Dulce et decorum isn't - Anne Rooney

This is not an image of heroism. It is not an image of sacrifice. It is an image of wretched and criminal desecration. The way we use language to talk about and memorialize the First World War perpetuates a deceitful legacy.

It's a hundred years ago. All the people who were in the war have died. It is long past time to change the rhetoric and speak honestly. Because words are the most powerful thing we have, and how we express things defines how we perceive them, how we feel about them, how we respond to them and, arguably, how they are. We know that. We see it in the impact that political lies have had over the past few years.

And yet still we build war memorials that 'thank' those who 'gave their lives' or 'made the ultimate sacrifice' or, least pernicious but still dishonest, 'fell in service to their country'. Siegfried Sassoon had something to say about such 'memorials':

'Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp...
...Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.'

They did not sacrifice or give their lives. They were robbed of their lives, health, sanity and futures as though these were not their possessions. Their lives were given by the ruling classes of Europe, intent on having a large-scale squabble as soon as they could find an excuse. Some men and boys were tricked into signing up by talk of glory and a quick win and the honour they would garner, but many were conscripted. Those who signed up were hardly giving informed consent and conscription was downright tyranny. The First World War was not fought over causes worth killing and dying for. There was no Hitler, intent on taking over Euope, there were no death camps where huge swathes of our European neighbours were sent to die. It was about territory and bravado, greed and relatively minor (in the scale of things) differences of opinions. I don't think someone reluctantly conscripted can ever said to have 'given' their life — they have had it taken, given for them — but at least in the Second World War the loss was for a worthwhile cause.

By repeating the heroic rhetoric we endorse the view that this was a 'sacrifice'. Who would stand so comfortably beside a war memorial that began: 'This is to honor and apologise to the young men whose lives were torn away from them, to offer some tiny token of atonement for the lives of men and their families and communities shattered by the pride and greed of Europe's rulers.' It's too uncomfortable, isn't it? Too honest. We read the war poets and know the awfulness, or think we do (but of course we don't) and we might pay lip service to the 'waste of a generation' but still our memorials, those official markers of the atrocity, don't own up to what it was.

My generation is the last to grow up in the shadow of that war. The old people of my childhood were its (surviving) victims. We were taught by the legion of women who never married because there weren't enough men, or they lost their man. Many of us had grandparents who had endured the war, would-have-been great uncles who had died in it, relatives who still woke screaming, still had shattered bodies, had the stain of killing on their memories. As the war passes further into the past, with the centenary of its end being a significant marker in that making history of it, let's not forget. But let's not remember in the voice of official remembrance. Let's remember in the way we remember the Holocaust — as desecration, robbery. In Wilfred Owen's words, 'the undone years. The hopelessness.' Let's remember the men ridiculed and bullied for being conscientious objectors. Let's remember the men who refused to accept their medals because taking part in the shameful travesty was nothing to be celebrated. Let's remember, in Sassoon's words 'the unheroic dead who fed the guns.' Let's recognise that honouring the dead is not as useful for a society, and not as honest, as would be a ceremony of remorse, shame and regret that Europe ever let that happen. 

We shouldn't have had to remember them at the going down of the sun; they should have been in their armchairs in the 1960s, grumbling about whatever was on television and sucking Maltesers. And intact. Not having been partially rebuilt by Harold Gillies and his surgical team, or worn a mask, or stayed indoors all their life, or sat on a bench painted blue (to warn the public that horribly disfigured men might sit there, and they should be prepared, when approaching, to hide their alarm). Just suffering the usual troubles of old age, with limbs to have creaking bones in and eyes to become farsighted.

So please let's examine our language carefully. If we say someone 'gave their life', 'sacrificed their life', 'made the ultimate sacrifice', our language assigns agency to the dead. You could almost call it victim-blaming.  If we say we honour the memory of the 'fallen' we remove agency; they look unfortunate, as though they somehow toppled into a trench full of barbed wire and hand grenades. The state should own what it has done; we no longer have the widows whose feelings we might want to spare by upholding the pose that their loved ones made an honorable sacrifice (as if they didn't know the real state of affairs!) The responsibility now is to claw something back from that despicable act of carnage. And all that can be clawed back is to prevent it happening again by acknowledging that it's something to be ashamed of, and that what we are remembering is not honour, but the most cataclysmic act of harm humanity has ever (so far) inflicted on itself.


Anne Rooney

Lonely Planet, Dinosaur Atlas, 2017; illustrated by James Gilleard
Winner, 7-12 years,  SLA Information Books Award
Shortlisted, Royal Society Young People's Book Award 2018

Books: my emotional stepping stones to the past – by Rowena House

Before I could begin the story that became The Goose Road I had to give myself permission to write about a subject as shocking & sad as the First World War.

 

Now, after years of research, that seems odd. Today I feel on firm mental ground in WW1, eager in fact to return. But back then I felt presumptuous. Almost guilty. How could I possibly begin to imagine what it was like?

 

Yes, I did a ton of research in books and online, in lecture halls and museums. I had to get the facts right out of respect for the dead. But that wasn’t enough. I needed a deeper, more visceral connection. With hindsight, two types of research were critical to building that emotional bridge to the past.

 

 

First was place, by which I mean being there physically, walking through the cemetery-strewn fields of the Somme and the rolling hillsides of Verdun, or standing in a zigzag trench at Beaumont Hamel, or paying my respects to the broken & greying skulls of French and German soldiers, laid to rest together.

 

Second came a few, critical books.

 

Out of everything I’ve read about World War One, fiction and non-fiction, I now believe it was just five books that led me to a sufficient level of understanding that I finally felt I had the right to trespass into – and then to inhabit – the world of the Great War. They were stepping stones, and I’ll always treasure them.

 

 

The first, chronologically, was a venerable copy of The Complete Works of Wilfred Owen which I took with me to Étaples, the Channel port where I knew my story had to end. Owen (pictured above) himself spent time in this place. Like all British Empire infantrymen & officers, he passed through the huge reinforcement and hospital camp, which dominated Étaples’ old town, on his way to the Western Front. I’d been deeply upset by his war poems when we studied them at school. And here I was, a grown woman, weeping over them again.

 

 

The second book, The Price of Glory – Verdun 1916, is a brilliant piece of narrative non-fiction by Alistair Horne. First published in 1962, he resurrects the dramatic personae of that gruelling battle with dexterity and detail, populating the horrific statistics of slaughter with living, breathing men.

 

 

The third book that opened unexpected doors in my mind was Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger, a German officer who survived the war. Dedicated to The Fallen, Jung gives an alternative perspective to the ‘pity of war’ that is deeply embedded in the British tradition of remembrance, thanks in part to the anti-war poets such as Owen. I brought Jung’s unapologetic account of courage and comradeship under fire in the bookshop at Thiepval, the Commonwealth war memorial to the missing of the Somme – that is, to soldiers whose bodies were so torn apart (evaporated even) by artillery bombardments that they were beyond identification as individual men.

 

 

The fourth & fifth books which stand out in my memory are both by Pat Baker, being the first and last in her Regeneration trilogy. If anyone asked me which single WW1 novel they should read, I would say The Ghost Road, the finale, every time. It may be that Owen is important here too, since he is a character in these stories, and his death vividly told. His fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon – at the time far better known than Owen – is central to the narrative as well. But I think it is the complexity of Dr Rivers that makes these novels so compelling, and the depth of the irony that, as a military psychiatrist, his job is to make officers who are suffering the most awful mental torment as a result of what they’ve seen and done in battle, well enough to go back to fight and kill and quite probably die, like millions upon millions of others.

 

Dear God, never again.

 

 

 

 

 

My own contribution to the stories inspired by this ‘war to end all wars’, The Goose Road, is a coming-of-age quest set in France in 1916. It will be published by Walker Books on April 5 and is available to pre-order on Amazon and from local bookshops now.

@houserowena (Twitter) @rowenahouse (Instagram)

 

 

 

De-WOWing 'wow' words

"If you want to find the old battalion,
I know where they are, I know where they are, I know where they are
If you want to find the old battalion, I know where they are,
They're hanging on the old barbed wire,
I've seen 'em, I've seen 'em, hanging on the old barbed wire.
I've seen 'em, I've seen 'em, hanging on the old barbed wire."

Those lines form the final verse of a soldiers' song from the First World War. It's a - mostly - sarcastic protest song that recounts the safe location of all the officers and ends with this, the location of all the privates, the regular soldiers. (You can read the whole of it here or listen to it here.)

Where does the impact come from in this song? What is the 'wow' word?

That question - well, without the word 'wow' - was put to me more than 30 years ago by the headmaster of my school as his test of whether I could actually understand how writing works or whether he was wasting his time. (It was part of the six hours of preparation he gave me for the Cambridge entrance exam, a thing never previously encountered in my school.) It was a good test, and one that should be set for the champions of 'wow' words.

That paragraph was just to put some distance between the question and answer so that you could think about it. The answer is 'old'. The entire song hinges on it. Its first use is slightly ambiguous: 'old', as in ex? Or 'old' to communicate familiarity and affection, as in 'my old mate'? It turns out to be both. It also links the battalion with the barbed wire. The familiarity, the normality implied by the word, when encountered again in 'old barbed wire', brings with it all the pathos and tragedy of that war, of the young lives wasted on the barbed wire of northern France. The horror of the corpses hanging on the wire is redoubled by the application of the affectionate, familiar 'old'. This is the soldiers' normality. In a life and landscape so devastated and devoid of comfort, the desperate need for something to engage with locks onto the familiarity of the barbed wire: the 'old barbed wire.'

It doesn't need me to point out that 'old' is not what the Education Secretary would consider a 'wow'-word and yet that's how it functions here. This is how literature - writing - works. Not by bringing in a flashy word to do the work for you, but by employing the real, ordinary words of our language to do the work together. The tricky bit must be done by the writer, in choosing, combining, juxtaposing, even missing out, the words that are just right. It's not clever to use an unusual word. It's clever to use ordinary words in a new way.

Impact is an emergent property. It comes from making the words spark off each other, producing more than the sum of their parts by drawing on all they have going for them - associations, connotations, their sound, the way they feel as you say them or the way they look on the page. Wordsworth knew that. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1801), he pleads for poets to use the “language really used by men” rather than the esoteric, arcane language and often bombastic posturing that characterised much of the writing of the eighteenth century - or "inane phraseology" as he put it. The philosopher Wittgenstein, one of the most influential authorities on language of the twentieth century, declared that we need to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). Have we lost sight of this soon?

Effective writing is not about studding the page with sparkly words. It's about making something spectacular out of the ordinary stuff of language, just as sculpture is about making art from a lump of rock or wood, not about sticking some diamonds on a rock. Of course, it's much harder to make words work together to produce something startling. That takes some teaching. But that's the case with most things that are worth doing.

The practice of writing a piece and then adding some 'wow' words recalls making a cake and then adding coloured sugar sprinkles on top. If the cake is good, the sprinkles add little and if the cake is bad the sprinkles disguise it only for seconds. Also like cake sprinkles, wow-words are for children. As soon as the kids get to university, we have no end of work in unpicking the damage and teaching them to write concisely and clearly. Maybe we'd all be more streamlined if we ditched both sprinkles and wow-words.

I will leave you with another poem in ordinary language, this one probably about 600-700 years old, though the oldest surviving text is from 1530:

Westron wynde, when wylt thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne?
Cryst yf my love were in my armys
And I yn my bed agayne.

The 'wow' is in all the words working together, as it should be. (But I guess that's a bit too socialist a principle for Conservative education ministers. They'd rather have a top-hatted wow-word lording it over the ordinary words and collecting its bonus as the one that makes the piece work. Which, of course, it doesn't. The wow-word often impoverishes the rest...)

Anne Rooney
Latest book: Flashpoints in Science, Bounty, January 2016

THE BONDS THAT BIND by HILARY ROBINSON

Today's post is by Hilary Robinson who, together with historical artist and illustrator Martin Impey, created a unique trio of titles for younger readers. Hilary explains how her series of picture books set during World War 1 are not only written to help children engage with remembrance, and peace but to encourage empathy and understanding.

Children could easily be influenced by the negative and distressing news coverage which focus so much on what divides our diverse communities rather than on the values we share.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 showed that although the soldiers might speak a different language, might live in a different part of the world and might be fighting against their will, in reality, they would much rather heed the appeal of the then Pope who asked that “the guns might fall silent at least upon the night the angels sang.” They did. The High Command chose to ignore it – but the German soldiers, freezing in their trenches, started singing “Stille Nacht” and, before long, soldiers on both sides put down their arms and offered hands in friendship.

 
The Christmas Truce followed on from ‘Where The Poppies Now Grow’, a story of the strength of friendship amidst the trauma of warfare. 

In the latest book in the series, ’Flo Of The Somme’, we have not only paid homage to the vital role of birds and animals during the First World War, but the text has also provided a canvas to help broaden children’s understanding that minority groups too played their vital role.

 Over 130,000 Sikh troops fought in Belgium and France during the First World War and more than one quarter of those soldiers died. Illustrator Martin Impey recently said:

"by including Sikh soldiers in some of the illustrations I was keen to highlight the contribution their community made to the war effort, encouraging children to be aware of the sacrifices that they and so many others from faraway lands made in WW1."

Our shared history, brought together by so many circumstances is part of our national identity today and while the media plays its part in highlighting what are often troubling world events, empathy, compassion and understanding can be encouraged by the arts. 

As authors and illustrators, and through our medium of picture books, poetry and prose, we are in a privileged position to make a difference by countering the terror and highlighting the common humanity.

Hilary Robinson
www.hilaryrobinson.co.uk
 

A little bit of remembrance - Dulce et decorum isn't (Anne Rooney)

Today is both Remembrance Day and the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. 11th November - 'real' Remembrance Day, would also have been the 116th birthday of my granny, who died in 1970. War and the Wall were defining icons of my childhood, and she was my favourite relative.

I was born closer to the First World War than my children were to the Second, though of course it was the Second that people talked about most. My parents' characters were forged by the Second World War - by rationing and evacuation and air raids and watching the planes fly over.

Imperial War Museum

But my mother was born eight years after the end of the First World War and that also shaped her childhood. It also produced that generation of women teachers who had never married, or had been early widowed. The First World War was in my classroom. I knew nothing about my father's family in the First World War - it was never mentioned. My mother's father, an ARP warden in the Second World War, was in the merchant navy in the First and so had an easier time than most. He had three brothers, and I think one was in the 'proper' navy, and one was too young to serve. No one died.


It's easy to think that everyone who went to war was slaughtered, but in fact 90% came back. Fairly obviously, most of us are not descended from those who died, or even who were horribly wounded or traumatised. Those young men were not the ones to marry and have families. They were people like the old man who ran the shop at the end of the lane where I grew up: partly blind, scarily angrily for no apparent reason (not apparent if you're six and just wanted to buy sweets), living alone with a dog and a limp. We remember those who died, but we should also remember those who survived, as it wasn't always the better alternative. And, of course, the families who survived, their lives rent apart by loss or by the return of destroyed young men. We should remember them.

'Lyricmac', 1982 - creative commons licence

The Wall existed from soon after I was born until the time I was pregnant with my own first child. As my father made frequent trips to Germany on business, the East/West split was something I was aware of in a shadowy way. When I began to travel in Eastern Europe as a teenager, it was unpopular - seen as fraternising with the enemy. But it was more a keen desire to understand what this 'other' was like that was presented as the enemy.

I was in Budapest when the Wall fell. I went to the railway station to get a ticket to Berlin. It was packed. I realised it wasn't my fight. The people around me wanted to go to Berlin to reach the West. I couldn't take their seat, so went back to the hotel and watched it on TV instead. I would have loved to have been there, but in the end it was better not to be.

My granny didn't kill anyone and was killed by a heart attack, so although I will remember her fondly, she doesn't need much of a paragraph here. Just a loving hello across the lost years. 

Mostly, today is about the First World War. The poppies at the Tower of London are an impressive and moving memorial. There will be 888,246 poppies - one for every British soldier who died. Not that there is a definite number of known casualties, but hey, you can't make an approximate number of ceramic poppies. Perhaps there could have been some way to show, though, that we don't even know how many people died. (The figure of 888,246 is the number reported by the War Graves Commission in 2010-2011 and includes names from war memorials and all named burials.) Non-British soldiers who fought for the Empire are not remembered at the Tower, even though The Mirror erroneously stated that the poppies commemorate the '888,246 British and Commonwealth servicemen' killed. The German memorial exhibition in the Deutsches Historisches Museum simply says that 15 million died, without singling out German soldiers for special note (and around twice as many German troops died as British).

It all looks more real in colour - French troops

Britain got off lightly in the First World War by comparison with some other parts of Europe. Approximately 10% of British (and Empire) troops died and a further 20+% were injured. The British (and Empire) death/casualty/missing rate was about 35% of troops mobilised. That's truly terrible. But the death/casualty/missing rate for Romania and France was over 70%, and for Russia it was 76%. A British soldier had a better-than-evens chance of surviving intact (or what passed for intact) - a Russian soldier had only a one-in-four chance. But wait: in Germany, 65% of soldiers were killed , missing or injured. In Austro-Hungary, it was 90%. Yes, 90%. OK, they started it. But not the individual young men dying on the battlefields. They didn't start it. Let's remember them all - not just the notional 888,246 who warrant a ceramic poppy. Four million people will have visited the Tower exhibition. Just look at the crowds in any photo. Imagine wiping them all out at a stroke - probably several thousand in any picture, but it would only be a tiny fraction of those represented by the poppies, and the poppies only represent a tiny fraction of those who died. It makes you think. The poppies make you think in ways that just numbers on a page don't.

Edna Gertrude Urwin

The best writing I know about the the First World War is Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (German) and Wilfred Owen's poetry (English). Perhaps some of you know of equally good writing in French or Russian or Greek or Romanian. There must be some. Maybe a good way to spend the day is in reading, remembering all the men on both sides - and the 4.5-5 million men, women and children who died of malnutrition and disease as a result of the War. And let's remember, too, the 200 or so who died trying to escape East Berlin and the millions whose lives the Iron Curtain ruined. That's a lot of remembering to do. And I'll add my granny, too.

Anne Rooney
(Stroppy Author)
Latest book: Space Record Breakers, Carlton, 6 Nov 2014