A just war?

GIVING THE CONCHIES THEIR DUE

Being away from home for a couple of days meant we missed out on having a grandstand view of the ceremony which took place in the cemetery below us yesterday.  It was commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the UK's biggest ever rail disaster which happened at Quintinshill, near Gretna, and where more than two hundred people died.  The majority of these were soldiers from a battalion recruited from this area of what is now north Edinburgh, in Leith, Portobello, and Musselburgh.  They were on their way to Liverpool where they would have been shipped off to fight in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

Their train, carrying almost five hundred of these men, crashed into a stationary local train.  Within minutes an express from Glasgow had ploughed straight into the carnage, compressing the troop train into a space little more than a third of its original length.  Wooden carriages and gas lighting ensured there was an instant conflagration and many suffered horribly slow deaths in the fire.  When the surviving troops were finally assembled barely more than sixty were still alive and without any serious injuries.

Set in the context of the slaughter that was taking place on the European mainland the actual numbers dying must have appeared trivial, which may explain why the incident is so little known today.  But at the time it had a massive impact on the Leith community, with few families untouched in some way.  The subsequent enquiry was rapid, cursory, and resulted in two signalmen being convicted.  They didn't serve their full sentences and were later re-employed by the railway company.  There remain strong suspicions that The Establishment, under the cloak of wartime expediency, closed ranks and ensured that the real problems underlying the accident were never investigated.  There was much that smelled rotten about the affair.

So although the memorial service was marking an event of tragic significance, it did so without critical examination.  And that fits in neatly with the prevailing culture that what happens in war is 'glorious' and not to be questioned too closely.  A culture which seems to be frequently picked up, uncritically, by the those who claim to be 'patriots', and will often be against anything which involves the UK in European institutions.  How often have I seen some Neanderthal on Twitter claiming that the two world wars were fought to keep Britain out of Europe?  As if having a common German enemy in each made them identical.

Yet the two wars could hardly have been more different in moral quality.  Whilst the 1939-45 conflict had some clear elements of good versus evil (or at least better versus worse), I'd find it impossible to say that about 1914-18.  The Nazi regime was truly appalling and could not be allowed to survive.  And so it's simple, and simplistic, to put that good v evil label on Allies against Axis.  Yet the country which did most to win the war, and whose people suffered the most in it, was Stalin's Russia, a tyranny that was litle better, morally, than Hitler's.  And a government who had, when the war began, been an ally of the German state.  Simple answers rarely tell us much.  And that applies even more for the First World War.

You might remember the TV advert that was running last Xmas which showed British and German troops playing football in no-mans land on 25 December 1914 (was it a supermarket ad?).  That annoyed me (OK, many ads do....) because it placed an important event outside the historical context which made it so meaningful.  The real world football had to take place in 1914 because the following Xmas the army commands on both sides took steps to prevent a repeat, including officers threatening to shoot any men who attempted to establish friendly contact with 'the enemy'.  So who was the real enemy here?

It's arguable that ordinary private soldiers, British, French, German and all, had much more in common with each other than they did with their own officers or governments.  The Europe of the period was far more divided along class lines than national boundaries.  The Establishment fear of that football match came from the dread that their own troops might see the truth and turn against them.  This was a war of imperialism, the established empires seeking to maintain their monopoly in the exploitation of Africa and Asia, one (Austro-Hungary) hoping to hold back it's steady demise, and the new kid on the block, Germany, looking to break through and join the big boys.  In qualitative morality there was little to choose between them.  Never was the phrase "Workers of the world, Unite" more necessary.

Most people would have had no access to this line of thought, bombarded as they were with jingoistic propaganda and force fed the line the regime wanted them to hear.  So it's all the more credit to those few who saw through the fiction and took the brave decision to become conscientious objectors, not just on religious grounds, but because they recognised the essential falsity underlying the war and the usage to which ordinary people were being subjected.  There have been recent moves to belatedly make some attempt to remember these men properly in the UK.  Maybe the time will come when society realises that they were the true heroes of 1914-18.