Sometimes the most eloquent moment in a symphony is heard in a few bars of silence, and the twist in a plot can be not what happened but what did not, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark in the night. In the same way the real significance of a newspaper headline might be hidden, as with a Guardian story on Saturday: “Four British soldiers die in Iraq in a week.” The deaths brought the number of British dead to 172, along with 3,689 US fatalities.
Every violent death is a tragedy, and in this case a pointless sacrifice. More and more service personnel are angry that the government has betrayed the military covenant by which soldiers forgo many ordinary rights but expect fair treatment in return. And more and more of those serving in Basra must know that the game is up and that, on the old military precept, “Never reinforce defeat,” the best they can hope for is a dignified withdrawal as soon as possible.
But then you stop and blink at that headline. Think first of a shameful contrast between those “coalition” casualties and the number of Iraqis who have been killed since March 2003. No one actually has any idea how many that is, certainly 100,000, possibly many more. One death is tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, Stalin said in his epigrammatic way. He certainly acted on his own insight, but so do we: Four British soldiers killed is tragic headline news, thousands of Iraqis dead is little more than a bagatelle.
And then there is another contrast. In what previous war would it be worth a newspaper item at all to record that four soldiers had been killed in a week? There was a time when casualties were counted in the hundreds or thousands, and when a battle meant that four men would be killed every few seconds rather than every few days. One could even say that the really astonishing — even the really shocking — thing is not how many US or British forces have died, but how few.
Every week in the Commons, Tony Blair used to read out in suitably lachrymose tones the names of our dead servicemen and women, as Gordon Brown may also feel obliged to do. What Blair never grasped was what his mournful routine said about this war. 90 years ago, could Asquith have read out the vast tally of dead at Passchendaele with individual condolences to all their families, or the year before that the names of the 19,240 British soldiers killed on the Somme on the one day of July 1, 1916? A generation later, in a war when British casualties were lower than that unimaginable carnage of the western front, could Churchill have named all the dead of El Alamein or D-day?
There is another change. We are ruled today by people who are to a remarkable degree personally ignorant of the reality of war, more so than at any time, or than in many other countries. Even now there are statesmen who have worn uniform.
Just before the invasion of Iraq, Blair met Jacques Chirac, who of course opposed the war and was being blamed by the British as well as reviled by the Americans. According to those present, it was a comparatively cordial meeting in the circumstances, but the French president had some words of warning for the prime minister. Blair and Bush seemed to think they would be welcomed with open arms, but they shouldn’t count on it, he said, and they should realize that by invading Iraq they might precipitate a civil war there. (It was afterwards that Blair said to a colleague, “Poor old Jacques, he just doesn’t get it!” Someone should ask our last prime minister about that, and whether he now thinks that Chirac might have perhaps “got” it after all.) But Chirac said something else.
Tony and his friend George did not know what war was like, apart from the months Bush spent in the National Guard, at least, that is, when he reported for duty, guarding Texas from Oklahoma by way of avoiding service in Vietnam. But Chirac did. As a young conscript 50 years ago, he had served in Algeria, in a brutal war which resembled Iraq all too closely. For him, the horror of war was no mere phrase.
Not that Blair, the military virgin, is alone. His government that took us to war contained more than 100 ministers, not one of whom had any military experience; scarcely anyone in the entire parliamentary Labour Party did, either. Watching those MPs vote for a war few of them really wanted or believed in, I wondered if they knew that during the World War I, not only did many sitting MPs bear arms, but no fewer than 22 of them were killed in action.
Along with many other bereaved MPs, two prime ministers lost sons in that war, Asquith and Bonar Law. And all four prime ministers in office from 1940 to 1963 had served in it as infantry officers; two of them, Attlee and Macmillan, were badly wounded. Might our present rulers take war more seriously if it affected them more directly?
Among all the other horrors of the 1939-45 war, the 300,000 British servicemen who died were outnumbered two-to-one by the 600,000 German civilians killed by bombing. Iraq is only a culmination of a long and miserable trend.
Does this mean it would it be better if more of our troops were killed? Well, one wishes no one to die, but if heavy casualties had been expected five years ago, we would never have embarked on the wretched war in the first place.
