11 January 2013
First World War anniversary: we must do more than remember
Breaking ranks with the Government's centenary advisory board, Hew Strachan argues that our commemoration of World War One is in danger of becoming sterile and boring.
(Hew Strachan)
The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War is only 20 months away. The clouds of the media blizzard are forming. Publishers have planned their lists - many hoping to pre-empt the market by bringing out books this year. The theme of much of this, as it was of the Prime Minister's announcement on October 11, 2012 of his plans for the centenary, is remembrance.
So what is it we are going to "remember"? There is no veteran of the war alive today. Anybody who claims that they can remember the war was only an infant at the time and is now very, very old. Many can remember veterans remembering (or not, because many of them were reluctant to talk). Their memories were coloured and shaped by the intervening years, including the knowledge of the Second World War, and some of their reminiscences could be a misleading guide to their feelings at the time. What we also "remember" is the familiarity of Remembrance Sunday, of poppies and the Cenotaph, the symbols through which the First World War is still most commonly refracted today.
The centenary of the First World War must not be Remembrance Sunday writ large. We have few precedents with which to approach this landmark, which will not be a single event but will last more than four years. If it simply reworks the familiar themes of remembrance, it will be repetitive, sterile and possibly even boring. If we do not emerge at the end of the process in 2018 with fresh perspectives, we shall have failed.
We need a sense of progression through this war: perhaps different themes for different years. We also need to recognise the degree to which this war shaped our thinking about all war: our notions of when it is right to fight and when not, of warfare as simultaneously necessary and wasteful. Indeed, those very dilemmas are to be found in how our predecessors elected to interpret its conclusion - both victory, as marked by Armistice Day, and mourning, as marked by Remembrance Sunday.
In the 1920s those who had experienced the war kept those rituals separate precisely because they recognised that the forces that underpinned each of them also created tensions. We shall confront the same problem in 2018. So how we commemorate the beginning of the war must reflect a quest rather than pre-empt the answers - just as those who went to war in 1914 did not know what they faced, did not know when or if they would come back home, and were not sure of their own courage.
In fact, the vast majority of those who donned a uniform did return. Over six million served in the British Armed Forces, and roughly 722,000 (though estimates vary) or 12 per cent died. It was more dangerous to be a Grimsby trawlerman who swept mines in the North Sea than to be in the Army. The same percentage died in the (admittedly longer) Napoleonic wars, which were celebrated as a national triumph. Most people did not lose an immediate family member. This is not to trivialise the immense losses that Britain incurred, or the long-term suffering of many survivors. But it does mean that visiting war graves or refurbishing village war memorials neglects the majority of our forefathers, let alone foremothers, who may have supported the war effort in other ways, through munitions and food production, charitable work and refugee relief.
The iconic war memorials are not those that mark the British landscape but those that occupy the battlefields. In November, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the body charged with their care, undertook a survey of public opinion on the centenary. Nearly nine out of 10 of the British public, and even four out of five of the age cohort 18 to 24, feel that we should mark it. However, only one in five feels that there is sufficient awareness of the contribution of the other Commonwealth countries to the war.
For Britain, this is a crucial challenge, both psychologically and politically: we find it very difficult to elevate our gaze from our parochial preoccupations with the mud of the Western Front. The Prime Minister announced the Government's plans at the Imperial War Museum, an institution founded, as the commission was, in 1917. Both titles (and in the latter's case its funding) make it clear that Britain fought this war as a global empire.
Britain will have to coordinate what it does not only with Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which established their national identities on the battlefields of Gallipoli or France, but also with other Commonwealth members whose legacy is more ambivalent. For South Africa, the sinking in 1917 of the SS Mendi, which resulted in the deaths of 616 members of the South African Native Labour Corps, is now more important than the 80 per cent casualties (of whom 547 died) of the white 1st South African Brigade at Delville Wood on the Somme in 1916. India raised over a million men for military service, and they fought in France and Flanders, at Gallipoli, in East Africa, and in Iraq and Palestine, but their legacy today is also carried by Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as by the Gurkhas who serve in the British Army.
This is going to be a worldwide commemoration. We are fond of stressing that we live in a globalised and interconnected world. So did our ancestors in 1914. Their system, erected by the banks and built on the convertibility of the gold standard and on the City of London, was broken first by conflict and then by the slump of 1929. Globalisation may be back on the agenda, but we still live with the war's consequences, not just in the Middle East, but also in its introduction of the United States as a global power and in its contribution to the long-term relative decline of Europe.
Paradoxically, although the public is almost unanimous that the country should commemorate the war, it is much less sure what that war was about, only six out of 10 people feeling that they have sufficient knowledge of it, with that number falling with reducing age.
So the big challenge is not the principle of commemoration but the practice of education. The Imperial War Museum and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission have anticipated this. The former is developing new First World War galleries, not least thanks to the additional money announced by the Prime Minister in October, and is creating an online presence that embraces other institutions. The commission, by enhancing its provision of onsite information, is addressing the fact that visitors now come to be informed rather than to mourn.
It is not the job of these institutions or of the Government to impose interpretations on a war dogged by controversy. For some, this will always be a futile and wasteful war, despite the convictions of many who fought that it was not. For their opponents, the British Army achieved the decisive victory over the main enemy in the main theatre of the war. Those in the middle argue that this victory was also the achievement of Britain's allies: France's losses were double ours, and by the war's end the largest army on the Western Front was that of the US. The commander of the German army, General Erich Ludendorff, believed the war was lost when the Balkan Front collapsed.
It is the institutions' task to provide the framework within which these debates enhance knowledge and understanding - both of the First World War and of war more generally. The only other significant tranche of new government money contained in the Prime Minister's announcement was £5 million to enable selected school pupils in England to visit the Western Front. Many already do so, and it is hard to see how this funding is going to change much, not least when it is not extended to the rest of the United Kingdom and given that it will be exhausted by 2019. The major challenge is to produce an educational legacy that lasts and is more pervasive, originating in the classroom and stimulated by big and new ideas. The plans for the centenary are still conceptually empty.
Fonte:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/First-World-War-anniversary-we-must-do-more-than-remember.html
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnISVVzOFV6cnhsLWM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/inside-first-world-war
