A friend who was visiting Australia last month sent me this article from The Australian.
It was one of the last pieces that the late Christopher Hitchens wrote:
When war dead mount, ask who brought us bound to the pit
by: Christopher Hitchens From: The Australian November 19,
2011 12:00AM
AT this time of year, I spend a great deal of time writing
and thinking about Rudyard Kipling. This may seem like a
pretentious thing to be saying, but if you care about war
and peace and justice and life and death, then he is an
inescapable subject.
The same is true if you care about modern English
literature, which for no less inescapable reasons is
intimately bound up with the great catastrophe of
mortality that overcame British families between August
1914 and November 1918.
There had probably never been such a race for a society to
get itself involved in the battle for a perceived moral
superiority. Great swaths of young men saw their honour,
and huge groups of young girls their virtue, involved in
the defence of Belgium against the rape of German
imperialism. As a result, a huge and successful post-
Victorian people found itself nearly decimated, with a
special emphasis on the slaughter of its youth of
childbearing age. And Kipling himself, the man who brought
us The Jungle Book and many a school yarn, was desolate
because he did not have a real son to lend, or to give, to
the fight.
...Pay attention when people make use of those terms,
about "giving" or "losing" your life in wartime. Often, we
have only the uncorroborated word of the losers that that
is what they did. Either their lives were offered and
accepted, this being the great act of sacrifice and
solidarity honoured since Pericles and the Gettysburg
Address, or they were ruthlessly snatched away. In which
latter case, we have only the word of the generals and
kings and politicians that this was indeed a legitimate
deal. That, also, would be rather more like an accident.
Whereas the last alternative, almost too grim to reflect
upon, would be that of deliberate theft. In this scenario,
we encounter cannon fodder, fiddled casualty figures,
falsified statistics and all the cynicism of wartime
manipulation and propaganda. And again, nobody is on hand
to represent the words of the victim. That is what
happened to young John Kipling when he was
posted "missing" at the end of one of the fiercest early
battles of World War I. His father, Rudyard, upset that
the boy was disqualified for the military because of his
poor eyesight, had in effect smuggled him through customs
so as to pass the regulations. His agony as to having
effectively cheated his boy into vanishing in the
trenches, can only be guessed at.
By almost all accounts, young John wasn't properly
identified until the 1990s, a dreadful fact about hundreds
of thousands of British men who still have not been bagged
or tagged from the areas of Flanders and Picardy, where
the supreme sacrifice - another term to watch out for -
was actually carried out.
I wrote about the exhumation, and it seems that he was
horribly injured and perhaps blinded towards the end. As a
kind of atonement, his father agreed to write the official
history of his son's Irish regiment and to help design the
official memorial to that strange idea, "The Unknown
Soldier". Unknown to whom?
Even as Kipling was repressing his doubts about the nature
of the war and the death of his only son, there was a sort
of revolution of poets at the other end of the country. In
a mental hospital in Scotland were confined, because of
their opposition to the war and their "battle fatigue",
men of the stature of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Just contrast what Kipling and Owen wrote. I'll first cite
Kipling:
. . . Our statecraft, our learning,
Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning
Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour.
Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed
upon her!
. . . But who shall return us our children?
Owen decided to rework the Bible story of the binding and
killing of Isaac by his father Abraham. If you recall,
Abraham listened to his God's instructions and carried
them out until the last moment, whereupon an angel told
him to, in Owen's words, "offer the ram of pride instead"
of Isaac. In Owen's poem, the action follows the Bible's
form until the angel makes his appearance. At this point,
old man Abraham turns remorseless:
But the old man would not so, but slew his son.
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Reading them today, it is surprising how closely the two
poems converge.
In both cases, fathers grieve in different ways over the
slaughter of their sons. They also brood over the paternal
responsibility for the blood-letting. This introduces
elements of ambiguity into the reflection.
Shortly before November 11, some mediocre California mayor
announced that she wasn't going to attend a Veterans Day
event in her city of Richmond. Gayle McLaughlin was down
with the "Occupy" guys and gals instead.
You can easily picture the response she got: the city of
Richmond insulted, along with the memory of its brave men
and women in uniform.
Indeed, there might not even be a Richmond if not for
those unforgettable volunteers.
But if this were true, then the writing of history would
always be simple. So would the composition of morality
stories. Both Kipling and Owen came to the conclusion that
too many lives had been "taken" rather than offered or
accepted, and that too many bureaucrats had complacently
accepted the sacrifice as if they themselves had earned it.
And this has made a lot of difference. It means, for
example, that each case needs to be argued on its own
merits. I am convinced that the contingents who went to
fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, though badly led on a scale
almost equal to that of 1914-18, are to be praised and
supported. But I take no comfort from the idea that this
should be an official position.
I must say I think that McLaughlin expressed herself with
awful casualness (because November 11 is, after all, truly
still a solemn day on the calendar). But it's still more
important on such a day to discuss dissent, and to reflect
on whether it might have been your own enemy, or your
deeply mistaken father, who brought you bound to the pit
and alive to the burning.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and
Slate Magazine, and the author of Arguably, a collection
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