Week 6 2014

Tendring Topics……..on Line

 

'Oh - What a Lovely War!'

This was the title of a satirical musical stage play and film of the 1960s that made it abundantly clear that  'the Great War' of 1914 - 1918 was anything but lovely.  This year sees the 100th anniversary of its outbreak and the news media is making the most of it.  The picture of General Kitchener urging  members of the civilian public to 'join up' because ‘Your Country needs You to which I referred in last week’s blog,  inspired the cover of this week’s Radio Times.  The threat of war breaking out is affecting the plot-line of ITV’s popular Sunday evening serial ‘Mr Selfridge’ and on Monday evenings on BBC tv, Jeremy Paxman is presenting a fascinating four-part series on the effect of the ‘Great War’ on ordinary people.  I’m sure there will be many similar to come.

       I generally enjoy programmes presented by Jeremy Paxman though I don’t think I would care to be the subject of his somewhat acid wit.  Enjoyment isn’t how I would describe my reaction to the first episode in the present series though it certainly held my attention throughout.  I was struck by the fact that some members of the Government had at least an inkling of the horrors that were to come.  Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Minister’s best remembered remark as ‘the Great War’ began was ‘The lights are going out all over Europe.  They will not be lit again in our time’.  Bearing in mind that the terms of the Peace Treaty that ended World War  made World War II inevitable within less than twenty years, it was not a wholly inaccurate forecast.  Sir Edward, it seems, was only one of the stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman in the government to be moved to tears by a vision of Europe’s future.  What a tragedy it was for the world that they were unable – or perhaps unwilling – to do more to change that vision.

      I was shocked to learn (I read it in the Radio Times before seeing the programme)  that in the second episode of his series Jeremy Paxman refers to conscientious objectors as ‘cranks’ and states his belief that World War I, although terrible, had to be fought ‘to prevent Europe becoming a German colony’.  Conchies, as they were disparagingly called, may have been cranks but they were certainly heroic ones.  When I was seventeen I volunteered for the Territorial Army because I thought it was the right thing to do. I was not in the least dismayed when - only a few months later – I was called up for full-time service in the army to ‘do my bit’ in World War II.  Fortunately perhaps for my peace of mind, it never even occurred to me at that time that killing or trying to kill fellow humans, for whatever cause, was wrong.

      Had it done so I really doubt if I would have had the moral courage to swim against the overwhelming tide of public opinion, and register as a Conscientious Objector.   And that was in 1939 when the right to conscientious objection was legally recognised. The chances are that I would have been drafted to work on the land or something similar and would have had to face nothing worse that the contemptuous looks of former friends.   The situation was very different in Wotld War I.  Then there was a very real possibility of being forced into uniform, taken to the front line and shot for ‘cowardly’ refusing to obey a lawful order.

      Nor do I think that the Kaiser, arrogant and foolish as he certainly was, had any ambition to rule the whole of Europe.  He wasn’t Adolf Hitler.   I have little doubt that he was thinking in terms of the European wars of the late 19^th Century; the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, both of which had been won by the armies of his forbears. In those wars rival armies had fought each other in one or two battles and/or sieges.  The side that had lost had sued for peace and the winners had returned home covered in glory and the spoils of war.   The losers lost two or three provinces and a lot of national pride to the victors, and that was that – until the next time. Not even Napoleon had tried to rule from Paris all the countries whose armies he had defeated..  

      The ‘Great War’ developed quite differently from those earlier armed conflicts. Neither the Kaiser and his generals nor the British government and theirs, had imagined for one moment that their armies would be bogged down for years in defensive trenches extending from the English Channel to the Swiss border, and that hundreds of thousands of men would die horribly, and many more be mutilated, in vain attempts to break through the defences of the other side.

              There was an extraordinary spontaneous Christmas truce in 1914 when soldiers of the opposing armies temporarily laid down their arms and fraternised with their enemies. They showed each other treasured photos of their families in London or Berlin, Manchester or Munich, Darlington or Dresden.   They played a friendly football match between the trenches; and sang carols of the advent of the Prince of Peace.  It was almost as though God, or Fate, or the Evolutionary Instinct for Survival (whichever you prefer) had given humankind a final opportunity to change its mind – a last chance.

         It was an opportunity that the rulers of humankind didn’t take. Next day it was ‘business as usual’. The slaughter was to continue and intensify, with no further truces of any kind, for three more years!

 

‘January brings the snow, makes our face and fingers glow.

February brings the rain,  thaws the frozen lake again’

 So insisted the first two lines of a nursery rhyme with which as children in the 1920s and ‘30s we were all familiar. I imagine that they had been well-known to generations of children long before that.  

This year though, there was no snow (and very little frost) in January.  No lakes have frozen - but there are 25 square miles of lake in Somerset where once there was farmland and scattered villages and hamlets.  Those who live on Somerset Levels are accustomed to occasional flooding – but not to flooding of the whole area for a whole month.  Last week a representative of the government visited and announced that he’d produce ‘a plan’ ‘in six weeks.    Six weeks! and just 'a plan'!   The Levels have already been flooded for over a month, and more rain is forecast.

 I am writing these words on the first day of February. January was a month in which southern England had the heaviest rainfall ever recorded! Who knows what shocks ‘February fill-dyke’ will bring us? Throughout the southern half of Britain the dykes (ditches) and rivers are already full and overflowing, the subsoil is saturated – and more heavy rain is forecast.

          When, as in this case, everything else has failed, the government’s immediate reaction is to call on the normally much-maligned public services to save the situation.  The army and police were called when a private sector firm proved to be incapable of providing the security promised for the 2012 Olympics.   The army has been summoned to help with the present flooding situation. It appears though that there is nothing they can do at present and another public service, the Fire Service, is doing what it can to help by pumping thousands of gallons of flood water from the Levels into the Severn estuary when low tide makes this possible.

 Meanwhile it has been pointed out that the Norfolk Broads are geographically very similar to the Somerset Levels.  They too are a considerable area of largely reclaimed land at or below normal sea level.  Norfolk’s annual rainfall is lower than Somerset’s but this winter Norfolk too has had far more than its usual quota of rain.  The subsoil there is soaked – but there has been no serious flooding.

 Locals claim that the principal reason for this is that the waterways through the Norfolk Broads are regularly and thoroughly dredged (we saw on tv a dredger currently in action there) while flood victims in Somerset claim that their waterways haven’t been dredged for over twenty years!   Dredging is, of course, one of the not-very-glamorous activities carried out by the public sector – the sector that has been, and is being, systematically kept short of essential funding by central government.

 I believe that the public services; the armed forces, the police, the NHS and the many local government services, are the essential supports of civilised society. They are rather like the foundations of a great cathedral or other splendid and much-loved building.  You can chip away at those foundations, probably for many years, without any visible effect whatsoever.  There may well be warning signs, but they can be ignored.  There will come a point though at which the creaks and groans from the building become a thunderous roar – and the whole structure will collapse in ruin. Could  the world's governments' reluctance to tackle the threat of global warming and our government's apparent inability to counter its increasingly disastrous effects, be early signs of just such a collapse?

Pete Seager

  Pete Seager, American folk singer and peace campaigner was two years older than me.   News of his death took me back in memory to the ‘60s and to the days of CND demos and the Aldermaston Marches.  I was never a marcher but for several years I went with my two sons (when they were old enough to appreciate the meaning of ‘Ban the Bomb!) to Trafalgar Square to welcome them at their destination.  What rallies they were!   How full we all were of hope and of enthusiasm!  At their heart were Pete Seager’s songs.   Their tunes are running through my head as I type; ‘We will overcome – one day!’, ‘We shall not be moved’, ‘Where have all the flowers gone……when will they ever learn?’

 Well, they still haven’t learned. The Cold War is over but the world is as far from peace as it ever was and is scarcely less dangerous, and the gap between the rich and the poor, both in the United Kingdom and the USA, is even wider than it was in Pete Seager’s prime!