Matthew Parris
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Sometimes it happens because new facts are uncovered, prompting a reappraisal of causes and culpabilities. As it became clear Saddam Hussein had not, after all, possessed weapons of mass destruction, we reassessed the British-American propaganda campaign before the invasion. As the evidence of Hitler’s genocidal atrocities mounted, what was seen by my parents’ generation as one of the secondary justifications for war came to be seen (by my own) as more central.
Sometimes it happens because standards and cultural values change. Slavery and (more controversially) colonialism are examples.
And sometimes memories just fade. Sharp edges soften and scars heal. In the end we more or less forgave the Americans for pulling the rug from under our feet at Suez; more recently our departure from Hong Kong had an agonising quality; but a mantle of historical inevitability settles slowly over such chapters, and we think little of them now. We ‘move on’. Already, weeks pass without any mention of Afghanistan — and we haven’t even quit yet. Our latest Afghan war is being consigned to history even before it is over: surely dispiriting to those still serving there, some of them still to die.
But there are bits of history that not only resist being put — as it were — to bed, but which show no sign of rendering themselves explicable to the generations that follow. The first world war has entirely failed to settle down into easy explicability or ‘proportion’. In fact it grows stranger, sadder, more bewildering and in some ways more interesting as the decades (soon the centuries) turn. I would go so far as to say that WW1 is a mountain that has grown in our rear-view mirror, even as we speed away.
This year I read for the first time Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. I defy anyone to open this book without being dumbfounded by the apparent meaninglessness of Sassoon’s awful tale. I’m not particularly interested in wars or warfare, but the questions about 1914-18 have gnawed at me. They surfaced again this week as I studied the London Midland Railway’s scroll of war-dead railway servants on platform one at Derby station, the lists from the first world war so much longer than those from the second. My grandfather, who fought in the Great War, never seemed able to explain to me what it had all been about, though my father (his son), who fought in the second world war, explained that conflict readily and to my satisfaction. Dad put the second world war to bed for me. Grandpa never achieved that for his own war. Slowly, Grandpa’s war has come to seem more extraordinary than Dad’s.
This summer in Picardy my partner and I took a detour from the road to Calais to visit the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, designed (like the Cenotaph) by Lutyens, with its thousand upon thousand names carved into the stone flanks. Standing on the steps in the weak sunshine of a windy day, I asked my partner (by inclination a serious historian) the question about the first world war that I’ve asked with increasing perplexity as I’ve grown older: ‘why?’
‘Well it became sort-of inevitable,’ he began, and I groaned inwardly because that’s what everyone says about the Great War, as if it were an explanation. Doubtless the report is true that all sides became sucked into something they felt, at the time, unable or unwilling to resist; but the report never quite explains why they felt this.
I haven’t the ghost of an explanation myself. I would, though, like to push the rear-view mirror metaphor a little further; for what I may be able to explain is the way the enormity, the waste, of that war has (I believe) grown rather than diminished since I was young, and may be growing still. I, like most readers of this column, was born after 1945. For many of us the second world war had finished not so long before our own childhoods. The war had some apparently simple and (for us British) deeply satisfactory explanations. We knew what we’d fought, why we’d fought, and that we won. The noble story loomed large and magnificent over my boyhood.
When you have driven through an impressive range of rolling hills, they will appear very big in your rear-view mirror, filling the sky. There may, further behind you and behind that range, lie a greater and more fearsome range, but you will not be able to see it. Only as you drive on, and the immediate range begins to dwindle in the mirror, will the greater and more distant range rise behind it, emerging again to dominate the horizon.
Thus it is, perhaps, with the Great War, and why it seems to grow. For its insanity, its mystery and its horror, it surely deserves that stature.
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