The 28th July officially marked 100 years since the start of WWI.
For many this whole year has been a time of sombre reflection; remembering fallen soldiers, and for feeling an immense sense of gratefulness for their sacrifice.
For others though the sentiment is different. Still with an air of respect some people are questioning whether it is perhaps time to stop remembering.
Is it maybe time to think less about the past and more about a peaceful future?
Robert Fisk, writer for the UK's Independent thinks so. He claims that his father, a survivor of WWI, was forever haunted by what he experienced during the war, especially the loss of his friends. Fisks asks: "Why do we pay homage to the dead but ignore the lessons of their war?"
www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/first-world-war-centenary-my-father-threw-away-his-poppy-in-... Fisk continues: "Let them die now. Let the memorials gather grass and the commemorations be over. I wish all those dead men could lose their eternal youth beneath those ever-fresh graves, now that their natural lifespan has ticked past the final Zero Hour, and that the kind old sun would finally go down and spare them another morning, that they may now grow old as we grow old. Close down the annual production line of replacement gravestones. So at least we can get on with the business at hand.
For Little Belgium, Little Gaza. For Flanders poppies, Ukrainian sunflowers. It’s not difficult to imagine what “they” would have thought, the men we should – today – respect, love, remember, but finally leave in peace. For their Horatio Bottomley, we had Blair. For Woodrow Wilson, we have Obama; and Netanyahu, an Austrian Archduke facing a Serbian horde. For Gavrilo Princip, read Khaled Meshaal.
And then there’s Putin. Ah yes, Putin, a truly 1914-18 statesman, the only giant on the stage – which is part of our problem with him – who understands that war is a placebo upon which ambition feeds. And between the dead of the Great War and us – we post-nuclear, globalised, Googled folk – there lies that titanic tragedy whose hundredth anniversary we shall have to face in another quarter century from now. Must we really go through all this again?
We didn’t always worship the corpses. After Waterloo, the bones of the dead – Wellington’s Britons and Napoleon’s French and Blücher’s Prussians – were freighted back to Hull to use as fertiliser for England’s green and pleasant land, military mulch from the 1815 battlefields which also yielded fresh teeth to be reused as dentures for the living. Hence my old Great War soldier Dad used to refer to “Waterloo teeth”. Tears for the departed, but no sentiment for the dead.
Bill Fisk (born Birkenhead 1899, 2nd Lt, 12th Batt. Kings Liverpool Reg, Third Battle of the Somme 1918, died Maidstone 1992), grew tired of it all, threw away his poppy in disgust, refused to pay homage to dead comrades on 11 November."
Does Fisk have a point? Is it time to let the sun set on WWI (and other wars) and time to welcome a new dawn of peace?
What do you think?
Image:
www.ibtimes.co.uk