The boys did win that war

Always it is the extreme youth of the First World War soldiers that I find most striking.  They were boys mostly.  It is important we remember them as they often had no children to remember them (they were children themselves).

Complex iconography in this stained glass window commemorating the end of the First World War.  But notice the two archangels - on the left proclaiming Peace, on the right proclaiming Victory.  The boys did win that war, whatever the current revisionists might tell you.

Paper arch

Amazing print on show at the British Museum of Durer's "paper arch".

The arch was never built.

The arch in Washington Square in New York was originally made of paper.

The Cenotaph in Whitehall was originally made of board.

Is it not possible to have a paper Victory Arch constructed in London for November 2018? 

Smithfield Market

Another view of Smithfield Market.  Italianate facade, with central arcade and very charming pepperpot towers at each end.  Kentish red brick and white Portland stone, designed by Sir Horace Jones 1866-67.

The First World War memorial along the Grand Avenue that goes through Smithfield Market.  I'm not sure how authentic the multi-coloured paint is.  The memorial was designed by G. Hawkings & Sons and unveiled in 1921 (or 1924?).  Note the figures representing Fame and Victory holding laurel wreaths.  When I worked nearby I used to walk along the Grand Avenue each lunchtime on my way to the Barbican library.  When I first saw this memorial I was so moved that I stopped and read each name (over two hundred of them).

The culture war Labour activists have been waging against the First World War commemorations

Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umuna points to this LabourList announcement of a speech by Dan Jarvis MP and calls it "important":  http://labourlist.org/2014/06/jarvis-to-call-on-labour-activists-to-take-part-in-wwi-commemorations/

And yet the two quotes from the speech seem entirely unremarkable.

What is Mr Jarvis going to say this evening that is so remarkable?

Is he going to call an end to the culture war Labour activists have been waging against the First World War commemorations (perhaps knowing how badly this is being received in the country)?

Will the speech be filmed and posted on YouTube so that we can all have a look?
 

Old-fashioned

Above:  the wide river, the clouds blustered by a mild wind, the ferry long gone so that the villages just look at each other with little contact now.

Above:  inside the little Victorian church the atmosphere is timeless and eternal, the chancel panelled like a country house, the altar frontal white to mark the fifty days of Easter ("white for the light, joy and purity of Christ, Mary and the saints").

Above:  when the village school closed it became a private house, and the school Great War memorial was moved into the church.  It is in an art nouveau style, old-fashioned for the 1920s but perhaps that was appropriate for such an out of the way place.  Carved wooden surround with a painted plaque - laurel wreaths for victory and a mourning mother.

Gallipoli

The Gallipoli Association has received funding to commemorate the centenary of the campaign (which included one of my direct ancestors) in 2015:  http://www.1914.org/news/the-gallipoli-association-awarded-100000-for-a-centenary-project-highlighting-the-gallipoli-campaign/

Michael Morpurgo was entirely unconvincing in his appearance on Newsnight

Michael Morpurgo was entirely unconvincing in his appearance on Newsnight yesterday.

As someone born in 1943 he seemed representative of those who came to adulthood in the 1960s - lefty, pacifist, internationalist.  This was the generation who could not live up to the achievements of their fathers and grandfathers who won victory for British civilisation in two global conflicts.  Frustrated by their oedipal inadequacy they have since the mid-1960s reviled that civilisation and its achievements and attempted to smash up its institutions (a process that is still on-going).

Therefore it is ironic that Mr Morpurgo is also the spiritual successor of those "...men who look as if they had done very well out of the war", ransacking the tragedy of the Great War to produce a sales-orientated story of trite sentimentality and then sitting on a national news and current affairs programme in his cardigan-covered plumpness to tell us that the Germans need commemorating as well and that the anniversaries of the next four years should be covered in a sickly internationalist jam where everything is mixed together and boiled up and given a "we were all guilty" label.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27033633

The window needs to be transferred

Can the Department of Culture Media and Sport please tell us what their policy is towards the stained glass windows of St Stephen's church in Hyde, Greater Manchester?

In particular the 1920 window by Edward Hartwell commemorating Second Lieutenant Allan Hudson who died at Gallipoli in the First World War.

The church has been closed for some while, and is about to be converted into sixteen "luxury" flats.

It would be a disgrace if the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign in 2015 should see the window illuminating the bathroom ablutions of some Mancunian yuppie.

The window needs to be transferred to a museum - perhaps the Imperial War Museum North.


There is a picture of Second Lieutenant Hudson (third photo down) - he was only aged 20:  http://ashtonpals.webs.com/1915page4.htm

Untouched

The lambs graze with their mothers.  The buds on the trees silently and slowly open.  Even the rain clouds look beautiful.

Fanciful theory, published by the County History Society, that a small Romano-British garrison survived at this hill-top village after the departure of the legions in 410.  The most ancient building is the church, no sign of any re-used Roman masonry.  Friendly dog.

At the back of the church is what can only be described as a shrine to the village dead of the Great War.

Hand-illuminated list of ten men from the village who died.  An enlarged portrait of one of the fallen.  An idealised illustration of the moment of death and heavenly committal.

This corner looks as if it has been untouched for nearly a hundred years.

The growing bibliography

Interesting review of the growing bibliography associated with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War:  http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21599798-first-world-war-was-defining-event-20th-century-thousands-books-have

The author (who does not seem to be identified on the webpage) tells us that "When the war ended suddenly, after the extraordinary “100 days” offensive that culminated in the armistice of November 1918, it was greeted as victory."  It was indubitably a great British victory.  And that victory should be celebrated (celebrated with all due solemnity, but celebrated nonetheless) in November 2018 - preparations need to start now to plan this victory celebration on a scale commensurate with sacrifice that was made.

Also I was interested in the mention of William Philpott's Bloody Victory which describes how the Somme became the turning point of the war - more attention needs to be paid to the significance of this battle.

Clear and unambiguous

Listening to an item on the Today programme on the proposed new garden city planned for Ebbsfleet, it occurred to me that here was a perfect untouched venue to commemorate the British victory in the First World War on a scale that would do justice to the tremendous achievement of the millions of British combatants and in time for the victory anniversary in 2018.

Not some wishy-washy "we were all guilty" lets-pretend-it-was-all-multicultural sort of monument.

Nor something so abstract that it leaves most people baffled ("modernist" designs are completely inappropriate to Great War memorials).

I am thinking of something as clear and unambiguous as the Mamayev Kurgan memorial:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Motherland_Calls

And entirely paid for by private donations.

Marxist interpretation of the First World War by Seamus Milne in the Guardian

An almost textbook Marxist interpretation of the First World War by Seamus Milne in the Guardian:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/08/first-world-war-imperial-bloodbath-warning-noble-cause

It is mostly just hyperbole.

However Mr Milne is wrong to say:  "The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd" and "Britain and France then divvied up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Palestine to Cameroon, without a thought for small nations' rights".

The Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919 set up the League of Nations, which formalised international law.  The territories surrendered by Germany and Turkey were held in trust by the League of Nations and given to France and the United Kingdom as trusteeships to prepare for self-government.  If the Britain and France were just interested in a cynical land grab why would they bother to set up the League of Nations and go through the rigmarole of trusteeships?

It's a question Seamus Milne ignores.

1960s version of history

An odd piece on the Today programme this morning about the First World War.

It just repeated the 1960s peacenik view without any attempt to interrogate those views.

Of course all war is to be regretted.  Of course the loss of millions of young lives is a matter of great seriousness.  Of course political leaders must be held accountable for the decisions they take, including where necessary trial for war crimes (I'm thinking of Tony Blair and his Labour colleagues).

But it is intellectually bogus to extrapolate from those general ideas and say that the First World War was a pointless conflict, that the people who died were mere dupes and drones, that the British victory in that conflict was not a magnificent achievement worthy of commemoration and indeed celebration.

We need to recognise that in the 1960s there was a cultural coup that effectively hi-jacked interpretation of the Great War and propagated the now all too familiar view that it was an imperialist war that exploited the working classes.  This 1960s version of history was a product of its time and needs to be junked.  It had nothing to do with the serious examination of history but was a leftist peacenik subversion that interpreted "peace" as supine passivity to the ideological expansionism of the Soviet Union and saw the whole of history as the inevitable progress of humanity towards communism (an idea all the more laughable now that communism has utterly failed and is dead and gone).

And can the media please stop quoting Harry Patch as some kind of distillation of the armed forces who served in the First World War.  Old codgers at the end of their lives are not the most reliable witnesses of what happened eighty years previously.  And in any case, he was just one person among many millions.

It is offensive in the extreme for descendants of people who died in the Great War to hear Harry Patch saying the deaths were "not worth it".  Not worth it compared to what?  When you think of the bovine lives that most of us (including myself) live, can we really say that our existence is so superior to those who died in that conflict? 

Compared to the idealism, courage, and self-sacrifice those young people displayed, are we really saying that the mindless consumerism, cynicism, and over-indulgence of life in 2014 is "worth" more? 

And in any case, do we not owe everything we now enjoy to the victory achieved in 1918? 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03nv0m9

The general election will take place during the centenary of the Gallipoli landings

Ostensibly most of the left, when asked, will say that British involvement in the First World War consisted of "lions led by donkeys".

When scrutinised more carefully however you soon learn that the lefties really think it was a case of "donkeys led by donkeys".

The next four years are not going to be easy for Labour with this attitude in the ascendant.

Duncan Weldon (TUC Senior Economist) says facetiously on Twitter:  "The general election will take place during the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. I now expect this to dominate the debates."

Indeed, it might.

For what it is worth, my own direct ancestor was a stoker on a battleship during the Gallipoli landings.  As a stoker he may have been the lowest of the low, but he was not a donkey.  Duncan Weldon may not care about his reputation, but I do.

The Great War poses a threat to Labour

It was inevitable that Labour would have to take a position on the commemoration of the First World War, although Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt comes across as rather intemperate:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/04/first-world-war-michael-gove-left-bashing-history?CMP=twt_gu

The Great War poses a threat to Labour in that left-wing pacifism and internationalism cannot be integrated into the narrative (not without a lot of clunky and unconvincing revisions - eg Tristram Hunt's assertion in the article that pre-1914 Germany was "fascist", an ideology that did not come into being until the post-war period).

For the Conservatives on the other hand all they have to do is allow the centennial anniversaries to unfold one by one and waves of national pride will wash through the country, culminating in the victory anniversary in 2018.

Conservatives simply have to allow the narrative to be told.

Socialists need to revise the narrative, so that the Blackadder spin is what the public sees.  This is going to be a tough challenge.  Also one that risks branding them as unpatriotic.

Recently I read Tell England by Ernest Raymond.  Published in 1922, it became very popular and has been continuously in print ever since.  One cannot imagine an account of the war that is more at variance to the "lions led by donkeys" theme.

The novel is strongly autobiographical, and is obviously a memorial in written form of his friendship with two companions (all of them aged in their early twenties) and the deaths of his two friends at Gallipoli.  Often sentimental, the story is half a school story and half a war story.  Sometimes the author goes off on incomprehensible excursions, as if he were more concerned with giving a complete record of his friends, rather than maintaining narrative drive. 

The book contains many passages that are homoerotic, and the story can be viewed as an unconsummated love story.  Homoeroticism was of course one of the major thematic experiences of the Great War, and the whole conflict can be seen as an episode of barely repressed sexual longing (perhaps that was why so many combatants did not want to talk about it when they returned to civilian life?).  This sexual aspect may well be one of the national "discoveries" of the next four years.

"...there are three things old England has learnt to make:  ships, and poetry, and boys."

"Just look around... isn't our Tommy the most lovable creature in the world".

"And your friendship is a more beautiful whole, as things are.  Had there been no war, you'd have left school and gone your different roads, till each lost trace of the other.  It's always the same.  But, as it is, the war has held you in a deepening intimacy till the end.  It's perfect."

The Promenade de Verdun

A government press release refers to the sacred soil of the First World War battlefields:  https://www.gov.uk/government/news/flanders-soil-arrives-in-britain

My thoughts went back to the summer when I walked around Purley Garden Estate and saw the Promenade de Verdun which also incorporates sacred soil from a Great War battlefield.

Above:  the Promenade de Verdun was designed by William Webb when he laid out the estate and was intended as a tribute to the fallen French soldiers who died at the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

Above:  a sign talks about the sacred earth that was brought from France and mixed with British soil as a symbolic foundation for the memorial.

Above:  the avenue of Lombardy poplars stretched off into the distance, the afternoon silent, the summer air fragrant.

Above:  at the end of the promenade was the memorial - a simple obelisk.  Made of granite, so it will endure for centuries.  The sense of peace at this spot was almost overwhelming.

Nineteen Twenty-One by Adam Thorpe

Have just finished reading Nineteen Twenty-One by Adam Thorpe.

The narrator is a weedy intellectual Oxbridge student called up right at the end of the Great War, the war ending before he is actually posted to the trenches.  Too cowardly to reveal himself as a lefty pacifist, he is injured during basic training, and thus unintentionally acquires the status of a war combatant.  Discharged from the army he retires to a broken down cottage in the Chilterns to write what he hopes will be the defining war novel.

Except that the drafts he produces are rubbish, inauthentic and pretentious.

Realising he needs inspiration he goes on an organised tour of the battlefields, which in 1921 still have much of the detritus of war in place.  Thousands of others are also visiting the former trenches, looking for the graves of family killed in the war.  The narrator falls pathetically in love with a young woman looking for the grave of her brother, and has a sordid affair with a middle-aged German woman looking for the grave of her son.

Throughout the novel characters appear who illustrate some aspect of the First World War - a farm labourer whose genitals have gone (and drops his trousers for a fee); a Chinese worker in France who shows him the "hand of General Haig" (in a deep dugout a skeletal hand that protrudes from the mud wall); a vast ossuary filled with unknown bones and open to the public who line up, dressed in black mourning clothes, to visit what might possibly be the remains of someone they once loved.

"We've still got it in the bone, the war.  It went too deep.  It's still in there, right in there, inside.  Right in the marrow.  Even those who are getting born, now, it's in them too."

Charles Robert Watkins

Intriguing memorial in burnished brass to a soldier who died in the Great War.

At the top we see the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet together with a laurel wreath.

Below these symbols is the text:
 
In Loving Memory of Charles Robert Watkins, born Sept 29th 1891, killed in action on the Belgian Frontier Feb 3rd 1915.  He, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time.

How should we decode this commemorative tablet?

The Greek letters represent Alpha and Omega, a symbol for the eternity of God.  Within this eternity is placed a laurel wreath, symbolic of victory.  The brass plaque is saying that the victorious death of Charles Watkins will be hallowed for all time.

The Belgian frontier in February 1915 was where the German Schlieffen Plan finally failed when confronted by the French army and the British Expeditionary Force – the date indicates that Charles Watkins was not a conscript but a volunteer.

The line of scripture (“He, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time”) is from the Apocrypha, a non-doctrinal book of the Bible.  It means that we should not judge the value of a person’s life by how long they have lived, but by how much virtue they have possessed.  Charles Watkins was so virtuous (so the memorial tells us) that he should be considered perfect.

There is no indication who commissioned this memorial but one supposes it was his parents (it could have been a wife, but a wife would presumably have chosen other qualities than virtuous perfection; it could have been a comrade, but the “perfection” descriptor seems too intimate for that).

“Perfection” is of course an ambiguous definition to make of a young man of 23.

Moral perfection?  Physical perfection?  Perfectly loyal?  Perfectly courageous?  Perfect as a fighter?  Perfect as a (perhaps sublimated) lover?

We don’t know – although perhaps he was all of these things.

There is also a hint of bitterness in the choice of religious text.

As the casualties mounted into hundreds of thousands there was a feeling that the best of the population was being slaughtered and that as a result the country would fall into the hands of the second-rate or third-rate (the cowards, the war profiteers, the pacifists, the disloyal, the communists, the foreign aliens, the likers of atonal music, the writers of defeatist poetry, the daubers of abstract paintings etc).

“He, being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time” comes from the so-called Wisdom of Solomon.

The parents of Charles Watkins were obviously deeply religious to have chosen such an obscure quotation from the scriptures.  They did not choose one of the more traditional epitaphs.  Instead they went for a line from an eschatological sequence.

The section it is taken from goes on to say: “Thus the righteous that is dead shall condemn the ungodly who are living”.

And then it delivers a terrible warning about what is going to happen to the seditious elements of society:  “God shall laugh them to scorn; and they shall hereafter be a vile carcass, and a reproach among the dead for evermore. For He shall rend them and cast them down headlong, that they shall be speechless; and He shall shake them from the foundation; and they shall be utterly laid waste and be in sorrow, and their memorial shall perish.”

As an implicit curse against the filthy forces of modernism this seems fairly strong.

And as a curse it came to nothing, for as we know, the seditious elements of society have more or less triumphed in every sphere.

Randall Stevenson's Literature and the Great War 1914 - 1918.

Catching up on my reading, I have finally got round to the TLS for 8th November.

It contains a review by Kate McLoughlin of Randall Stevenson's Literature and the Great War 1914 - 1918.

Many interesting ideas.

For instance, the poetry of the Great War is unreliable because it was mainly written by the officer class and so does not represent the feelings of the ordinary combatants (however much it might be approved of by modern lefty intellectuals).

"Combat gnosticism" is the "secret knowledge possessed only by an initiated elite".

Modernism did not result directly from the experiences of the Great War.  Indeed it could not have done since most of the proponents of modernism were not combatants (James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf etc).  Rather it was a revolution that used the dislocation of the Great War to launch a cultural coup.

Armistice Day

Today is Armistice Day.

In the office we have just had the two-minute silence.

Writing on 7th November Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future (sic), drew attention to poppy wearing among BME communities in the United Kingdom:  http://www.britishfuture.org/articles/news/million-british-muslims-reject-extremists-on-poppy-wearing/

"Remembrance has become increasingly inclusive" said Mr Katwala, drawing attention to BME "shared participation in its rituals".

"62 per cent of ethnic minorities wear the poppy" research by the latest Ethnic Minority British Election Survey (EMBES) is quoted as saying.

Taken at face value this is very heartening to assimilationists.  What more convincing proof of assimilation of the immigrant communities could be desired than the fact that BME people are commemorating the British participation in the Great War (with all that that implies).  "Mission accomplished" as George W Bush might say.

Except that it doesn't quite ring true.

Is British Future saying that if I went today (Armistice Day) to Leicester or Brixton or Bury Park in Luton I would see sixty per cent of the BME people there wearing poppies?

Not very likely is it.  I might be wrong and doing them an injustice.  But it's not very likely that 60% of the BME population in Southall and similar areas are wearing poppies today and stood respectfully silent at 11 o'clock (did any mosques have displays of poppies in the way that Anglican churches had displays - if so perhaps we could see some photographs?).

Extrapolating from the EMBES research, Mr Katwala tells us that the BME displays of poppy wearing matches "the ethnic composition of the armies which fought the First World War".  This is a disingenuous argument.  British Future have produced no evidence that the BME people who fought on the Western Front were the great grandparents of the BME people in the United Kingdom today, and common sense tells us that they probably are not (the recruitment of the Indian Army pre-1947 tended to be specific).

Just as "Muslim terrorism" cannot be blamed on the Muslim community now resident in the United Kingdom, so Muslim heroism on the Western Front in the Great War cannot be claimed by the Muslim community now resident in the United Kingdom.  The terrorists were responsible for the terrorism and the heroes were responsible for the heroism.  To push either blame or virtue onto the wider Muslim community is bogus.