Arguments are rumbling on, very late in the day, about how the First World War should be commemorated.
No one would want to see triumphalist events but the “Lions Led By Donkeys” versus “A Just War For Democracy” debate still rages with very little territory gained by either side.
The “Great War” doesn’t have the clear cut Good-Guy-Bad-Guy feel of the Second World War. And it is riddled with misrepresentations.
Millions died but some of the highest casualties were among young officer leading from the front.
Unlike Stephen Fry’s General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett VC KCB DSO, more than 200 generals were killed, wounded or captured.
Blackadder is superb entertainment but it’s not history.
Mistakes were made and people died. In civilian life a mistake leads to sacking or sideways promotion. Mistakes kill people in every war.
The key to any commemoration is the battlefields and the men who fought on them.
To stand in the rich green pasture at Ypres or The Somme, the immaculate cemeteries, the lumps and bumps that were trenches and shell holes, and know something of what happened there is incredibly moving.
Regardless of the rights and wrong, millions were asked to do a job and did it, often in appalling conditions. What happened then shaped the world now.
If events are bent to fit modern attitudes we risk celebrating 1984 not 1914
The centenary should be a tribute to courage and the human spirit.
They say they don’t make ’em like they used to and I am inclined to agree. At the moment I’m addicted to TV reruns of The Vice with Ken Stott, David Harewood and Caroline Katz. It really is heart-stopping drama at its best.
Flanders and Swann were a musical duo whose comic songs can stray a bit too close to real life. Their 1964 ditty The Gasman Cometh tells the story of a householder’s week of woe as he calls in a gas man whose cock-up needs a carpenter whose cock-up needs an electrician, then a glazier, then a painter.
I know the feeling.
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Remembering Barbara