Today I could talk about what a lovely weekend I had and I did, it was lovely but today also marks 100 years since the declaration of war that marks the start of World War I. Tonight, to echo the words attributed to Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary on the 3 August 1914, when war seemed inevitable, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life”, the service at Westminster Abbey will put out all the candles except the lamp at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and at 11pm, the hour that war was declared that lamp will go out too.
Perhaps because I spent such a good weekend with my family and because the news seems to be all about conflict, all over the world but especially in Gaza, I find myself thinking about war and families and damage.
All week, I’ve been hearing Israeli spokesmen talk about the damage that the Hammas rockets to the Israelis, I’ve read about the impact that the rockets have on the psyche and how it contributes to the determination of the Israelis to put a stop to the rockets. What I haven’t heard or read is the opposite, I haven’t heard about the affect on the Palestinians of living in an area the size of the Isle of Wight, with 1.8 million other people. Unable to leave, unable to work, where access to water and everything else is controlled by an outside force that claims it will stop all of this if you will just behave and elect someone else, someone reasonable. I think of the damage that causes and I find myself agreeing with Paddy Ashdown.
I find myself being so thankful that war has never touched my life.
Then I think about my friend, Jo who worked in the Congo and told me stories of people our age who don’t know how to dance without a gun in their hands. Jo is in Nigeria now and the last time I heard about a bombing in Abuja it was quite near where she lives. I think about Jo’s partner, Lazare out in Cote d’Ivoire for his second stint as a UN peacekeeper. I think about my trip to Cote d’Ivoire and how I felt later when I heard that about the bombing happening right next door to were I’d stayed. I think about my friend Kathy who spend time in Bosnia, telling me about her friends and their nervousness around loud bangs, about my friend from the EBRD that didn’t talk about the war in the former Yugoslavia but told me about her parents antique mirror that survived a siege but not stompy upstairs neighbours and how she cried when that mirror broke. I think about Ben and Laura in Tel Aviv for the wedding of one of Laura’s best friends, just as the Israeli shelling of Gaza began. I begin to realise that war has touched my life but luckily for me, it’s hasn’t had an impact on it. Not any of the wars that have happened while I’ve been alive anyway.
Zhou Enlai’s famous quote about the impact of the French Revolution, that “It’s too early to say” has been debunked, but debunked or not, he was probably right. If I look I see the impact of both World War’s I and II, on the world and it’s government, on what is happening in the Middle East (there’s been a lot of talk about Sykes–Picot recently), in what is happening in the Ukraine. I also see it in my family. This morning, Ma, who in retirement does a lot of reading, has been re-reading the Lyn MacDonald books on WWI, said that she didn’t understand how a whole generation of men, having lived through that war, came back and picked up civilian lives. I think about my great-grandfather who I never met but from all accounts, wasn’t a very nice man. I wonder, though, was he a different person in August 1914, when he was called up (he was in the reserves) and left his pregnant wife to go to war? Was his terrible relationship with my Grandad because he was a horrible man, because of what happened to him during 4 years in the trenches? I don’t know. What about the ‘surplus’ women, who in a time when being married what what you should aspire to, knew that they never would and had to find a new way of living and surviving. I wonder if my great grandfather’s second wife was one of those women, did they love one another or did she need a home and he need someone to look after a house and 3 children? I don’t know the answers to these stories but I know that my family was formed in the answers to them.
My generation was raised by the baby boomers, the children of the WWII veterans and civilians who in turn were raised by the veterans and civilians of WWI. My parents grew up in a world totally changed by war, and their parents did too. Not just the World Wars either, my dad’s parents were Irish and alive during the Irish Civil War and that must have had an impact on them too. How did they do it? What was normal for them? How did normal change because of the war?
I can tell you the odd story about my family and it’s participation in war. I can tell the story of my Grandad telling the man he found in his mother’s bedroom that he was “going to tell his Dad” only to be told that the man was his dad. I can tell you something about my Grandad’s friendship with a Belgian man that he met during the war and the yearly visits my Grandad made to Belgium when I was a kid. I can tell you that my Grandad introduced his sister to her future husband because they served in the same regiment but that I didn’t know that until after all three of them were dead. I can tell you that my grandmother had a fiance called Sam and a brother called Billy, who were both killed.
I can show you my Grandad’s Territorial Efficiency Medal which you got for a minimum of 12 years service in the Territorial Army with war service counting double and I know that he had at least two others but I don’t know where they are. What I can’t tell you is what he did, because he didn’t like to talk about it. I can’t tell you if he was a different person after the war but I think he probably was.
I can tell you he was a loving and kind grandfather but not a great father. Today we’ll remember the dead and that’s important. We should also remember the survivors, the men damaged physically and emotionally, the families shattered, the people bombed and devastated.
We should remember that promise, that it would be a war to end all wars. It wasn’t and the damage that tricked down my family from 100 years ago, starts anew in the hearts and minds of the families in Afganistan, in Iraq, in Syria and in Gaza. In the families of servicemen and women. Maybe if we really want to honour the memory of the dead of World War I, we should work to make sure that it doesn’t happen to anyone else. Instead of thanking military personnel for their service we should strive to build a world where no-one has to perform that kind of service.
