The Meaning of Europe

100 years ago today, 140,000 men were killed in the first ten minutes of the Somme offensive. They’d been ordered to go ‘over the top,’ advance towards the German guns and to keep walking until they arrived in Berlin.

Somehow, British commanders hadn’t realised that the Germans were dug into deep trenches and had brought forward large guns and machine guns.

After 141 days of fighting, General Haig called a halt when winter weather closed in. Over one million men, on both sides, had been killed or wounded.

If that wasn’t enough, Europe went to war again twenty-three years later. The Allies had kept Germany poverty-stricken after WWI, as a punishment, which enabled the rise of the far right Nationalist party, or Nazis.

In each war, the USA was called in to join the fight. Apart from anything else, Europe needed the USA’s money to acquire food and weapons.

Europe was devastated and bankrupt after the war. The USA was virtually the only country in the world that could provide resources for redevelopment. William Marshall, Secretary of State in the US devised a plan that would not only enable European countries to recover economically, this time Germany included, but also develop institutions that would foster European strength through cooperation, a precursor to the European Union. Between 1947 to 1951, the USA gave Europe nearly $13billion in aid.

Besides, a strong, united Europe would form a buffer against the enemy of the Cold War, the Soviet Union.

And now, 100 years later, Britain has thrown in the towel on the idea that a united Europe would be a stronger Europe that would be less likely to go to war between its member nations. And President Putin of Russia is eyeing up some of those territories that only gained their independence a short while ago. A divided Europe could not combat Putin.

Would those who died in the mud, squalor and bullets of the Somme Battle have understood rejection of peace initiatives? Were they as xenophobic and racist as some of those British who voted to abandon the EU? Wouldn’t they have preferred to live in peace and harmony with their family and friends on all sides rather than slither and die in the mud, so that their only memorial is a gravestone dedicated to a ‘soldier of the Great War.’

Years of progress and a bid for understanding have been cast aside as if all that loss of life and economic rebuilding meant nothing.

’Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ John Donne

I looked for poppies to photograph today. I wanted to make a dedication in memory of that awful, awful episode a century ago. These poppies are in a meadow off Ingleberry Road in Shepshed. Poppies in remembrance.