The Done War

 Thom Gunn again – 


Adolescence

After the history has been made,
and when Wallace's shaggy head

glares on London from a spike, when
the exiled general is again

gliding into Athens harbour
now an embittered foreigner,

when the lean creatures crawl out of
camps and in silence try to live;

I pass foundations of houses,
walking through the wet spring, my knees

drenched from high grass charged with water,
and am part, still, of the done war.


Although I was born two decades later than Gunn, I also felt, as a boy, part of that 'done war'. It was still recent when I was born, there were still bomb sites aplenty all through my boyhood, and 'the War' (as it was always called) hovered over everything as an event that had changed lives and fortunes and provided the clearest of historical markers: 'Before the War' was another world, the past. Nobody who had served in the armed forces spoke much of their experiences, and when they did it was seldom to lament the suffering, the loss and waste, more often it was to recall the camaraderie, the humour, the sense of all being in it together, doing a job that had to be done. For many, too, it had undoubtedly opened the way to a new and better life, with new skills and wider horizons. ( In D-Day: The Unheard Tapes, Major John Howard, one of its most compelling characters, speaks feelingly of how military service rescued him from an early life of abject poverty.) My father – who served in R.E.M.E. in Egypt and Palestine and, to his regret, saw no real action – would join his comrades to march past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, and would enjoy somewhat riotous regimental reunions, but over the years these observances died away. One family friend, a dashing figure who had had a miraculous escape after being left for dead in the Burmese jungle, actually wrote a book about his wartime experiences, but  another, who had survived a string of missions with Bomber Command (death rate 44.4 percent), had little or nothing to say, and that was the norm. English reticence was still a thing back then: if you'd had a bad war you wouldn't want to dwell on it (or even mention it), and if you'd had a good one you wouldn't want to boast about it. The emotional loosening of recent decades has gradually changed all that, and instituted a kind of inverse sentimentality that encourages emotional unburdening, emphasises the waste-and-futility side of war, and labels every veteran a 'hero'. This sentimentality finds expression in the ever more insistent, ever more unreal Remembrance celebrations, which, as the actual events fade from living memory, become more and more detached from reality. Many of my father's generation would be astonished at this development, especially as, by the Seventies, it did look as if Remembrance was becoming less of an event every year, with only a few diehards still marking it with any conviction. Now, as we drift out into unreality, Remembrance is big business, a national wallow in... well, in what? Whatever it is, it seems to me that it has less and less to do with the actuality of that war that hung over my boyhood and changed the lives of my parents' generation. And an unfortunate by-product of this drift into unreality is the growing insistence, stoked by military and political interests, that we must gear up for another world war. Having done so much to hollow out the nation state, weaken the armed forces and undermine patriotism, the technocrats apparently think the populace can still be made to fight a serious war.  Hey ho – 'tis a mad world.