Papa Malliarós: On remembrance

On Remembrance

Why is Remembrance important?

The hundredth anniversary of the ending of the First World War is now ancient history. For heaven’s sake, it was before the pandemic! Do we still need to remember?

It’s a few years now since the last combatant from that conflict passed away. Why do we need to remember? After all, we don’t pay the same attention to the 34 wars involving the British armed forces in the 19th century. Of course, British colonial policy, the driving force behind almost all of those 34 wars, is politically an embarrassment now, but nonetheless, gallant, brave, valiant professional soldiers—many of whom were just ordinary men—self-sacrificially gave their lives in the service of their country.  

It’s 110 years since the first soldiers died in the awful conflict we call the First World War, but it’s history now. Surely, from now on, we can let it gradually become no more than a textbook filler, no more significant than the Napoleonic Wars, and then in fifty years’ time, someone can win the Eurovision Song Contest with a trite song about the Battle of Ypres.

I hope you will gather from the last facetious comment that I don’t think allowing those events to slip into collective unconsciousness is a good idea. Nor do I think it is good that the majority of the population today think of Waterloo only as a song or, at best, a train station, having no idea that it is a town in Belgium or the significance of the battle fought nearby. Furthermore, I do not think that it is wholesome that history books and articles focus on the thoughts and writings of Napoleon, Wellington and Blucher as if the death and life-changing injury to 47,000 men in a single day were irrelevant.

In the late 20^th Century, it became fashionable to mock Remembrance Sunday as an event which glorifies war partly because the accounts of the war focus likewise on the decisions and actions of controllers operating far behind the front lines instead of the horrors and suffering of the troops. When we put on smart uniforms and parade through our towns to Remembrance Services (the accusation goes), we are glorifying war, minimising its horrors in a sanctimonious religious placebo, and sometimes even worse, pretending that “we” won because God is on our side.

Not so: when we gather on this Remembrance Sunday, let no one mock us as if we were glorying in war. We are honouring both those who, in the battle against injustice, have made the supreme sacrifice, often in appalling circumstances, and honouring, too, those whose sacrifice was that they lived on, diminished by life-changing injury, by unrelieved mental torture, by desolating grief, or by haunting memories held forever in the secrecy of their own heart.

I have conducted the funerals of a number of World War Two veterans or their families. I recall one old soldier, a former infantryman who took part in two major campaigns of the war. As we were discussing the details of his wife’s funeral, he suddenly started talking about his experiences of the War, to his family’s astonishment: never, never before had he spoken of it, keeping it all tightly contained inside. It was only in the presence of a priest as he approached the end of his own life that he allowed himself the luxury of a confessional, seeking absolution—yes, for his own actions, which had been of necessity clinically and brutally ruthless—but also for having had the temerity to survive when so many of his comrades did not. He died less than six months later.

He paraded every November, but he did not glorify War.

You see, the truth is that humanity has never really glorified war, apart from a few exceptional and obvious pieces of propaganda. Humanity has never taken an attitude of undiluted delight in war. The Iliad, by Homer, was written over two and half thousand years ago, depicting events over 400 years previously. On one level, it simply narrates the Trojan War. A coalition of Greeks are attacking Troy (in modern-day Turkey). The Greeks seek victory partly to gain territory but also one king’s wife, the famous Helen of Troy, has eloped with one of Troy’s princes. Neither for the first nor the last time in war, carnal desire cost other people their lives.

The Trojans are equally eager to win the war; losing would mean territory, wealth and prestige forfeited, leaving many slain or injured and others enslaved, cities destroyed, and freedom lost. But after years of brutality, just like the 1914-1918 so-called Great War, the Trojan War reached a stalemate. Homer depicts the final year after a decade of struggle, not as a revelling in the glory of battle but as a longing for peace. He described the conflict as “wretched, accompanied by many tears, bringing much woe and dread”. Even those who started it and believed most in the cause for which they were fighting want a better, less bloody way to resolve it. And although most of The Iliad’s action is about war, this epic, nihilistic poem is consistently punctuated with powerful evocations of peace.

It is over a hundred years since the armistice ended the Great War.  It’s also one hundred and sixty years since Alfred Nobel (1833-96) first marketed his new user-friendly explosive as Dynamite. Although we might think of it as more of an explosive for blasting rock, it was also a weapon of immense force, as its name suggests: the word Dynamite derives from the Greek dunamis, power.  Due to his legacy—the Nobel prizes—we tend to think of Nobel as a philanthropist, scientist and entrepreneur. We forget that he made his fortune as an arms manufacturer. As well as his inventions for setting off high explosives safely for the user – detonator caps – he owned the Bofars gun company, and he saw at once that his new creation, the well-named Dynamite, could have military applications.

But this Swedish arms manufacturer was not the unrepentant “merchant of death” that he was once called in a prematurely published obituary.  (Nobel was one of a handful of people who have had the salutary experience of reading his own obituary, and it may have changed him for the better).  So although he saw dynamite as a weapon,  Nobel hoped that it would be so effective as a weapon that it would deter people from making war. (Does that sound familiar as we look back on the Cold War and Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the nuclear weapon?)  In words remarkably reminiscent of Oppenheimer’s position on nuclear power and the political doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction,  Nobel wrote to Baroness Bertha von Suttner, a campaigning pacifist: 

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

And if that hope wasn’t enough to persuade us that he shared the Trojans’ heart for peace, how ironic that Nobel’s fortune from arms funds the Nobel Peace Prize. The irony is only made crueller by seeing how over-optimistic, particularly in the light of a newly renewed arms race, his words have turned out to be.

Because there are people on this planet whose excesses have to be curbed by determined, brave and sacrificial opposition. That’s part of history’s witness; tragically, it’s part of life. But however inescapable war might be, we cannot simply shrug our shoulders and say, “what will be, will be”, hopelessly abrogating our responsibility to shape our world for good.  Which of us is not like the Trojans, longing for peace? Which of us is not like Alfred Nobel, wanting to celebrate peace-makers?

Nor are these new ideas. At about the time when Homer was writing the Iliad in the West, the prophet Micah in the Middle East was declaring his hope for a time when humans would turn their weapons into instruments of productivity, swords into ploughshares (Micah 4.3). A bit later, Saint Paul (who must certainly have known the Iliad) acknowledged the reality of human destruction, of hardship, distress, persecution, famine and all the other horrors of aggression and war, but believed that Christians would find a greater victory in spite of such suffering (Romans 8. 28-39).

Regardless of what we think of religion or even of God, here are two ideas that speak directly to our contemporary world, blighted as it is by such determined separation, by too many indicators of self-preservation, and by too ready a resort to violence. The Bible has these insistently prophetic words for our times.  So today, we have a commitment to strive for the peace that Homer, Micah and Alfred Nobel sought. Not simply an absence of war, but a peace wherein humans can share in mutual benefit, where they beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks. A peace that is built on remembering and honouring the sacrifice of those who bore the brunt of the horrors of war.

I had an interesting experience when approaching Remembrance Day in 2018. The theatre company I was part of performed The Sound of Music. I played the bad guy, the Nazi, the Gauleiter Herr Zeller.  It was fascinating because it gave me an opportunity to think about war and remembrance from an unusual perspective.

In order to make the character convincing, I had to try to get inside his mind, to find out what motivated him. And it was not comfortable.

The Sound of Music is heavily fictionalised but based on reality, the events being compressed for dramatic effect. The Von Trapp family did indeed flee from Austria and lived as refugees in Italy and then England for a short while before emigrating to America at a time when America accepted refugees with open arms.

Zeller (the character I played) is a fictionalised version of the Gauleiter of Salzburg, a man by the name of Fredrich Rainer who ran the province of Salzburg on behalf of the Third Reich from the Anschluss until the end of the war. As Gauleiter, he held the rank of Reichsleiter in the SS, was appointed by Hitler personally and could only be dismissed by him. The fact that he held the position unchallenged for seven years says a lot about him. In a notoriously paranoid administration, he did what was expected of him and kept himself always above reproach from the point of view of the Reich leadership.

His war record from the First World War had sufficient distinction to the Nazis, and as he rose through the party ranks, he acquired the badge all future tyrants need – he served time in prison for his political beliefs.

Rainer was arrested at the end of the war but not tried as a war criminal. Indeed, he appeared as a witness for both prosecution and defence at the Nuremberg trials and appears to have done his best to ingratiate himself with the Allied administration.

However, for reasons I have not been able to discover, he was handed over to the Yugoslav government in early 1947 and appears to have assisted them in hunting down and prosecuting war criminals. Yet, for all his collaboration, the Yugoslavs executed him in 1949 or 1950. And so, for those who wondered why the villain of The Sound of Music appears to get away with his evil, take comfort that his sins found him out eventfully, and he was executed, presumably in connection with his wartime activities. He did not get away with it.

What is disturbing about the character is that you can still see his type in so many administrations throughout the world, and not just in totalitarian regimes, either. In administrations both East and West, North and South, in dictatorships AND in liberal democracies, you will find people like Gauleiter Rainer. You will find governments that are no better than that which Rainer served, led by people who fundamentally do not care for those for whom they are responsible, and who seem to have learned nothing from the genuine horrors of the wars of the last century. People who still despise the refugee, the outsider and the ethnically or culturally different. In an increasingly intolerant world, particularly a world where truth can be redefined to mean simply what the powerful want it to mean, and in a world of polarised society where politicians are ignoring the divine imperative to live in peace because it is politically expedient so to do, we need to remember.

We NEED to remember.

It’s only eighty-five years since the events of The Sound of Music. It’s three thousand since the Trojan War. Humanity seems incapable of beating its swords into ploughshares. We need to remember.

We need to remember, not because of our history, but because of our present.

Remembrance is our chief weapon against people like Herr Zeller to prevent him and his like sending another generation into the guns and explosives.

Remembrance is our chief weapon against the strangers to truth and justice who ignore the suffering of the refugee, the outcast and the ethnically or culturally diverse.

Remembrance is our chief weapon against those who would glorify war.

We need to remember.

We need to remember.