All They Were

Anthony H. Harrigan

Anthony Harrigan is a free-lance writer with decades of experience.

On a program on Winston Churchill's funeral, television essayist Roger Rosenblatt stated (PBS, Jan. 17, 2002) in regard to the people along the funeral route that they had in their minds "all they were and would never be again."

To reflect on profound experiences from yesteryear, to acknowledge overwhelming change and an inability to return to the high points of the past, to undergo the shock of recognition of diminishment is traumatic for individuals and nations.

People who participated in high moments of history experience the most trauma and sadness. There is the realization that one cannot turn back the clock, that a country also is incapable of doing so.

In modern times the British nation and people experienced the most devastating and transforming events. The people who filled London's streets for Churchill's funeral undoubtedly thought back to "their finest hour" in the Battle of Britain, to the Blitz, the War in the Desert, D-Day and other epochal events. Others may have thought of what family members and their country had gone through a mere twenty-odd years before the coming of the second great conflict in 1939.

Millions of Britons were impacted by the cruel struggle in the trenches of France and Belgium. This conflict, this civil war of the West, marked the high point of courage in Anglo-Saxon civilization. It was a conflict infinitely more horrific than the next world war, terrible as that was.

Americans have little understanding of the first conflict, which we entered close to its end. Our people didn't know first hand of the unbelievably bloody battles in the mud of Flanders. Thus we aren't mindful of the challenges these battles posed to the will, stamina and courage of the British fighting men. One great test was the Battle of the Somme. According to the Encyclopedia Americana, 57,450 British soldiers died on the first day of the battle-as many men as America lost in the entire Vietnam War. British communities were utterly devastated. Young men were lost from every street in Britain. Britain's stake in this battle was a small patch of muddy Belgian soil. The Somme was one of the most shocking events in the history of our civilization, an utterly unnecessary battle. Total British losses in the protracted battle totaled 420,000 men. The Somme also was the most extraordinary demonstration of heroism on the part of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers.

Passchendaele, the final combat phase within the overall battle, has been described by countless writers with varying degrees of knowledge. One very ordinary but nevertheless striking account appears in, of all places, in a mystery story Aunt Dimitry Beats the Devil by Nancy Atherton (1917). She has a fictional character say of Passchendaele that it is

. . . a lowland village surrounded by bogs drained by a system of dikes and canals. Artillery barrages destroyed the drainage system and when the rain came, the bogs were reborn. Farm fields became sucking quagmires that swallowed horses whole. Wounded men pitched forward into the mud and drowned. They sank without a trace. More than 40,000 soldiers vanished in an insatiable sea of mud.

Behind the stubborn courage and heroism of British soldiers on the Western Front 1914-1918, including Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians, was more than 850 years of fidelity to king and country. It accounts for the tenacity of soldiers from Britain and the dominions who fought on through a modern hell.

Almost 90 years later British soldiers put their lives on the line in Afghanistan. But it is hard to imagine, courageous as these soldiers are, going through the kind of meat grinder that was the Battle of the Somme.

If the strategic folly and waste of the Somme is hard to comprehend today, it certainly is difficult to comprehend the valor-"all they were"-of the British and allied soldiers who knew they would be pulverized by German artillery hitting trenches or mowing them down as they went "over the top" and sought, usually in vain, to advance through the murderous fire and cut through the razor-sharp barbed wire entanglements. The amazing thing is that the British troops didn't march against the senior commanders who, in their stupidity and unconcern for their men, ordered the Tommies to attack in the face of a hurricane of steel and high explosives. Unlike some of the French, however, they did not mutiny. They obeyed the mad orders of their superiors. The butchers at the top of the British army and their political masters killed off the best and the brightest of a generation as well as those who only had the most modest skills.

On a visit to Sandhurst, the British military academy, some years ago, I took note of the memorial plaques on the walls-plaques that marked the death of young British officers in combat, the majority in the First World War. Many of the plaques were dedicated to graduates of Sandhurst who died on the Somme and in other insane frontal attacks ordered by the high command. Many of the fallen were members of families that served and fought for England since Agincourt. Their contributions would never again be available to the kingdom.

Many families spared in World War I were savaged in World War II two decades later. It was a terrible toll imposed within the period of a generation, a toll on our civilization and not simply a single country. But Americans should understand that was a toll paid directly by the British that allowed the United States to pay a lesser price. For Britons, there was no possibility of a full recovery. Too much blood had been shed. Ironically, the bloodstream of the Anglo-Saxon world in the home island was altered by massive immigration from the Third World as a result of a failure of vision, nerve, confidence and authority after 1945. Government and the powers that be did not act to safeguard the Mother Country for the exclusive benefit of people from the United Kingdom. The old population of the kingdom will pay for this failure for untold centuries.

Churchill told the British people they would pay the price of victory in blood, sweat and tears. But he had no idea that the British world would be compromised by a vast influx of aliens, and barbarism would be inserted in the life of the United Kingdom as evidenced by the militant Islamist agitation in many of England's cities, an agitation that is proof of an alien culture within the British world. The tragedy of the First World War-the initiating event in the unraveling of Anglo-Saxon civilization, has a variety of facets.

It begins with Britain's unnecessary participation in the conflict on the Continent. To be sure, the British government feared German domination of Europe, a fear that had affected Britain from Napoleonic times. The British government also feared the expanding German navy and the threat it could pose to British territories in Africa. These were legitimate fears but need not have been controlling. Britain could have dealt with these challenges and threats rather than engaging in ground war in Europe. The British navy could have been expanded to an extent the Kaiser could not have equaled. Such a course would have avoided any loss of life.

In any case, the German challenge was national, not, ideological. It didn't pose a threat to British values or the British way of life. If the United Kingdom had not joined the French in a continental war, Britain would have been spared the horrendous bloodletting of the First World War and the loss of the most incredible amount of national treasure.

The Second World War was a very different situation. In 1939, Britain faced an ideological foe, a totalitarian regime bent on invading Great Britain and destroying the civilized life and traditions of free people in the West.

The Britain of 1939 was a very different place from the Britain of 1914. It knew through bitter experience the meaning of modern war. It not only faced the cruel Hitlerite German regime, guilty of unspeakable atrocities against Jews and others, but it had undergone serious problems with subversive forces on the left which favored the brutal Communist regime that held the Russian people in its grip.

Socially, the Britain of 1939 had undergone considerable change from the early1900s. Class differences had diminished if they had not totally disappeared. The father of a British friend of mine (he served in the British army 1932-34 and, again, 1939-45) notes that he never heard class discussed during his years of service at home and abroad. He attributes much of the change to the emergence of labor unionism in the inter-war years.

That the British people would respond so swiftly to Hitlerite Germany and with such complete understanding of the threat to their civilized, decent way of life is a tremendous tribute to them. The tribute must extend to the people in the dominions who responded with the same speed and clarity of vision. Future generations of civilized people should never cease to pay tribute to them for this response. What a contrast this was to the response of the divided French people to the Nazi threat and occupation. The British response is a testament to the solidity of British institutions and the unity and strength that grew out of them. Americans ought to be thankful that we don't have multicultural institutions that make for divided and flawed responses to crises. Britain always is notable for the quality of patience. This certainly is true both of the First World War and its aftermath.

Consider the situation of British servicemen at the end of World War I. After years of heroic action, British demobilized servicemen found themselves in a desperate situation.

Apparently no one in authority had given serious thought as to how the ex-servicemen would be employed, certainly not how they would have a better life after the years of sacrifice. The war industries closed down. Britain's situation with respect to foreign trade was perilous. Even before the war Britain was lagging in development of new technologies for the manufacture of goods to be sold in foreign markets. So there was little industry to absorb the demobilized soldiers and sailors. The government was not thinking in terms of providing any opportunities for those who had achieved military success. As a result, many ex-soldiers were forced back into the menial occupations-the service occupations-they had held prior to the outbreak of war. Resistance to this unhappy and unfair situation was not strong or widespread. Class subservience remained with inequalities very evident. Land remained concentrated in too few hands.

The bad situation overall had to make many veterans realize "all they had been and would never be again." Negativism and despair regarding their economic and social situation undoubtedly festered in the inter-war period.

The post-World War II period brought other problems. Many Britons were to suffer another letdown after the empire began to unravel-and this after heroic military operations from North Africa to Burma. Many British people went out to the empire in the 20th century when conditions were bad at home. These people created great economic progress in backward lands. They helped establish a civil order that gave the indigenous peoples of the empire the first law-based civilized order that they had ever known. The Britons who achieved this from India to Rhodesia received absolutely no credit for what they did. On the contrary, they were reviled in academia and the international media. "Colonialism" became an international dirty word from New York to Paris. Colonialism, at least in the British colonies, should have been seen as a great progressive operation unprecedented in history. The United States, certainly under President Franklin Roosevelt, bears a heavy responsibility for not recognizing and acknowledging the achievements and lasting importance of the British empire. Historians should explore and discover who in his inner circle of advisers turned him against the empire.

Little attention has been paid to those who manned the outposts of empire until the very end. After the Second War, veterans of combat against the Nazis, including Spitfire pilots such as Ian Smith of Rhodesia, went out to Africa to find the challenges and rewards that the dominant socialist government at home denied the able and adventurous. They fought against the barbaric Mau Mau in Kenya and other manifestations of a return to the heart of darkness. Others helped counsel and guide emirs and sheiks whose people were beginning to emerge from a still medieval Arabian world. In India, the British laid the foundation for government that in many respects resembles the civilized government established over the centuries in the British Isles. The British officers of the old Indian army established the basis for the controlled and obedient army of the new Indian Union.

How difficult and sad it was for these capable and decent people to accept the surrender of empire engineered by socialist ideologues who, at the same time, were opening the United Kingdom to a horde of immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, people who were incompatible with the ancient stock of the United Kingdom. We don't see the personal tragedies of those who were forced to leave Africa and Asia and return to an island that had become alien to them, where there wasn't any place for them and where economic opportunities were virtually non-existent, where the whole thrust of government was on leveling, on taking from the talented and energetic and redistributing the wealth to the indolent and incapable.

We can't be sure how many Britons suffered this fate and how they managed to get through life after their return to the U.K. Their experience is not something that television producers in Britain or America have any interest in exploring. But their tragedy was unquestionably real. And they undoubtedly dwelt in their minds on all they were and would never be again.

They surely were heartsick when they read the papers and learned that all they had achieved was going down the tube, as legal processes in the former colonies were corrupted, as they discovered how the economies they had built up were wrecked by incompetence and thievery, as they saw lands and people who lived in peace and security under British colonial rule were plunged into bloody strife. Consider Rhodesia, once a prosperous country living under the rule of law, now stricken by famine, with the surviving European farmers under brutal attack and driven off their lands by the government's thugs, and with all the people of the state now called Zimbabwe living under a murderous dictatorship. This is what "the winds of change" in Africa have wrought.

In history, individuals and entire countries can sometimes recover from huge disasters, as Europe did from the wars of religion and the United States from the Civil War. But not everyone, not every country or civilization, can survive and regain an important, valuable life. The ordered life enjoyed by the people of Roman Gaul was completely obliterated by the repeated incursions of the barbarians so that many centuries passed before civilized life was reconstituted. European primacy in much of what is called the Third World would seem to have been destroyed in what in history is deemed forever, and part of the tragedy is that it has been replaced by what are euphemistically called "developing" nations which, in truth, are examples of chaos, bloodshed, corruption, incompetence and barbarism. Such is the reality facing the world in the 21st century.