Remember Them

Tom Armstrong
Just an old fashioned romantic libertarian conservative at heart. Or maybe a romantic conservative libertarian, depending on the stages of the moon.

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent. The Armistice that ended the fighting of the Great War was signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne. For the first time in more than four years, the continuous roar of artillery, the chatter of machine guns and the cries of the wounded gave way to an unnatural quiet. Millions of men who had lived under the shadow of sudden death stood in the mud and listened to the silence. Among them were the soldiers of the British Empire, whose dead already numbered nearly 900,000.

Those men, and the hundreds of thousands more who would die in the second global conflict a generation later, deserve to be remembered with honour, clear eyes and without sentimentality. They were not abstractions. They were farm labourers from Norfolk, coal miners from Durham and Wales, clerks from Manchester and Glasgow, dockers from London and Liverpool, fishermen from the Hebrides, and the sons of the professional and officer classes who went over the top at the Somme, at Passchendaele, at El Alamein and on the beaches of Normandy. 

In the first world war alone, the United Kingdom and its empire lost roughly 886,000 military dead. In the second, another 384,000 British service personnel were killed, together with some 67,000 civilians, many of them in the Blitz. Entire streets in northern industrial towns lost a generation of young men. Villages in the countryside still carry the names of the fallen on their war memorials: three or four brothers from one family, a whole cricket team, the entire intake of a local grammar school.

They went, for the most part, believing they were fighting for the freedom of their country. In 1914 the language was of defence against German militarism, of honouring the guarantee to Belgium, of protecting the liberties of small nations and the security of the British Isles. In 1939 the same language returned, now directed against a regime that had torn up treaties, swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia, and made plain its contempt for any order short of conquest. Ordinary soldiers did not draft the notes or the alliances. They answered the call as their fathers and grandfathers had answered earlier calls, trusting that the cause was necessary and that the sacrifice would protect the life they knew. That trust, and the courage with which they met the consequences of it, is what we commemorate when the clocks strike 11. To forget them, or to reduce them to background noise in some larger ideological argument, is a failure of elementary decency.

Yet remembrance that stops at the graves is incomplete. The same date that marks the end of the slaughter also requires us to remember the politicians, diplomats and vested interests of every nation who made the wars possible and then prolonged them. The men who died in the trenches and the desert and the bomber streams were not the authors of the catastrophe. The authors sat in cabinets, in foreign offices, in general staffs and in the boardrooms and salons where influence was traded. Neither the Central Powers nor the Allies of 1914, neither the Axis nor the Allies of 1939–45, were the pure agents of light or darkness that later propaganda made them. The July crisis of 1914 was a failure of statesmanship across Europe: rigid mobilisation timetables, secret understandings, prestige competitions, and a willingness on all sides to risk a general war rather than accept a diplomatic setback. Britain’s decision to enter was not forced by immediate invasion – it was a choice shaped by the entente with France, the naval rivalry with Germany, and the conviction among key figures that British power and honour required intervention.

A respectable historical case can be made that Britain might have stood aside in 1914 without the empire collapsing or the home islands being overrun. Germany’s war aims in the west were primarily continental; a neutral Britain controlling the seas would still have constrained any German bid for global dominance. The same sober argument can be advanced, with equal seriousness, about 1939. Hitler’s regime was aggressive and criminal, yet the immediate guarantee to Poland was a choice made after years of hesitation, and the subsequent world war brought the Soviet Union into the heart of Europe, the exhaustion of British power, and the loss of the empire that earlier generations had sought to defend. In both cases, powerful interests, strategic, commercial, and ideological, pressed for commitment. In 1914 the navalists, the imperialists and the Francophiles carried the day. In the late 1930s, a different coalition of anti-appeasers, many of them sincere, others calculating, determined that another war was preferable to continued negotiation or a more limited continental commitment. Those determinations should not be airbrushed from the record any more than the courage of the men who paid for them.

Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated infantry officer who had seen the worst of the Western Front, put the charge with rare clarity in July 1917. In the statement that became known as “A Soldier’s Declaration,” he wrote:

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.

Sassoon’s words were aimed at the political class that had the power to stop the killing and chose not to. They remain a standing rebuke to the idea that the ordinary soldier’s stake in war is identical to the stake of those who send him. The men who went over the top at the Somme, who held the line at Ypres, who fought through the North African desert and the bocage of Normandy, rarely owned the factories that supplied the shells, the newspapers that shaped opinion, or the seats in the cabinets that framed the war aims. They fought for home, for their mates, for the simple conviction that their country was threatened and that duty required an answer. That conviction was real and honourable. It does not follow that the larger purposes for which the wars were fought were equally pure, equally necessary, or equally honourable.

The central lesson of the 11th of November is therefore double. We remember the British dead of both world wars because they showed extraordinary courage under conditions few of us can imagine, and because they believed – sincerely – that they were defending the freedom of their country. That belief and that courage place a permanent claim on our respect. At the same time however, we must remember that the decisions which placed them in the path of the machine-gun and the bomb were made by others, often for reasons that were sordid, furthered political ambition and heavily invested with prestige, commercial interest, and the momentum of political alliances. Ordinary men and women often have no decisive stake in the quarrels of statesmen. They pay the price, nonetheless.

To keep both truths in view is not cynicism. It is the minimum required of a serious remembrance. The silence at 11 o’clock is not only for the dead. It is also a moment in which the living are obliged to ask whether the next generation of young men will again be asked by unscrupulous politicians to die for purposes that those in power hide. The dead of 1914–18 and 1939–45 cannot answer that question. We can.

This article was originally published by the Free Speech Backlash.