Another voice
Suitable case for shooting?
Auberon Waugh
So all month long the noise of battle roll'd, with D-Day reminiscences not only from such heroic warriors as Colin Welch (`Normandy's horror', 2 June) and Julian Spiro (`Wallowing to Utah', 9 June) but even from such as the Daily Mirror's Marje Proops, whose role it was to keep the home fires burning during those historic times. My own reaction, as one who was much too young to have made any signifi- cant contribution to the course of events, was strangely mixed. Of course there was gratitude and admiration in abundance for the noble generation of Welches and Spiros, Amises and Proopses who fought and suffered, or at any rate suffered, through that dreadful time. But there was also, if one is completely honest, an element of jealousy.
`We did resolve,' wrote Mr Welch in the course of a moving account of his ex- periences, 'that, in so far as lay in our power, it must never happen again.'
In that resolve, at least, they have been successful to date. My generation has vir- tually no knowledge of the horrors, or the excitements, of war. The horrors are easy enough to imagine, even without the graphic descriptions to which we have been treated: the corpses lying everywhere, the smell of death, the sense of desolation and terror when civil order is removed. Ob- viously, it was a most disagreeable business for all those who tood part, and fatally so for the many who never returned. But so far as the survivors are concerned, it was all 40 years ago. I envy them the experience, and resent the fact that my generation will never have known it.
When one talks to people who fought in the war, it is obvious that they can think of little else: never since then have they lived life so fully, found themselves in such ex- traordinary situations, known such excite- ment and joy in comradeship. No doubt their memories play them false to a certain extent: the jokes were never quite so funny, the comradeship never quite so warm, or the dangers quite so excitingly enjoyable. Nevertheless, the shared experience gave them a knowledge of themselves, and of each other, which is denied to subsequent generations. They also have a justification now for sitting back and enjoying the good things of life — heaven knows, there are enough of them around — without any stir- ring of guilt or feeling that they should be sharing their pate de foie Bras with some ghastly school-leaver from a Shirley Williams hell-hole on Merseyside.
Of course the horrors of war grotesquely outweigh the subsequent satisfactions. To urge another world war so that we can en- joy our lives more fully when it is over, or reduce misunderstanding and animosity between the classes, or forge a manlier race of Britons, is a more extreme example of the idiocy which sends people jogging through wind and rain or denying themselves all the pleasures of life so that they can live longer. In any case, I doubt whether people's happiest memories of wartime are very accurate. They say that there was this wonderful feeling of com- radeship, that people smiled at each other in the street, and one sees the same sort of chumminess around even now, here and there, in the north of England, but I have never found it particularly enjoyable. From my own experience, I remember deriving keener pleasure from a mug of tea made from sweetened tinned milk in the NAAFI at the Guards Depot, Caterham, or from some smuggled margarine and Marmite at school, then I could ever hope to derive now from a plate of Beluga caviare and bot- tle of Krug or Bollinger. But it would be in- sane to create the deprivation in order to enjoy the enhanced pleasure. No, there would be practically nothing to be said for having another world war, even if it did in- volved the virtual obliteration of the coun- try.
What Mr Welch and his generation learn- ed most particularly from the experience, apparently, was a deep hatred of disorder, violence and anarchy: 'The fragility and preciousness of civil society, as well as the dire consequences of its collapse, were in- delibly impressed on us.'
This, of course, is the lesson which my generation, and those which come after it, have most conspicuously failed to learn. While all, or practically all, have assented in the general conclusion that war is a bad thing, there is nothing really to be said for starting another one, the fact that we have none of us have had any experience of the sort of disorder, violence and anarchy which Mr Welch describes means that we are strangely indifferent to the fragility of civil order. In the restlessness which in- evitably arises from nearly 40 years of peace — the restlessness, perhaps, of young bullocks being fattened at pasture with no means of demonstrating their other capabilities — there seems a profound im- patience with the constraints of civil order, even a readiness to overturn it whenever possible.
In other societies, these pressures find release in the licence for controlled hooliganism of Saturnalia or Carnival, but no such tradition exists in Britain, so we find it increasingly expressed in skinhead and Hell's Angels feuds, in football
Spectator 16 June 1984 hooliganism and in the aggression a Yorkshire and other miners. Surely the miners must be aware by now that they are demonstrating nothing but their own boredom with life. Of course, there are other more highly focused individuals within the general rumblings of ennui, Po" pie who consciously wish to bring about the collapse of civil order, but I do not see their activities (at any rate where my own genera- tion is concerned) as being directed towards any more sinister purpose than that.
It is a commonplace of political vituPer.a
n ; on to describe people like Arthur Scargill as being concerned to bring about the col- lapse of civil order 'for their own purposes , but I do not honestly believe that have ant more sinister purpose than that collapse. confess to stirrings of a similar sort in MY own chest, when I suddenly feel a wild urger to rush out and bash a Yorkshire miner, „ hospital ancillary worker, or whichever. A All of which might seem to be gn°' an harmless fun. Of course a few heads area broken, but that happens also in rugger cricket. We do not really need another Brig; Gen Dyer to teach the miners a lesson. 1311 it also occurs to me to wonder whether the impossibility of staging another major in- eluctably war may not be leading us lir eluctably into a full-scale civil war on class lines. For my own part, I regard the outentne of such a war without much terror, being tolerably well persuaded that our side_ would win it. Caliban would be sent back to his cave. On the other hand, the great lesson of war is surely that the end does not justify the means. Would the last war have taken Place without the presence of Hitler? Perhaps ri some other war would have emerged, ‘1,t,ee one between the rest of the world and Soviet Union, but I do not think it can v`_ seriously denied that the timing and shaP" of the last war, with all its countless 11°11:1 rors, were the responsibility of one ula Might not the same be said about our proaching civil war and Arthur Scargli There can be no serious doubt about wila,t he is up to. As the Mirror reported week, as soon as the faintest possihdlbie emerged that the Government might it prepared to accept his demands over Pr closures, he toughened his conditions ending the strike by demanding a four-dad week, retirement at 55, salaried status an an end to the incentive bonus scheme. _f Might we not save ourselves a lot rie trouble by shooting him now, just as t d Germans would have saved themselvesand the world untold horror if they hal, murdered Hitler before 1933? My own fee_ m g is that Scargill is probably not to be coot sidered as an individual mover and shake.'s like Hitler, but more as a symbolic PI.% bladder, containing all of the foul air bells5 blown up from below. I think there are `eie drastic ways of deflating it. But few Pe°Pid in West Somerset seem to agree. He st1911,iri come down here, one day, and exP'" himself to us.
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