What a sad day

Today, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we remember those who died in the blood-soaked battlefields of the First World War. (Two minutes of silence on Remembrance Sunday are coming, and Boris Johnson must brace himself for that trying experience.)

The memories are heart-rending – especially since a whole generation of young men was wiped out for nothing.

In 1914 Europe decided to commit suicide and, over the next four years, almost succeeded. It didn’t quite kill itself, but was left crippled, disfigured and vulnerable to the ensuing two-pronged onslaught of pure evil.

We all pin paper poppies to our lapels on this day because every summer that flower covers the killing fields of Flanders with a red blanket, as if they weren’t red already from all the blood spilled there. Yet the poppy has a symbolic value that transcends its colour.

After all, it’s not the only red flower, nor even the only red field flower. But it’s the only one that instantly withers when picked. The poppy is thus seen as a symbol of freedom, refusal to live under a tyranny.

So is this what that carnage was all about? Preserving freedom against despotism? To make this argument plausible, one would have to defend a whole raft of indefensible propositions.

Just look at the main warring parties, the Entente of Britain, France and Russia (with America kindly agreeing towards the end to eat the chestnuts others had pulled out of the fire) against the Central Powers of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

One could argue, if without much conviction, that Britain and France were marginally freer than the Central Powers. But Russia would be the piece falling out of that jigsaw.

In any case, how was Britain’s freedom threatened? I’m not aware of any plans mooted by Germany for an amphibious onslaught across the Channel or the North Sea. Even the Nazis killed Sea Lion before it was really born, and the Kaiser had nowhere near Hitler’s might.

France was consumed with a revanchist spirit after the Prussians chastised her in 1870. But in the intervening 40-odd years no new humiliations had been visited on her. Yet bygones weren’t allowed to be bygones.

And Russia? What dog did she have in that fight? The French extended massive loans to Russia in the 1890s in exchange for a defence treaty.

But neither France nor Russia was really threatened by anything other than its own ineptitude, so no defence was necessary. Yet Russia was the first major power to mobilise, when the echo of those pistol shots was still reverberating through Sarajevo’s air.

New weapons made their debut: high-calibre machine guns, tanks, airplanes, poison gases. But the tactics were still firmly frozen in the 19^th century. Generals, as the saying goes, always fight the last war.

Dashing British officers, all educated at the better schools and armed only with swagger sticks, led soldiers over the top and into murderous fire – the Germans relied on more effective weapons. “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton,” wrote Orwell later, “but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

After the first clashes, civilised people were no longer fighting a civilised war. They were killing for the sake of killing – only taking a break at Christmas to have a friendly football kickabout, as if the British and the Germans felt the urge to remind themselves that they were indeed civilised.

Cenotaphs have since gone up in every French, Belgian, German and British village ( I never saw any in Russia), preserving the names of the fallen for posterity. Each has chiselled in its stone a cautionary tale of human folly and its awful consequences – but no one was cautioned. No one ever is.

Driving through France (now that driving through England has become a tortuous chore) I often stop at those obelisks to read the names of the dead youngsters. Their number sometimes approaches the whole population of young men there at the time.

Sometimes one sees several names of the same family, three or four strapping sons mourned by their mother, friends and fiancées. The boys must have left the village to the accompaniment of fanfare, only to come back to the accompaniment of a dirge, if at all.

It sounds sentimental, I know, but this is one day on which sentimentality ought to be allowed. Especially if it’s followed by rage at those who let the carnage happen.

This was perhaps the only war where no one won. There were no winners, only losers.

And the biggest loser of all was Europe, whose civility, elegance, thought and beauty died along with the mangled bodies in those poppy-strewn fields. I miss it; don’t you?

A sad Armistice Day, everybody.