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Lucy Mangan: lessons of the first world war Lucy Mangan: lessons of the first world war
(4 months later)
It is with a wave of relief that I greet the announcement of the plans to commemorate the centenary of the first world war. I had dark suspicions that David Cameron was going to staple chisels to the agonised and palsied limbs of all those deemed fit to work by Atos and force them to carve a granite block into a well-appointed French chateau in reverent memory of all those commandeered to keep Old Etonian officers floreating 40 miles behind the frontline.It is with a wave of relief that I greet the announcement of the plans to commemorate the centenary of the first world war. I had dark suspicions that David Cameron was going to staple chisels to the agonised and palsied limbs of all those deemed fit to work by Atos and force them to carve a granite block into a well-appointed French chateau in reverent memory of all those commandeered to keep Old Etonian officers floreating 40 miles behind the frontline.
But it appears that a wiser course is to be steered. It will start with a candlelit vigil at Westminster Abbey and wreath-layings at Glasgow's cenotaph and in Mons. Over the next four years, there will be money to send state school pupils to see the battlefields in France and Belgium, and to encourage other young people to explore the impact of the war on their local areas. Around the country, events will mark everything from the battle of the Somme to Armistice Day.But it appears that a wiser course is to be steered. It will start with a candlelit vigil at Westminster Abbey and wreath-layings at Glasgow's cenotaph and in Mons. Over the next four years, there will be money to send state school pupils to see the battlefields in France and Belgium, and to encourage other young people to explore the impact of the war on their local areas. Around the country, events will mark everything from the battle of the Somme to Armistice Day.
The lessons we spent learning about the first world war are some of my clearest memories of primary school, 30 years on. We built a defiantly non-scale papier-mache model of trenches. We read a poem – which I've been unable to find since – about a soldier's view "running red with blood" and tried to work out what that meant. Blood in his eyes like Darren when he gashed his head in the playground, or something more? We went to the Imperial War Museum and saw photos of real soldiers, the real bayonets they carried and letters they wrote. A teacher showed us photos of her visit to the cemeteries in France, with their rows upon rows of immaculate white crosses stretching strangely peacefully across the Gallic greensward.The lessons we spent learning about the first world war are some of my clearest memories of primary school, 30 years on. We built a defiantly non-scale papier-mache model of trenches. We read a poem – which I've been unable to find since – about a soldier's view "running red with blood" and tried to work out what that meant. Blood in his eyes like Darren when he gashed his head in the playground, or something more? We went to the Imperial War Museum and saw photos of real soldiers, the real bayonets they carried and letters they wrote. A teacher showed us photos of her visit to the cemeteries in France, with their rows upon rows of immaculate white crosses stretching strangely peacefully across the Gallic greensward.
There will, no doubt, be those who object to the ways in which the government and the other organisations involved have chosen to commemorate the Great War's hundredth anniversary. They may say that they sail too close to the winds of jingoistic pride, that an absence of reflection on its causes and concentration on the pity and the sacrifice threatens to romanticise a terrible story.There will, no doubt, be those who object to the ways in which the government and the other organisations involved have chosen to commemorate the Great War's hundredth anniversary. They may say that they sail too close to the winds of jingoistic pride, that an absence of reflection on its causes and concentration on the pity and the sacrifice threatens to romanticise a terrible story.
All these criticisms could have been levelled at my teachers. It was the drama of it all that engaged us at the time. We were too young to be appalled by any of the wider implications then. But the best, most durable teaching is not of facts but a seeding of souls with something better. A few years later and I stared in a different museum at other pictures of those crosses and realised that some were engraved with "Known unto God" instead of names because the bodies had been too damaged to identify. And I understood what running red with blood might mean. A few years on from that, it dawned on me, as I looked round my university lecture hall, that my teachers had been talking about men – boys – dying at our age, in their thousands. Every young – young, young, young – man I could see would be marching off to the slaughter. And you begin to try to fathom the depth of grief that convulsed a nation.All these criticisms could have been levelled at my teachers. It was the drama of it all that engaged us at the time. We were too young to be appalled by any of the wider implications then. But the best, most durable teaching is not of facts but a seeding of souls with something better. A few years later and I stared in a different museum at other pictures of those crosses and realised that some were engraved with "Known unto God" instead of names because the bodies had been too damaged to identify. And I understood what running red with blood might mean. A few years on from that, it dawned on me, as I looked round my university lecture hall, that my teachers had been talking about men – boys – dying at our age, in their thousands. Every young – young, young, young – man I could see would be marching off to the slaughter. And you begin to try to fathom the depth of grief that convulsed a nation.
Empathy is the greatest secular virtue, and commemorative events are a kind of collective teaching of it. You press the simplest points home at the tenderest points of the communal psyche. Your aim – your duty – is to seed as many souls as possible and hope that they have time to take root before the next catastrophe comes.Empathy is the greatest secular virtue, and commemorative events are a kind of collective teaching of it. You press the simplest points home at the tenderest points of the communal psyche. Your aim – your duty – is to seed as many souls as possible and hope that they have time to take root before the next catastrophe comes.
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