THERE are a couple of kids on the front page of the Mercury today, displaying their great grandfather’s war medals, and who would want to interfere with the intent of their display.
The older child has the expression of involvement in something beyond his understanding, while the younger is simply resolutely compliant.
When somebody attempts to debate the glorification of war, and how deceitful and wrong it is, there are always people out there who genuinely believe that war worship shows respect for those who have died, or “fallen” or some other euphemism that adds to the glory of war.
Robert Graves in his autobiography, Goodbye to all That, is somewhat paradoxical in his warrior like acceptance of the first world war, as Captain Graves. Some twenty one years old. Yet his amazing deep perception in his writings and poetry, seem to make mockery of his willing involvement in the war, almost like a game of rugger.
On the other hand his friend Siegfried Sassoon, who joined up on the first day of war, and by July 1917 had thrown his M.C into the Mersey.
Siegfried’s poem, On passing the Menin Gate, in my view should be read at the end of every Anzac service, in every town in Australia.
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds his own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
“Their name liveth forever,” the Gateway claims.
Was there ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in this slime
Rise and deride this sepulcher of crime.
