It is 50 years ago this year that I immigrated to Canada. I cannot say the move, what in respects has proved to be the most important (non-family) event in my life, was very much planned. One day I was hanging around Bristol with a mediocre degree not quite knowing what I was going to do next. The next day I was on the Empress of England steaming out of Liverpool, bound for Quebec City. All thanks to a completely unexpected and undeserved offer to do a graduate degree at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
To say that I had a lot to learn about my new homeland is hardly to start on my ignorance. But one thing that very quickly did come apparent and that has stayed with me ever since is the extent to which Canada as a nation was defined by the First World War. The Second World War was obviously much more in people’s memories, especially back in 1962, but it was the Great War, as it had been called, that was the really important event.
The blood of the young men of Canada and Newfoundland – the latter only became part of Canada in 1949 – had spilled out at an appalling rate on the battlefields of Belgium and northern France in that dreadful conflict. After it was all over, Canada (and I think the same is true of Australia and New Zealand) was a changed country. It had earned its independence and took it. And to this day, that War is remembered like nothing else in the country’s history. Canada did not have a War of Independence and the founder of the nation, Sir John A. Macdonald, is best known for his prodigious consumption of alcohol, on and off duty. Every Canadian child knows about Vimy Ridge, where at Easter in 1917 the Canadians took an escarpment that no one else previously had conquered.
The Great War left its mark on established countries too. Although I was born in 1940, just before the Battle of Britain, in my childhood it was the earlier conflict that loomed larger in collective memory. Above all, the Battle of the Somme, in July 1916. Soldiers climbed up and out of the trenches, starting across no man’s land and into the fire of the German machine guns. On the first day, there were 60,000 British casualties alone, including 20,000 deaths. Think about it. The British population (including Ireland) in 1914 was about 45 million. About a seventh of the population of America today. The war in Iraq has taken the lives of just under 5,000 Americans – in my opinion, 5,000 too many. But if you think of the scale, about a thirtieth of the number that Britain lost. IN ONE DAY. No wonder people hated Hitler. How could he have dragged us all back into it again only 20 years later?
I have just finished reading Adam Hochschild’s account of the Great War, To End All Wars. As an overall account, I think it is bettered by John Keegan’s The First World War, and, thanks to its use of diaries and the like (including poetry), I have a special liking for Martin Gilbert’s The First World War. But Hochschild’s book affected me in a way that others did not. He does not set out to tell a comprehensive history – at times a weakness, especially in the lack of attention paid to the German side of things – but focuses more on individuals and their motivations and successes and failures. It is one of the most moving books I have ever read.
It brings home the horror of the conflict more than any other I have known. Rudyard Kipling, the novelist, moving heaven and earth to get his son into uniform, despite the lad’s appalling eyesight. And then? The last report is of the boy howling through his shattered jaw. His body and his last resting place gone forever. Douglas Haig, scheming (especially through his friendship with the King) to get top command, committing thousands of men to nigh-certain death while he gets his daily exercise out riding and (like Hitler later) staying away from the actual conflict that his nerves not get too unsettled by the sight.
Men who on moral or religious grounds refused to fight thrown into stinking jails and given just the bare floor on which to sleep to bully them into submission – and so bravely in their way simply refusing to be cowed. Battle-fatigued wretches raised at dawn and tied to a post and shot for cowardice. The suffragettes split and divided – some becoming more patriotic and bloodthirsty than any man and others simply refusing to join a conflict they saw as deeply wrong.
Old Etonians – the school of the Princes William and Harry – going to their slaughter as meekly as any flock of sheep being herded to the stockpens and the abattoir. John Buchan, a novelist for whom I confess a weakness, churning out propaganda and idealistic stories of the conflict, both non-fiction, a multivolume history of the war, and fiction, his so-called “shockers” about his hero Richard Hannay. And so much more.
The popular science writer Steven Pinker has just published a book in which he argues that human nature is getter less and less violent. I don’t care what the statistics are. In an important sense I know that what he writes cannot be true. In an important sense I don’t want it to be true. I don’t mean I don’t want war to stop. I mean that I don’t want accounts telling me that things are getting better. I know that they are not. Books like To End All Wars show me that, if the statistics tell me otherwise, then there are far greater truths than statistics.
Augustine was right. We are tainted with original sin. And people like Adam Hochschild do us a service in not letting us forget this fact.
