Wherever you are in the world, there’s no shortage of bad news. The nightly television bulletins are as gruelling as they’ve been for many years, with images of the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel jostling for airtime along with the plight of the Yazidi refugees sheltering on Mount Sinjar and the continuing conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Sometimes it seems as if half the world is at war.
These images – exhausted troops, terrified refugees, ruined towns – have a ghostly parallel on TV screens in the UK. This month marked the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, a conflict whose scale and suffering dwarfs all subsequent hostilities.
Unless you live in the UK it’s difficult to appreciate just how profound the conflict of 1914-18 was for Britons. While France and Germany suffered even more horrific casualties than Britain over the four years of madness, the war is far less commemorated in those countries than in the UK – perhaps because it has been partially subsumed by the events of the Second World War that followed.
In Britain, though, “The Great War” still exerts a profound psychological influence. And little wonder: so huge were the casualties among the armed forces that in some communities the male population aged between 18 and 40 was virtually wiped out. It is estimated that hardly a family in Britain was unaffected by the loss of a loved one – my own family being no exception, with my great uncle Frank Hill killed in action in 1917.
On August 5 this year, the people of Britain were invited to dim their domestic lights and place a single lit candle in the windows of their homes at precisely 11pm, to commemorate the moment that Great Britain reluctantly entered the war. The inspiration came from a famous comment made by Sir Edward Grey, who was foreign secretary in 1914. He is said to have looked out of the window of his office in central London at the gathering dusk and uttered the phrase: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life.”
Cinema may have been in its infancy back in 1914, yet there is no shortage of footage of the conflict. A century later, these grainy images, shot in black and white on hand-cranked cameras, have been shown once more as part of the many commemorative programmes broadcast almost nightly. There they are: the faces of thousands of young British soldiers, many still in their late teen years, some staring at the camera lens with expressions of mild bemusement, others with features already etched with fear and exhaustion.
These images have found themselves unexpectedly juxtaposed with images of contemporary events. The wars may be a century apart, but merely change the uniform and improve the weaponry, and those young men staring back at us from the trenches of northern France in 1914 could just as easily be the faces of those fighting in Donetsk or in any other of the myriad zones of battle around the world. Terror and hatred look the same in any era.
The philosopher George Santayana is credited with saying: “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” In recent weeks it has sometimes seemed as if the world has learnt nothing in 100 years other than how to slaughter one another more effectively.
Yet amid all this doom and gloom it’s worth remembering that in western Europe, at least, conflict is now a thing of the past. Once-warring nations have forged a commonality and unity of purpose that has resulted in peace for the past 70 years – something for which the much-derided European Union (EU) and its predecessor organisations must take much of the credit. It may be cumbersome, overly bureaucratic and stupendously wasteful, but if nothing else it has knitted together various disparate nations into a loose single entity.
How ironic then, that at exactly the time when Britons are remembering the past, the British government is contemplating a referendum on its membership of the EU.
There are many within the British Parliament who consider the EU to be expensive, self-serving and entirely counterproductive to national interests. Maybe so, but these individuals should also remember that despite its myriad shortcomings and iniquities, the EU has delivered the greatest gift of all to its people: that of continuing peace.
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer based in London
On Twitter: @michael_simkins
