Illtyd Harrington: ‘As I Please’ - The killing fields still yield a rich harvest of death

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Published: 18 November, 2010
by ILLTYD HARRINGTON

IN the 1930s, the leaders of the then coalition government laid wreaths with appropriate facial solemnity and returned immediately to Parliament to impose financial burdens on the wounded, the mentally scarred, the limbless, the homeless and the war widows. They were all of them called upon to save us from a financial crisis.

Fast forward to 2010 in a ghastly re-enactment of that shameful treatment, a gruesome overture to institutional callousness.

Wootton Bassett has become the equivalent of a Princess Diana shrine. The terrible individual sacrifice is given some emotional prop in the midst uncomprehending grief.

Just as well to remember John Pudney’s famous line about caring for ex-servicemen’s relatives: “Better by far to see his children fed.”

On Armistice Day in 1938 I responded to the hooter from the local works, standing absolutely still in the playground. My father – a veteran of the First World War – had walked me there sheepishly wearing a row of sparkling medals. He was a local founding member of the British Legion and the Communist Party. 

The party thought it a good opportunity to show off its heroes. He reluctantly agreed. But it took years to get his pension.

On that day Mr Williams was on playground duty. A shrunken man in a three-piece suit that hung loosely about him, he tended to wince and he shook constantly and was given to violent outbursts. My mother explained his condition to me. He was “shell-shocked”.  

For an appalling period, victims such as he were treated as cowards and shot. Then it became neurophenia. Today it is combat stress.

Walter Goss was an ebullient survivor of what the Kaiser called the “contemptible” British Army. Goss, a mixture of right-wing trade union boss, pompous alderman of Paddington borough council, one of Ernest Bevin’s hard men who formed the TGWU. 

He was very patient with me as leader of the Labour Group and invited me to feel the lump of steel embedded in his right side. He advised the War Graves Commission occasionally and told me of a war cemetery positioned on a steep hill. Every year, the local French peasants gathered to collect the metals washed out of the corpses and salvaged it.

A retired upright Army major, who looks at first sight to be insensitive and bigoted, startled me on a recent BBC4 TV programme. In blank terms he talked of standing close to his best friend when a shell struck: “I was blown up and landed among the scattered and splattered pieces of my friend’s body.”  

Of course, there are just wars, but to see Tony Blair hiding in the second rank of wreath-layers cannot justify his. In the early 1960s I went to Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, to mark the return of Marlene Deitrich to her native land. She sang to an uncomfortable audience, “Where have all the Flowers Gone?” but the merchants of death are still with us promoting conflict and selling arms, quite a few of them holed up in Eaton Square and the Bishop’s Avenue. No one can visualise the harrowing task of dealing with a death toll beyond comprehension, or burying them. More than 20 million Russians, 10,000 Londoners from V1 and V2 bombs. And still there is Holocaust denial of six million Jews.

At the Welsh National Eisteddfod they  shout: “Is there peace?” And the answer comes: “Yes peace.” Still the killing fields are providing a rich harvest of death.

Dylan Thomas, seeing a dead child after an air raid in London, wrote a memorable line: “And death shall have no dominion.”

Unfortunately many people do not read the book of Isaiah. It’s not optimistic but one line stands out: “The nations have made a covenant with death.”  Will it ever be broken?