[1] on August 4th 1914, but things should never have got to that stage and Great Britain bore some of the responsibility that they had. A little humility and admission of this failure would not have gone amiss at some of the commemorative events. Instead we had smug self-satisfaction, most in-elegantly personified by the Prime Minister remarks.
Where are the tales of the young German boys from villages and towns across Germany being sent to their slaughter, or the Russian peasants propelled into Germany, badly led, badly equipped and with no idea of what it was they were supposed to be fighting for? Where are the portraits of the Czechs, Croats and Poles, conscripted into a struggle not their own? Or the Italians clinging to near vertical cliffs as they fought over small provinces of the Austro Hungarian Empire? In short where is the presentation of this immense tragedy outside of the prism of the ‘this sceptre’d Isle’ version of history?

No Gutter too Grubby



In a small footnote to the events taking place on Monday an obscene attempt was made by a grubby little band of political apparatchiks in the Tory party, – the so called ‘kill Mill’ unit – to use the event to try and discredit the Labour leader Ed Miliband. Miliband was set up, unlike the Prime Minister he was not given time to personalise the message on his commemorative wreath. This was used against him. No gutter too grubby then. In response I reproduce a poem that I composed a couple of years back when a similar disgusting ‘controversy’ sought to exploit the dead for political purposes.  
‘David Cameron has called the ban on England's footballers wearing poppies on their kit "outrageous".’ BBC News 09/11/11

Mr Cameron’s in a froth
And the Sun is seething hot
And they curse the foreign crowd
Who say the Poppy’s not allowed.

The dead don’t care,
The dead don’t care.

The Radio pundit can’t believe it
Who can possibly conceive it?
No Englishman can hide
From this blow to English pride.

The dead don’t care,
The dead don’t care.

So we summon up our Shakespeare
Stand our ground and make it clear
That our courageous footballers
Will wear the poppy here.

The dead don’t care,
The dead don’t care.


*See ‘The Sleepwalkers’ penguin books 2014 and McMeekin’s ‘The Russian Origins of the First World War’ Harvard Press 2013, respectively.  

[1] And also a strong moral case for staying out, though the German invasion of Belgium and the subsequent war crimes that they committed there made this case much harder to be heard. 

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