The Last World War Veterans Are Dying. Cue New Heights of Remembrance Hysteria

Every November in Britain, you are guaranteed to see two things: comically exaggerated memorials to the soldiers killed in the two world wars, and media evisceration of any remotely public figure deemed to show insufficient respect. This year, it was the extravagant sound and light show at the Tower of London and the annual furore over Irish footballer James McClean’s refusal to wear a poppy or join his Wrexham teammates during a minute’s silence. This bipartite annual tradition is the result of a long rightwing campaign to re-cast the memory of the two world wars, the first in particular, as those who actually remember its misery conveniently disappear.

The Great War, as it was known then, began as a patriotic adventure, and “the war to end war”. Neither proved true: millions died in a horrific new kind of combat in which soldiers in trenches waited nervously for the order to charge into machine gun fire. Civilians drowned on torpedoed ships or were blown up in bomb shelters as cities were aerially bombed for the first time. Surviving soldiers often got little more than a medal for their efforts and the Treaty of Versailles laid the groundwork for an even more destructive war with Germany two decades later.

These two wars, especially the first, loom larger in British culture than any others. First world war imagery dominates the UK’s memorial culture, with Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day marking all wars but specifically its end on 11 November 1918; the poppy and the more recent but now-ubiquitous black silhouettes of soldiers, as well as the cenotaph, also came out of the war.

The poets’ war.

The war’s causes were complex, springing from the formation of Italy and especially Germany after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, which upset Europe’s balance of power. Tensions heightened as both new states joined western Europe’s competition for colonies in Africa and elsewhere. The political impact of the war was seismic: it led to two revolutions in Russia, failed leftwing uprisings in Germany and Hungary, the end of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and a redrawn map of eastern Europe. In the United Kingdom, it brought about the Easter Rising, the Irish war of independence, civil war and partition of Ireland, Labour supplanting the Liberals in the two-party system and to women getting the vote.

Its cultural impact was also huge. Feature-length films started to appear in Europe by 1914. An ocean away from the fighting, Hollywood established itself as the world’s leading film producer. In neutral Switzerland, the Dadaist movement emerged, its absurdist, anti-art stance formed in opposition to the carnage. Movements such as British vorticism, Italian and Russian futurism and German expressionism were changed profoundly by the war, not least because some of their leading exponents were killed. With a substantial number of soldiers and their relatives being poets, novelists or artists before the war started, or becoming so during it, they were able to set the narrative even before it ended.

In most cases, the narrative they offered was of a pointless conflict in which aristocracies set the lower classes against each other. Even Rudyard Kipling, a jingoistic celebrator of the British empire who signed propaganda pamphlets for the government when the war first started, turned against the war when his son died on the western front. Kipling’s Epitaphs of the War (1919) includes a number of bitter couplets, most famously in his two-line poem “Common Form”: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied” – a direct echo of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est”, which decried “the old lie” that it is good and proper to die for one’s country.

Meanwhile, Siegfried Sassoon, known as “Mad Jack” because of his bravery on the western front, for which he received a medal, wrote poems excoriating those in charge, and denounced the “war of aggression and conquest”, which was “deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it” in an open letter to the government, entitled “A Soldier’s Declaration”, printed in the Times in 1917. “I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest,” Sassoon wrote. By the time that war finally did end, there was a sense that writers’ attitudes to war had changed just as fundamentally as the technology used to pursue it. Poems such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s triumphant “Charge of the Light Brigade”, published during the Crimea war in 1854, were out. Who could write like that after Isaac Rosenberg’s depiction of a wagon wheel crushing a soldier’s face in “Dead Man’s Dump”?

In the years after the Armistice, Wilfred Owen’s poems – less visceral than Rosenberg and less accusatory than Kipling’s, but still a sober reflection on the horrors – emerged as the best known verses to question the slaughter, being taught in secondary schools. At memorial services, however, less critical verses were preferred. Among them were Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” (“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn”), written just a month into the war, or “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae (“In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row”). The latter led to the poppy being adopted as the official flower of remembrance for the British and Commonwealth war dead. Both poems strike a sombre tone about the slaughter without Kipling or Owen’s condemnations of the people or ideologies that brought it about.

For as long as veterans remained alive, they continued to speak out about the horrors of war, shaping the memory of the first world war for the rest of the 20th century. Throughout the 1920s, as cenotaphs were built in almost every town in the country, combat memoirs by Sassoon, Robert Graves and others appeared,, while literary fiction dealt more with a sense of the bourgeois values that had upheld Victorian society collapsing after the war, in a climate of cultural pessimism. The last published volume of Great War poetry by a participant was David Jones’ In Parenthesis, issued by Faber in 1937, after the Spanish Civil War had begun and the prospect of a second world war overshadowed the memory of the first.

The idea that the first world war was a folly in which the working and middle classes were “lions led by donkeys” prevailed, finding expression in Blackadder Goes Forth. Written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton and first broadcast by the BBC in 1989, the series transplanted several Blackadder characters familiar from earlier series of the historical sitcom to the western front, where Captain Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson), used to fighting “natives” who were “two feet tall and armed with dried grass”, tried to avoid being sent “over the top” of the trenches to certain death. Blackadder’s antagonists were not the (rarely-seen) Germans but General Melchett (Stephen Fry), who directed the troops from a French château miles away from the front. Increasingly disillusioned, Blackadder tells Private Baldrick (Tony Robinson) that it would be “a damn sight simpler if we just stayed in England and shot 50,000 of our own men a week”, before explaining that the war began because the inevitable failure of the European strategy of coalescing into two big power blocs that were supposed to keep each other in check.

Famously, the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth – first broadcast on 2 November 1989 – ends with Blackadder finally going over the top after his plan to escape by pretending to be mad fails (much like Captain John Yossarian’s does in Catch-22) The whistle goes and the men rush into a hail of bullets. Music plays as the slow-motion footage turns black and white and the corpse-strewn mud fades into a field of poppies. In its deathly seriousness, the episode was an extraordinarily powerful end to a sharp satirical series and made a deep impression on me as a teenager.

I watched it again before a school trip to the first world war battlefields in Belgium and France in 1996. We visited the Menin Gate, dedicated to British and Commonwealth soldiers killed at the Ypres Salient, “but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death”, as the inscription, contributed by Kipling, put it. There were still a few veterans, around 100 years old, attending the solemn annual service in which buglers played “The Last Post” and visitors laid wreaths and observed a minute’s silence. To me, it seemed like the epitome of British remembrance culture: quiet and sombre, inviting people to consider the horrors of the two world wars and to demand that nothing like them ever happen again.

Gone and mostly forgotten.

The last trench combat soldier to fight in the first world war from any country, Harry Patch, died in July 2009, aged 111. There were no more survivors to warn against the glorification of war that led to the Somme and Passchendaele. In any case,, the UK’s political and media classes had by this point long since shifted their focus to the second world war and the national myth of Britain fighting a lone battle against an authoritarianism alien to its culture, keeping calm and carrying on Two films that challenged this canard during the 1960s, It Happened Here and The War Game, proved highly controversial – the BBC refused to broadcast the latter. Just as importantly, the political and media elite had been rocked by huge protests against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which proved them to be wildly out-of-step with public opinion: clearly, the British people needed to be taught to love war again.

A year after Patch’s death, the Conservative Party returned to power after 13 years of New Labour government that had embroiled the country in those two disastrous, ongoing wars, with the centenary of first world war approaching. Plenty of people have written about how remembrance culture gradually became more overt and ostentatiously policed, from a controversy about how Michael Foot dressed at the cenotaph in 1981 to the obligatory attacks on Jeremy Corbyn for apparently not bowing enough, and even Sir Keir Starmer, who never makes any public address without at least two Union Jacks by his side, coming in for criticism, for mourning in the wrong way or place.

In such a climate, Conservative education secretary Michael Gove saw his chance to reconfigure public memory, aiming to rehabilitate the idea of the war as a great patriotic adventure, if not of a war to end all wars. Gove hit out at dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder that he said portrayed the first world war as a “a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”, throwing in an attack on “leftwing academics” for good measure.

One imagines Gove wishing he could turn back the clock not just on the memory of the war, but on what it unleashed: the collapse of European empires and monarchies; the increased participation of women in public life; the rise of organised labour, and so on. He could not do this, but what his government could and indeed did do was demolish the welfare state that Labour set up in the aftermath of the second world war and even the reforms made by the Liberals in the run-up to the first. Other writers have noted how second world war imagery resurfaced as the Conservatives laid waste to public services, with austerity presented as something to keep calm and carry on through, rather than oppose.

Such imagery resurfaced again during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Boris Johnson channelling Churchill in his speeches, pushing through commemorations of the 75th anniversary of VE Day despite lockdown, and Captain Tom Moore emerging as a national hero (at least until the charity foundation set up by his daughter became the subject of an investigation shortly after Moore died).

The last second world war veterans will die over the next decade or two, and British remembrance culture will likely change again. In a political culture that is only ever allowed to move right, and the media fiercely guardian against any change in the direction of travel, it’s hard to imagine any serious insistence on remembering the first world war as many of its veterans did being allowed to stand. Instead, there will be an emphasis on people signing up to fight (but not on how many people were forcibly conscripted, nor the controversy around it) and dying for their country, as if future world wars would be fought by people rather than with nuclear weapons. For the time being, it looks like Gove might win the history wars: the best way to counter him is to keep listening to the soldiers who went to the Western Front and reminding people of what they recorded.