We remember the wars of the last century and we hope that the challenges we now face can be met wisely and well.
A few weeks ago, on 1st of July, as people were arriving at Waterloo Railway station in London; they were stopped by an unusual sight. In the middle of the station stood a group of young soldiers dressed in the dull green battledress of a hundred years ago. The soldiers stood almost still. They said nothing. They stared out at the scene around them. People got out their phones to photograph the scene. When a woman tried to speak to one of the soldiers there was no reply. Instead he handed her a card. On it was written the name of a soldier, his regiment, age and these words: ‘Died at the Somme 1st July, 1916.’ It was an uncanny, unnerving spectacle.
All over Britain soldiers like these, wearing First World War uniforms, turned up unannounced in markets, streets, stations, on trains and in parks, sometimes marching in groups, sometimes alone, mingling with crowds, never saying a word. They just handed out cards, each with the name of a man, his age and regiment, all with these same words: ‘died at the Somme 1st July, 1916.’ Occasionally they would start to sing in a group. The words were simply these: ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’ It was a song popular with First World War troops that expressed the futility of the war they were fighting. The soldiers were in fact volunteers, each playing the ghost of a dead man, as part of a piece of street theatre to remember the centenary of the bloodiest day in British military history.
The Somme is a river in the North of France; its name comes from an ancient word meaning tranquillity, but its peaceful valley has now passed down into history as the site of one of dreadful campaigns in military history and a symbol of the horror of war. By July 1916 the war had been going on for nearly two years. It was being fought on a wide front, as far away as the coast of Turkey and the rivers of Iraq, but principally in Belgium and Northern France. Here the French and the British faced the German army in long lines of trenches. The battles had become a stalemate. Neither side had the military power to gain a large advantage. In the summer of 1916, the British, supported by and French, decided on a full scale attack in the Somme valley to break the German line.
On 1st July at 7.30 in the morning, at a signal given by the blowing of whistles, the troops climbed out of their trenches and started to advance on their enemy. They had been assured by their officers that they would be finding little resistance. For a week heavy artillery had bombarded the German positions so continuously that the sound of gunfire could be heard over the sea in England. It was firmly believed that nothing could have survived this attack, but the Germans had prepared for this and dug deep underground shelters.
As the British advanced over open ground, German machine gunners opened up, firing 500 rounds a minute. The result was carnage. On this one day, the British army suffered 20, 000 dead, 37, 000 wounded. The attacks continued by sides for four months. By the time it was over there had been a million casualties amongst the French, British and German forces, of whom about 300, 000 were dead. ‘Somme,’ wrote a German officer ‘The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.’
Photographs of these battle grounds show a devastated wasteland of shattered trees, bare earth and deep craters. It looked like a scene from the end of the world. The ground had been pulverized by so many shells that the mud was deep enough to drown a man. The rain of artillery on the battlefields was colossal – an estimated one ton of explosives was fired over the course of the war for every square metre of battlefield. A century later, the fields of Northern France and Belgium that formed the battlefields are still potentially lethal. Every year when farmers plough this land they turn up ‘the iron harvest’ – unexploded shells, bullets, pieces of barbed wire. It has been calculated that in one part of battlefields alone, the front near Ypres in Belgium, 300 million projectiles were fired that never exploded. These unexploded shells turned up by the plough are routinely stacked by the sides of the road ready for collection. The French bomb disposal unit destroys 900 tons of munitions a year in a task which is estimated to go on for 500 years. It is dangerous work. People are regularly blown up by artillery shells a hundred years old. To walk the battlefields of Northern France and Belgium is a sobering sight. Everywhere there are graveyards, some small some very large – row upon row of white gravestones, marking the final resting places of the young men of Europe.
The 1914-1918 war used to be known simply as ‘The Great War.’ It was considered to be ‘the war to end all wars’, so terrible that it would never be repeated. It killed 16 million people and scarred European memory. So many men never came home that for a generation of women many never married. In Britain, with the centenary anniversary of 2014- 2018 we have been remembering one after another the events of a war fought between the great European powers, whose causes and motivations are still the subject of heated debate. Those who survived were traumatized by the memory of the war they had fought. Parents lived to mourn the deaths of their children; young women became widows. My great-uncle, who fought through the whole war, and was present on the first day of the Somme, like the ghost soldiers at Waterloo Station would not speak a word on 1st July each year, remembering the friends and comrades shot down that day.
Centenary acts of remembrance have taken many forms. In August 1914 the British foreign secretary, seeing that war with Germany was inevitable, said "The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Exactly a hundred years later we were asked to turn off our lights for one hour on 4 August across Britain and to light candles to mark the moment that war was declared.
Each successive event has been painfully recalled, such as the great sea battle of Jutland between the German and British navies in 1915 and the battle of Verdun, being fought by the French and the Germans at the same time as the Somme campaign, that claimed 900, 000 casualties. Remembrance will continue until November 2018. The guns finally fell silent at 11 a.m. on the 11 November 1918 after a final ceasefire was agreed. Every year at this time across Britain on the nearest Sunday to 11 November acts of remembrance take place in churches and at war memorials. People wear paper poppies, symbolic of the poppies that bloomed on the battlefields of France and Belgium and of the blood that was spilled. As part of the commemoration of the outbreak of the war, the Tower of London was surrounded by nearly a million hand-made ceramic poppies, one for every person killed in Britain and its colonies during the First World War. The poppies seemed to be leaking out of the Tower walls, like blood from a body, and slowly flowing across the ground outside.
But of course the Great War of 1914-1918 was not the end of anything. Germany collapsed and surrendered and was harshly punished. It was forced to pay so heavily that its economy was crippled. Far sighted people such as the brilliant economist J M Keynes foresaw that this would lead to such great bitterness that it would lead to new conflict in Europe. Out of the terms imposed on Germany in 1919 came the rise of the Nazi Party and the seeds of the Second World War, more global and destructive than the First.
The creation of the present European Union arose from the need to bind the wounded countries of Europe together, to bring permanent peace and unity where two wars had wreaked colossal damage on the world. It has, despite much criticism, been successful, but we now face fresh challenges. Whilst we can be confident that there will be no more European wars the stresses on the Union over the past few years are starting the show. The creation of a single currency, the Euro, has proved a disaster for some of the weaker economies, such as Greece. Immigration from the war zones of the Middle East and Asia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan has strained the tolerance of European people, and the free movement of people within Europe has seen the arrival in the stronger economies of many workers from its poorer partners, such as Poland, Bulgaria and Rumania. This has caused considerable unrest in the richer countries of Northern Europe and led to the recent momentous decision by the people of the United Kingdom to vote to leave the European Union, which has shocked people across Europe – and many within Britain itself.
We remember the wars of the last century and we hope that the challenges we now face can be met wisely and well.
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