The market, Salonica

The market, Salonica
The market, Salonica

Sunday 23 February 2014

Happy Birthday, World War One

You weren’t so bad after all.

Not everyone had a hard time.  The generals weren’t all idiots.  You weren’t simply a conspiracy between arms manufacturers and Europe’s elite at the expense of a duped and exploited working class.

The centenary of your birth need not highlight our problems with Army recruitment, which has been declining for years.  Young men need no longer worry about joining up. They need to join up, just not worry about it. 

Thanks to the British government, we now have a clearer understanding of what went on a hundred years ago.  It really was a Great War.

In 2013, we all nodded when the Education Secretary, Mr Gove, caned history teachers for using Mr Men to help teenagers follow World War Two.  This year he is criticising teachers again, this time for using Wilfred Owen’s poetry to illuminate World War One.  It turns out that generations of teachers have been gulled by a left-wing agenda.  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is not an ‘old Lie’ at all.  War can be fun, if history lessons can’t. 

Mr Men have been dismissed, but the yes-men are still lined up.  Like the poet, Ian McMillan. Not poet and historian, just poet.  In a BBC article, he asks whether ‘our focus on poems like Owen's distorted our view of the war…Although Dulce et Decorum Est is written from the poet’s point of view, it's important to remember it is a work of fiction.’  Don’t take the poems literally.  It wasn’t like that.  Owen was going over the top. 

Mr Gove was criticised recently for making political appointments to civil service roles, that is, for wanting a yes-man to head the schools inspectorate rather than the presumed no-woman he had just fired.  Sir David Bell says that he should listen more closely to contrary views: ‘The day-to-day grind of policy battles, firefighting and political ding-dong can start to cut you off from outside ideas and thinking.’ 

You don’t want to cut your ding-dong off.  Not in Conservative politics.  It really is No-Woman’s Land.  Nice imagery, though, the bit about battles.   Wilfred will approve, looking down from his grand trench in the sky, at least when he is going over the top.

Like his predecessors, Mr Gove is used to being vilified.  At this very minute, pinned to staffroom noticeboards across England and Wales, there is a teachers’ union poster showing a giant, grey image of his head, or most of it, with some extremities cropped.  It looks a little monstrous.  The text reads: This man wants your pay, your pension, even your holidays.  In one school I visited, Mr Anonymous had penned in: and your ears.

WW1, WW2….  We don’t have to wait for another one.  This country has already contributed to a large number of wars.  They were all fun – for some people, anyway – and all worth fighting, so we shall probably be hearing from the minister again.

Dulce et pudendum est pro patria gove.

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