When I was young, I got to read the war poets — Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves — and their output influenced my philosophy on war. Revered in their time and accorded their place in the pantheon of English literature some of them, Brooke especially, have come to be reviled and criticised severely in later years for being overly sentimental and foolishly idealistic.
Personally I don’t know what is wrong with idealising a world without war or a world where peace reigns supreme. Realists may scoff but it doesn’t seem fair to disabuse anyone of their personal philosophy.
The famous inventor Thomas Edison, in 1914 was summoned urgently to his factory by his son Charles. The factory was on fire. Edison’s best research was going up in flames. He had options: Curse, grumble, break down and weep. As the report goes, he chose instead the path of the stoic, calmly gazing on and asking his son to enjoy the spectacle for, “You’ll never see a fire like this again”.
A few days later, he went right back to work again and with the help of a dedicated staff not only recovered the loss in four years, but went on to make substantial gain.
It is an anecdote, perhaps true, perhaps over time severely embroidered. The point is things could have turned out differently had Edison been of a different mindset. Which brings me back to the war poets. If I had the chance, again idealistically, I’d like to have met and heard them speak personally. There is something distinctly separate about reading somebody’s experience and hearing it firsthand.
Had I been a pupil again I’d like to have been in the school I was privileged to visit recently while on holiday in India. Here, senior pupils every so often get a chance to visit an institution that houses ailing, ageing ex-servicemen, speak to them and allow them to recount their personal anecdotes – of which there is an endless supply. Soldiers, privates, corporals, officers ... they have all witnessed action.
One of them didn’t actually engage the enemy but accompanied the troops — as a senior surgeon. According to him, he considered his task mentally more taxing than fighting on the front line because he had to personally perform amputations on fellow men — “Men who only a few hours earlier I had eaten with in the mess.”
“It is one of the hardest things to do but it is something you eventually become detached about. The human mind is such a wonderful thing,” he adds.
Many of these courageous men look forward to the visits by the school’s pupils. As some of them have said, it gives them a chance to talk, to break out of the loneliness that descends on the elderly. It thrills them to have an audience, not paying lip service to their courage but genuinely interested in hearing their accounts not only of war and its accompanying horrors but of everyday life at a barracks as it was in their day.
It helps, “open up chapters we thought were firmly closed. Who wants to hear our stories after all?”
“It helps me see the uselessness of war,” said one pupil on the cusp of finishing his schooling, “I am determined when I finish university to pursue a Ph.D. It will be on war and why we give it more importance than peace.”
A youngster’s ambition perhaps. The notion may even be revised in the years ahead. Nothing may come of it. But it is the philosophy of a young man, to see the world he is inheriting be at peace with himself. It is not for anyone to disabuse that thought process. He must be permitted his motivation just as his school has permitted him to broaden his own horizons, shape his own views by listening to the experience of others. It is a step in the right direction.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
