The Great War

2014, the year in which we shall commemorate the start of the Great War. The year has hardly started and already right wing politicians such as Michael Gove are complaining that our view of the conduct of that war has been too much influenced by lefty writers and productions such as "Oh What a Lovely War" and "Black Adder". Well, I think I shall continue to be most influenced not by here today gone tomorrow politicians but by those who were at the sharp end of that monumental catastrophe; writers such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon's anger at the jingoism of politicians and the press was captured bitterly in his short poem:

Fight to a Finish

The boys came back. Bands played and flags were flying,
And Yellow-Pressmen thronged the sunlit street
To cheer the soldiers who’d refrained from dying,
And hear the music of returning feet.
‘Of all the thrills and ardours War has brought,
This moment is the finest.’ (So they thought.)

Snapping their bayonets on to charge the mob,
Grim Fusiliers broke ranks with glint of steel,
At last the boys had found a cushy job.
. . . .

I heard the Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal;
And with my trusty bombers turned and went
To clear those Junkers out of Parliament.

(A Junker, a word not much used today, is a member of the reactionary party of the aristocracy whose aim it is to maintain the exclusive social and political privileges of their class. In the original manuscript Sassooon used the word Butchers but replaced it with Junkers.)

The bayonet in the photograph is German, a souvenir brought back from Flanders at the end of the war, by a relative.