WW1 + 100: What is There to Commemorate?

I have found almost everything to do with World War One intriguing ever since, as a child, I first saw my grandfather’s campaign medals.  Like many Irish men he fought in the British Army during the First World War, receiving medals that he never wore: on his return home, he promptly fought against men clothed in the very uniform he had been wearing a few months previously.

As a keen amateur historian, I have been looking forward for some time to the various centenaries that will fall between today and 11^th November 2018 in the expectation that there will be many fine new books to read and DVDs to watch. The nature of my interest in the period has changed over the years, however, from schoolboy fascination to adult disquiet, prompting me to ask, what exactly is it that we are commemorating?

Few wars have been romanticised quite like the First World War.  The very things that made the war horrific: trenches, machine guns and poison gas have been turned into literary and cinematic backdrops for tales of valour, despair, loss and glory.  All of this, of course, began even before the first shots were fired and continued throughout the war in the writings of poets and diarists.

Seldom have perception and reality been further apart than during the years leading to the conflict. From poet-officers to colliery-soldiers, war was welcomed as some form of ritual national-cleansing: an opportunity to escape mundane life in order to follow and to achieve greater things. In the end all that was achieved were millions of casualties and an ill-conceived ‘peace’ that laid the foundations for the emergence of totalitarian fascist and communist regimes across Europe culminating in the even greater horrors of the Second World War. Further afield, it set in motion the cynical carving-up of the Middle East, the ramifications of which are being felt today by millions of victims of violence in Palestine, Syria and Iraq.

Ultimately, what we are commemorating today is a terrible historic catastrophe created by a mixture of idealism, nationalism and commercial greed that was every bit as noxious as the gas that poured over no-man’s land. Evocative as thoughts of ‘a lost generation’ might be, there ought not to be any attempt to paint the war as being noble.  It was nasty, wretched and deadly, causing untold misery; just like all wars.

If a lesson is to be learned from 1914 it ought to be that we will never again allow politicians, the media and rampant nationalism to lead us over the brink into war…. yeah, sure!