Fordyce Maxwell: Reading about the hopeless descent into war, I wonder how much we have learned

I PAUSED recently at a village war memorial. I might have done that at any time, but the approach of another Remembrance Day, awareness of the 90th anniversary of the poppy appeal and halfway through a re-read of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns Of August gave the pause extra significance.

As with almost all such memorials, the First World War list is much longer than the Second World War one. Surely good news that we now attach so much significance to deaths in Afghanistan over several years that would have been the toll in a minor, one-day, skirmish less than a century ago. Surely?

There was the usual flicker of unease at any memorial surname that might be linked to my own family history – privates Pringle, Taylor, Weallans. Any relation? Given time and effort I could probably find out. Even without that it’s a safe bet they were young farm workers, gardeners or apprentice tradesmen, never more than a few miles from home until swept into the meat grinder in France.

There was more unease about the first three names on the list, all officers, all named Leather. An unusual surname, surely related? Cousins? Worse, brothers? How stiff can an upper lip be for a father and mother to deal with that even if it was, of course, for king and country?

I walked on with mixed thoughts. Foremost, as usual, how I would have reacted if hauled off the farm at 18 to soldier in France. Assuming I survived, would I have returned to the reassuring, if tough and underpaid, annual round of seedtime and harvest, counted myself lucky and never mentioned the war? Or tried to write poetry about it?

Or, unlike such writers mainly from the officer class, produce the sort of stoical private’s memoir I once read – and to my shame can’t remember its name, or his – whose main concerns through four years in the trenches and some horrifying battles including the Somme was poor food, rotting feet and piles?

I also thought of a recent visit to Dryburgh Abbey where General Douglas Haig is buried. Was he the unfeeling butcher familiar to most of us through Blackadder? Or a great general? Or, like most men in that appalling war, at whatever level, just doing his best?

And I thought of the war itself, which first interested me as a youngster through the cod-heroic, cod-Scottish, “McGlusky” novels of AG Hailes, then through The Guns Of August.

I’ve read a lot about the First World War since then, and realise that I’m re-reading Barbara Tuchman at almost the same half-century distance as she was from the war she wrote about so well. How time flies. And, reading about the world’s hopeless descent into a war where heroism and haplessness were always adjacent, I wonder again about how much humanity has learned. If only Flanders fields were the only place where poppies grow.