World War, a humiliating collapse of imperial power after Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris in a vain attempt to reach Baghdad. This comprehensive military disaster – Townshend was surrounded at Kut and watched his captive soldiers set out on a death march to Turkey – seemed to me to sum up both the arrogance with which Tony Blair took his country to war and the swamp in which our army found itself in Iraq. So Blair remains, for the most part, ‘Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’ in these articles.* A columnist must sometimes write with a cartoonist’s strokes.
Books occasionally write themselves. Reading the proofs, it became clear to me that my own journalism over the past five years has concentrated more and more on the sheer hypocrisy of the political–military–journalistic nexus of power which is deployed to fool us, to persuade us to follow policies which are contrary to our national interests and against all morality. Indeed, the use of power to terrorise us – to put more fear in our hearts than any ‘terrorist’ is capable of doing – seems to me to be one of the most frightening and damning characteristics of our age.
The blood of Iraqis flows through these pages, but The Age of the Warrior is neither a story of unrelieved carnage nor of unremitting journalistic rage. I examine the use and misuse of words, the influence of the cinema and of novels on our age, the need to create some form of beauty even amid war. You will meetmy former Latin professor, the old boys ofmy English school, you will walk round the mass grave of the Titanic’s passengers in Canada and read the battle honours in the oldest church in Wellington, New Zealand, and you will sit beside Mstislav Rostropovich, the greatest cellist of his age, as he travels to a Beirut still ravaged by war, his ‘wife’ – his most precious musical instrument – strapped beside him in seat 1K. And you will meet again my soldier father Bill who bravely refused to execute a comrade in the First World War – an Australian who did indeed stand before a firing squad but who died, it now turns out, with an extraordinary secret in his heart.
*By extraordinary irony, Amara was the first city that British troops abandoned to insurgents. Under a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in 2006, UK forces were permitted a single afternoon patrol through the city in return for handing over power to armed tribal leaders. The British could thus claim they had not retreated, while at the same time giving up all responsibility for the tens of thousands of local inhabitants: a truly Blairite solution.
Collections of this kind are bound to be a patchwork, but in this case I have found a meaning in the compilation. I have deliberately allowed some few repetitions to preserve the integrity of articles as they were originally published. But a journalist’s life – however specialised – revolves around a theme. And in this case, my columns have returned, again and again, to the semantics of politics and war and the need to expose the needless mass suffering that we inflict on our fellow humans. Death, as usual, walks through these pages until, at the end, Denise Epstein – surviving daughter of that wonderful Jewish–French novelist Irène Némirovsky, who perished at Auschwitz – warns us of the ‘dilution of memory’. It is this dilution, this wilful refusal to see and recognise cruelty, which will push us back into the inferno.
Beirut
February 2008
War is a paradox for journalists. Millions around the world are fascinated by the mass violence of war – from Shakespeare to Hollywood – and are obsessed with its drama, the cruel, simple choice it offers of triumph or defeat. Our Western statesmen – not one of whom has witnessed or participated in a real conflict and whose only experience of war comes from movies or television – are inspired by war and thus often invoke religion, or ‘good and evil’, to justify its brutality. If Shakespeare understood that human conflict was an atrocity, the history of the last century in the Middle East – leading irrevocably to the attacks of 11 September and thus the assault on Afghanistan and the preparations for an even more ambitious subjugation of Iraq – suggests that our politicians and our journalists are able to overcome this scruple. The peoples of the Middle East – though not their leaders – often seem to have a surer grasp of reality than those who make history, a superb irony since ‘we’ usually blame ‘them’ for the violence with which we are now all supposedly threatened.
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war
Poor old Bardolph. The common soldier, the Poor Bloody Infantry, the GI Joe of Agincourt, survives Henry IV, only to end up on the end of a rope after he’s avoided filling up the breach at Harfleur with his corpse. Henry V is his undoing – in every sense of the word – when he robs a French church. He must be executed, hanged, ‘pour encourager les autres’. ‘Bardolph,’ laments his friend Pistol to Fluellen, ‘a soldier firm and sound of heart… hanged must’ a be –
A damned death!
Let gallows gape for dog, let man go free, And let not hemp his wind-pipe suffocate: But Exeter hath given the doom of death… Therefore go speak, the duke will hear thy voice; And let not Bardolph’s vital thread be cut… Speak, captain, for his life…
How many such military executions have been recorded in the past thirty years of Middle East history? For theft, for murder, for desertion, for treachery, for a momentary lapse of discipline. Captain Fluellen pleads the profoundly ugly Bardolph’s cause – not with great enthusiasm, it has to be said – to Henry himself.
… I think the Duke hath lost never a man, but one that is like to be executed for robbing a church, one Bardolph, if your majesty know the man: his face is all bubukles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o’ fire, and his lips blows at his nose…
But the priggish Henry, a friend of Bardolph in his princely, drinking days (shades of another, later Prince Harry), will have none of it:
We would have all such offenders so cut off. And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compell’d from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language…
In France, Eisenhower shot post-D-Day rapists in the US army. The SS hanged their deserters even as Berlin fell.
And I never pass the moment when Shakespeare’s French king asks if Henry’s army ‘hath passed the river Somme’ without drawing in my breath. Did some faint moment of Renaissance prescience touch the dramatist in 1599? But I have still to be convinced that Shakespeare saw war service in the army of Elizabeth. ‘Say’st thou me so?’ Pistol asks of a cringing French prisoner who does not speak English. ‘Come hither, boy, ask me this slave in French/What is his name.’ I heard an almost identical quotation in Baghdad, shorn of its sixteenth-century English, when a US Marine confronted an Iraqi soldier- demonstrator in 2003. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he screamed at the Iraqi. Then he turned to his translator. ‘What the fuck’s he saying?’ At the siege of Harfleur, the soldier Boy wishes he was far from battle – ‘Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety’ – and Henry’s walk through his camp in disguise on the eve of Agincourt evokes some truly modern reflections on battle. The soldier Bates suggests to him that if the king had come on his own to Agincourt, he would be safely ransomed ‘and a many poor men’s lives saved’.
The equally distressed soldier Williams argues that if the English cause is doubtful, ‘… the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all “We died at such a place” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly