The unknown soldier

by master | May 23, 2021 | The Blog

I always found it rather intriguing that when it comes to honouring those fallen in battle, the leaders of the nations they supposedly died for invariably lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier.

More often than not, this unknown soldier is represented in a statue and the wreath is laid at the foot of the monument. These sculptures are not featureless, but they are not supposed to represent anyone with a birth and death certificate. It occurred to me that this could be a way of saying that in honouring no-one they were honouring every-one: the anonymous as the representative of the collective. And yet that unknown is still honoured not as all soldiers or all human beings who died without a name in the countless fields of battle but as the sacrificial victim of a particular tribe and its competing aspirations in the strategic geopolitical game of power. So the unknown is honoured not for itself but on account of its service to the known at the core of national identity.

These days, with every country in Western Europe tentatively coming out of lockdown, the usual celebrations of liberation, victory and surrender in remembrance of the end of WWII are rather tame affairs because the traditional crowds are forbidden. All those veterans will most likely still wear their medals and get emotional saluting the flag and watching documentaries on television about Winston Churchill, Dunkirk and D-Day. Strangely, nobody seems to say anything about the horrors of war, about it being an absolute abomination for which all peoples and countries on earth are responsible. On the contrary, it is the glory, guilt and shame that accrue to the various parties to the conflict that is being feted. And the whole patriotic spirit is being deliberately cultivated to boost national morale in the face of the current pandemic. As though we were at war with the virus and we needed the same kind of rallying cry about fighting it on the beaches. I

t feels so anachronistic to be feeding these nationalistic feelings at a time like this. The current situation exposes the total fallacy of such pomp and circumstance in the name of an honour denied by the very events that are being commemorated. The British might be celebrating their heroic endurance of the Blitz, their winning the Battle of Britain with their spitfires, their keeping a firm control of the seas in spite of the U-boats and having been the base for the invasion of Normandy. The Germans might be in mourning for their dreadful Nazi past, partly depressed by guilt and partly uplifted by the liberation that the fall of the Third Reich was for them also. But out of the total ruin that it left behind came the European federation project in order to eliminate the national divisions that had led to the two great wars and would lead to an unthinkably more devastating third unless something was done about it. But that wisdom, rather rare in politicians, seems to have been lost with the lotus-eating of prosperity and the forgetful passing of time, leading to Britain exiting the EU and retreating into good old parochial nationalism. The Germans at least reiterated their commitment to a unified and federal Europe in their speeches, something the Brits didn’t and could not do. The snippets of the Queen’s speech they reported on television were in keeping with that same parochial and insular mentality. It was ‘their’ dead, not ‘the’ dead of all nations, the anonymous humanity that keeps killing itself for absolutely nothing on the beaches of this world.

Needless to say, I’m deeply bothered by this total mindlessness of crown and pauper, of street urchin and civil servant, of pastor and sheep and the collusion of the media propaganda in support of a dangerous delusion. After all these thousands of years of interminable wars, we hold to their causes as the very pinnacle of our achievement and the chalky raft of our salvation. We still uphold such separate identities as the essence of our being and in their names we find the confirmation of our pride, profit and pleasure. So much so that we keep burning incense at their sacrificial altars forgetting that such violent offerings stink to heaven. The bloody red rose of nationalism by any other name would smell as sweet. So what are we actually celebrating? Is there anything to celebrate or should we be mourning our murderous history and making undying pledges against all war and, therefore, against the evils of nationalism? And right there is the rub, for only the very few will speak against the latter, which means the bulk of humanity accepts violence as the engine of progress, as the way of life.

Here in The Netherlands they put a nice little spin on their Liberation Day, i.e. the day when the Nazis retreated for good on May 5th, 1945. They do the typical thing of showing the documentaries of the invasion, the ruin, the resistance, Anne Frank and the final collapse of Hitler, but they place the emphasis on freedom, not just from the Germans but as a good in itself. So that it becomes a celebration of peace and cooperation. It is in freedom that we can live and prosper. It is through cooperation that we cement the peace that Western Europe has enjoyed for the last 75 years. It feels like an achievement but the fact that it does is itself a serious indictment of our barbaric past. I rather appreciate this more universal implication of this particular historical episode. For freedom, peace and cooperation are not for the Dutch only but for the Germans, the French, the Spanish, etc., for the whole of mankind. So that such celebrations become a pledge not to the nation and its murderous consequences but to the total welfare of humanity.

So here I am with Emmanuel Macron as he lays a wreath of red roses at the tomb of the unknown soldier, with the indelible image of Parisian women kissing American soldiers in the romantic but now totally deserted background of memory. He seems to be emotionally in tune with the symbolic meaning of the sorrowful occasion. The bronze statue atop its plinth, still armed and in uniform, though dead, keeps marching on. Allons! Enfants de la patrie… etc. I’d rather see Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ sitting up there, his head heavy with reflection and his expressive muscular body naked as mankind should be when looking dispassionately at itself. And then I remember from my Art History that Rodin had designed ‘Le Penseur’ to preside over his ‘Gates of Hell’. I always wondered why he did that, for it implied a connection between Hell and thinking. But after a little meditation, it was not so difficult to see, for thought is responsible for a great deal of violence, torment and suffering.

It is the way we think that is responsible for nationalism and war. It is to the ways of thought we owe all these historical catastrophes. Laying a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier is a futile gesture unless it be accompanied by a change of thought, by a change of heart and direction.And that change has to begin by a questioning of our identity, by the realization that the particularising identifications with the aims and images of thought is a fundamental factor of division and conflict. By giving ourselves a tribal or confessional name and glorifying its symbols, on which we invest our happiness, security and worth, we divide humanity into all sorts of warring factions. Such identities will always necessitate violence to prove their greatness. But that’s the greatness of butchers, not of human beings. And that’s why the wise have maintained that greatness is anonymous, for peace is to the nameless, to those who are no-one and so every-one.

I wonder whether Angela and Emmanuel (one an ‘angel’ and the other ‘God with us’) might appreciate the fact that the unidentified soldier they are mourning is the nameless key to everlasting peace.

Another sacred morning

by master | May 23, 2021 | The Blog

Another sacred morning,

Another sacred day,

With widening horizons

And journeys without end.

Another sacred cycle

Of burning love and light,

Of providence in sparrows,

Compassion and delight.

Another sacred passage

Whose transience is the true,

Where death has no dominion

For everything is new.

Where beauty shines and sparkles

From raindrops on the leaves

That send their purest rainbows

To symbolise their peace.

Where lovers feel contented

With knowing they exist,

For they have gleaned in dreaming

What they know deep within.

Where work is its salvation

And knowledge serves the good,

Where kindness is redemption

And heals our hidden wounds.

The blooms of grass are waving

Their golden sacred plumes

In breezes slow and gentle

Against the growing gloom.

The sun pours down its blessing

And sanctifies the crowns

Where sea-born winds are playing

Their oceanic sounds.

The clouds themselves are drifting

In cotton puffs along

And green moss swells enchanted

Between the cobblestones.

You hear the children playing,

You hear the geese in flight

And cherish the contemplation

Of throbbing and timeless life.

The ivy keeps sending signals,

The brightness is its own joy

And beings don’t need a reason

For Being is what they know.

Creation has lost its distance,

The past has been wiped away

And time is a single instant

Whose measure knows no decay.

The clocks chime away the hours,

The news tell of gain and loss,

But mind is no longer streaming

The network of reflex thought.

The glee has become the insect

That dances in the sunbeam,

Like us who now brim with passion

At being with all that is.

The moss is now green and fluffy

Between the grey patio bricks

And shines with the grace of children

Whose laughter is in the trees.

There’s soughing among the branches,

There’s singing in the blue dome,

Where astral celestial choirs

Intone their light orisons.

All causes possess a meaning

And rivers must meet the sea,

There’s always some needful motive

To wind up our fantasy.

Except when there’s no division

Between beginning and end,

As in this bright sacred morning

Of purposeless innocence…

The poppy fields of Flanders

by master | May 23, 2021 | The Blog

This past Wednesday they celebrated Remembrance Day, or Poppy Day, in the UK. Wreaths had already been laid at the Cenotaph, the tomb of the unknown soldier, on Sunday. It was something of a tame affair on account of the coronavirus. Her Majesty the Queen was in attendance and seemed to experience a nervous twitch during the two minutes of silence they kept for the glorious dead. Later in the evening they showed Peter Jackson’s ‘They Shall not Grow Old’ (2018), a documentary about WWI. He dedicated it to his grandfather, who had fought in the Great War. My kids and I have admired Jackson’s dramatisation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, so I was curious to see how he depicted this historic epic battle.

The documentary narrates the British experience of the conflict from the outbreak of hostilities to the Armistice. What we see is contemporary footage, first in black and white and then in colour, arranged in chronological order and overlaid with the oral accounts of the foot soldiers. There is no mention of the politics behind the whole thing, nor is there a single reference to the war poets. The point seems to have been to provide an account from the perspective of the rank and file. While this intra-historical narrative might be expected to depict the real suffering of the common man, it actually has the opposite effect, for the testimonies describe the gruesome reality as the most absolute commonplace. Not only that, but the survivors consider it the most glorious period in their lives. So, what might appear to be a nationalistic exultation of war, ends up revealing our terrifying ability to anesthetise and dehumanise ourselves.

Britain declared war on Germany on the morning of 4 August 1914. Everyone was swept along by a wave of patriotic euphoria. They all wanted to fight for their country. Britain had a huge empire and they were sure to defeat the weaker Germans. Although they had to be between 19 and 35 years old to enlist, many lied about their age and kids as young as 15 ended up joining. They were excited and glad to leave their boring jobs. After a period of physical training and military discipline in preparation for the front lines, they were shipped off to France.

They sailed from Folkestone under beautiful weather. They advanced through towns in Belgium that had been reduced to a pile of rubble and through fields full of craters and trees blasted by shelling. They had to live in a maze of trenches designed to minimise the damage of bombardment. All they could see above the parapets was barbed wire and total devastation. They slept in dugouts and got their water from the craters, with dead bodies in them. There was a communal latrine and they had to wipe their bottoms with their hands. Sometimes the bench they sat on would collapse, plunging them into the cesspool.

They were infested with lice. They lived under constant shelling and with the ubiquitous stench of decaying corpses. But they got used to it. There were infestations of rats that came to feed on the dead. And there was the gas cloud creeping along the ground. It destroyed their lungs, left them blind. In the winter the trenches filled with water; they got gangrene from frostbite and their limbs had to be amputated. They had to lay down boards to cross the morass. If they fell off, they sank into the mud and died. But there was a lot of kindness and comradery among them. Occasionally the troops would be granted a week off and they made the best of it. They played games, gambled, drank, smoked and went to the brothels. It was fun being in the war to end all wars.

Then, on another beautiful day, there was to be a major offensive. One thousand guns were firing over their heads and this bombardment created a collective hysteria. They launched 320 tanks. They were ordered to fix their bayonets and attack, the officers threatening to shoot anyone who retreated. The first wave was mowed down by the German machine guns. The second wave advanced over the dead and wounded. But they could not break through the enemy lines. After that carnage the jolly war lost its romantic aura. They became killers. They attacked the Germans, raided their trenches and cut their throats. Sometimes they killed their own wounded to put them out of their misery. The wounded kept arriving in droves. The dead, many just kids of 17 or 18, were buried unceremoniously in mass graves. The German prisoners were good, decent people; they mixed well with the Brits and bore them no malice. The Brits, however, robbed the Germans of their valuables.

They all agreed war was foolish and wondered why it had to happen. Though brave and stubborn, the German troops were fed up with the war; they just wanted it to end. And it did on 11 November 1918. All fighting stopped and there was a deafening silence. It was eerie. Nobody said a word. They were too exhausted to celebrate. The Armistice was one of the flattest moments of their lives: they were being laid off. And what were they going to do next?

They were shipped back to Folkestone. On arrival, they were welcomed with a sausage, a bun and a cup of tea. There was mass unemployment and not much of a life back home. The servicemen were actually discriminated against when applying for a job. People never talked about the war; they were not interested. The veterans felt like a race apart from the civilians. The latter had no idea of what war was like. Some of the soldiers felt war was horrible and everything should be done to avoid it. But others felt war had turned them into men. They were doing their job and learning to take care of themselves. They were elated because surviving that meant you could survive anything. They had no regrets, and they would gladly do it again.

It is quite extraordinary that after the unspeakable savagery of war anyone would want to do it again. But they had all gotten used to it and as every day was a matter of survival, the very excitement totally inured them to the real tragedy of the situation. They were driven by patriotism to sacrifice their lives. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), himself a victim of the war, expressed this patriotic sentiment in ‘The Soldier’:

‘If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed…”

His identification with England is so complete that not even his richer dust will lose the name and separate identity for which he lived and died. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), another war casualty, however, advised such a patriot about what he would do if he had seen the horrors of war:

“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.”

Poppies stand for the fields of Flanders and they are worn in remembrance of those whose lives were cut down there in the flower of youth. But they also stand for self-forgetfulness and an escape from reality. What the memory serves is to sustain the glorious lie of patriotism. So maybe it is time to take the patriotism out of such remembrances lest the poppies become once again the dangerously delusional opium of the people.