Forgotten Voices
‘At Pilckem Ridge I can still see the bewilderment and fear on the men’s faces when we went over the top… All over the battlefield the wounded were lying down, English and German all asking for help. We weren’t like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed by and left them. You couldn’t help them. I came across a Cornishman, ripped from shoulder to waist with shrapnel, his stomach on the ground beside him in a pool of blood. As I got to him he said, “Shoot me,†he was beyond all human aid. Before we could even draw a revolver he had died. He just said “Mother.†I will never forget it.’
Private Harry Patch, Cornwall’s Light Infantry.
That was a survivor from the ‘Great’ War - surely an insulting oxymoron - taken from the recordings at the Imperial War Musuem and brought back to immediacy in Forgotten Voices Of The Great War by Max Arthur. The idea of rememberance, and the promise that we would never forget, ring hollow, and have done ever since the end of the First World War. The ‘peace’ that was arranged sowed the seeds for the Second World War, and that war led to the ceding of most of Europe to the tyranny of Communist Russia. This led to the Cold War, which caused countless invasions of innocent countries by America - and Britain - under the guise that they were fighting ‘communism’, the end of the cold war led to a period of supposed peace. Each of these conflicts has led to mass grief, untold losses of life, and a new generation of innocence stripped away - and each new generation vows that they to would never to forget.
But we forget, we move on, those who experienced the reality of war gradually die away until they are nothing more than words on a page. After the Cold War the West lost its main cover for the relentless pursuit of wealth through foreign intervention, they could no longer invade to combat ‘communism’; so the corporations and governments needed a new reason. Then along came retaliation by a small group of people, retaliation at the greed, violence, and relentless pursuit of ideological, military, and financial domination sought by America (aided by Britain). The attack was aimed at the core of the American Evil: the Pentagon, the ‘World’ Trade Centre, and the failed attempt at the White House.
America had been given a licence to kill, and they seized it as the perfect replacement for the virtually unlimited scope of the war on communism; they created a ‘war on terror’. And so the circle repeats, and a new generation will get to know the horrors of war. Politicians today do everything they can to forget about the First World War, for it was the very worst kind of war, it was one purely in their interests, it was a war of empire, not morals. The millions who died caked in the mud of France, or on the cliffs of Gallipoli, died without purpose, without the moral justification that we like to attach to modern warfare.
It is the moral purpose behind a conflict that makes our culture want to remember or forget. That is why in a century of war the most enduring conflict is the Second World War, as it is something that we are in encouraged to remember, because in our culture it is seen as a moral war. The century of war revolves around Nazi Germany and Communist Russia; we are encouraged to forget any other conflicts as almost irrelevant to our national conscience. However, we must never forget any conflict, for the lessons in every war are the same, from the mud of the Somme, to the Jungles of Vietnam, and into the Desert of Iraq - war is suffering, war is the ultimate failure of ‘democracy’.
So when we consider the war on terror, a war fought in the complete disregard for morals or humanity, a war built on lies, greed and personal crusades; we must see that suffering is being continued for reasons as sordid as any that have been used for previous wars. The war on terror is nearly a hundred years on from the outbreak of World War 1 at the start of the 20th Century, but the results will be exactly the same. The rich will survive and prosper, whilst the poor will be forced to into doing the unthinkable, and treat it as normal.
‘While the Prince Regent of Bavaria launched an attack on Neuve Chapelle on January the 25th [1915], this was only a feint to get the enemy to concentrate in the wrong area. Our attack was launched against the French and British trenches on the south of the Aire-La Bassée canal.
We got orders to storm the French position. We got in and I saw my comrades start falling to the right and left of me. But then I was confronted by a French corporal with his bayonet to the ready, just as I had mine. I felt the fear of death in that fraction of a second when I realised that he was after my life, exactly as I was after his. But I was quicker than he was, I pushed his rifle away and ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand on the place where I had hit him, and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth and he died.
I nearly vomited. My knees were shaking and they asked me, “What’s the matter with you?†I remembered then that we had been told that a good soldier kills without thinking of his adversary as a human being - the very moment he sees him as a fellow man, he’s no longer a good soldier. My comrades were absolutely undisturbed by what had happened. One of them boasted that he had killed a poilu with the butt of his rifle. Another one had strangled a French captain. A third had hit somebody over the head with a spade. They were ordinary men like me. One was a train conductor, another a commercial traveller, two were students, the rest farm workers - ordinary people who never would have thought to harm anybody.
But I had the dead French soldier in front of me, and how I would have liked him to have raised his hand! I would have shaken it and we would have been the best of friends because he was nothing but a poor boy - like me. A boy who had to fight with the cruellest weapons against a man who had nothing against him personally, who wore the uniform of another nation and spoke another language, but a man who had a father and mother and a family. So I woke up at night sometimes, drenched in sweat, because I saw the eyes of my fallen adversary. I tried to convince myself of what would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t been quicker than him, if I hadn’t thrust my bayonet into his belly first.
Why was it that we soldiers stabbed each other, strangled each other, went for each other like mad dogs? Why was it that we who had nothing against each other personally fought to the very death? We were civilised people after all, but I felt that the thin lacquer of civilisation of which both sides had so much, chipped off immediately. To fire at each other from a distance, to drop bombs, is something impersonal, but to see the white of a man’s eyes and then to run a bayonet into him - that was against my comprehension.’
Sergeant Stefan Westmann, 29th Division, German Army.
The above extracts are taken from this moving book, which offers an immediate link to the reality of not just the First World War, but the reality of all conflict. I strongly recommend that you read this book.
