‘Between the Crosses, Row on Row’

Phil Burpee, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice

Phil Burpee

Once many long years ago, I was picking apples with a young Frenchman. He was from Brittany and was out taking a look at life in different lands. One day we were discussing issues of war and peace  -  it was the time of Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan, ' the Gipper', and there was a general and genuine nervousness over the fact that the fate of our planetary civilization hung in the balance between an old, heavy-browed, Soviet  apparatchik,  and the lop-smiley faded actor and one-time star of 'Bedtime for Bonzo', the genial and well-coiffed former Republican Governor of California. Between them, they had at their disposal enough thermo-nuclear weaponry to completely annihilate each other's country a hundred times over, outright kill several hundred million humans, deliver the world into a nuclear winter which would in all likelihood precipitate the collapse of global food crops for an unknown period of time, and more or less bring about what to all intents and purposes might as well be called the End of the World. It was a skittery time.


So, we were discussing the niceties and fine points of pacifism and militarism one day, when he came out with the most astonishingly clear premise. Referring to the recent WWII history of his country, and in the spirit of the Resistance rather than that of the Vichy, he said  -  "I only know one thing  -  when the Nazi comes, you shoot." That was it  -  when all else has unfolded, from the failures of diplomacy to the madness of brinkmanship and totalitarian mobilization, from the fire-bombing of cities to the fork-tongued blandishments of politicians, from the drone of aircraft and the roar of Panzer diesels to the cry of a confused and frightened child  - when all this has culminated finally with the stomp of the jack-boot at your door, you are left with no option but to pick up the gun and shoot. At that moment, debate has run its course. It's clear - the Nazi must die.

But let's back up to another irrefutable premise  -  armed conflict is always the result of a failure of civil society. Strife is never spontaneous, but always has a sequence of lost opportunities and  sundry transgressions. Whether it be avarice or racism or religious zealotry or stupidity or visions of empire, some perversion of peaceable equilibrium causes the soldier to take up arms against his fellow man. And typically, it is the old man who sends the young man out to die. For it is the old man, who has lost his physical power to act, who must now affirm himself through his remaining power to manipulate. No greater manifestation of this can be found than the First World War. In this useless and lamentable conflict can be seen the dead hand of a veritable squadron of addled and pompous old men in the persons of kings, dukes, prime ministers, generals, church leaders and industrialists. The British Monarchy itself was a festering relic of the German House of Saxe-Coburg, and judiciously only changed its name to Windsor to alleviate growing public concern over all things German. The resulting conflagration, which consumed the lives of some 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians, not to mention 20 or 30 million others wounded, maimed, orphaned or displaced, advanced the cause of civilization not one whit. It's only lasting legacy was its culmination in the victor's feast known as the Treaty of Versailles, which was so punitive and vengeful towards Germany, that it crushed the German economy, and along with it the safeguards and bulwarks of its civil society, and gave rise, ultimately, to joblessness, despondency, hatred, and the slow rise of National Socialism (Nazism).

We celebrate the sacrifice of our veterans with good cause. The deaths and injuries that visit these men and women remind us that we have somehow all collectively failed to prevent the ongoing causes of such loss. When Chinese MiG-15s and NATO F-86 Sabres carved their dogfights across the troubled skies of Korea in the 1950s, we recognized that the ideological intransigence that was meant to have been vanquished with the fall of the Third Reich had, in fact, only intensified with the formalization of the Cold War. Hitler had been quashed, but astonishingly, several other monstrous bogey-men had popped up to taunt and threaten us  -  Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Guevera  - the Communist hordes were at our doors - the Red Peril, the Yellow Peril. On the worst day of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, I remember my Mother telling me and my brother to not listen to the teachers at school if anything happened, but to run for home. Air-raid sirens were being tested in our cities. Strontium 90 was showing up in mother's milk from air-burst nuclear bomb tests. That was a skittery time too.

Today we receive our warriors home from Afghanistan. Some are well, though grim. Some are broken spiritually or emotionally. Some are broken physically. Some are in boxes. All have served with bravery, integrity and singleness of purpose  -  to honour the dangerous work that we have sent them to do. And that work, hugely challenging though it already is or was, has been made several orders of magnitude more difficult because the President of the United States had determined, for ideological reasons, to squander the necessary and proportionate military effort and precious good will through the criminally irresponsible decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Another old man sends the young out to die. And this a man who had contrived, in his time, not to go himself to fight. Hark! - the fife and the drum - and the craven shirker.

It is right to be sober and contemplative at this time of year. It is right to remember. My Dad joined the Corvette Navy and spent the Second World War shepherding convoys across the North Atlantic amongst the roving wolfpacks of German U-Boats. My Mom went to Halifax and worked for Munitions and Supply. My Uncle Rocky, an American, landed in North Africa and fought up the length of Italy with the US Army, rousting out the Wehrmacht. My second cousin Lewis was an RCAF Lancaster Pilot, shot down and killed in a Dambuster raid over Gilze-Rijen . I was brought up in the diminishing echo of the War. I’m sure I would have gone too  -  to shoot the Nazi. Yet, over the years I have also known many fine people from amongst Mennonite and Doukhabor and Quaker communities for whom the prospect of killing other human beings is so alien and fundamentally repugnant that they simply will not be compelled to do so. They are of the belief that if people refuse to kill, then killing will not be done. It is a sublime concept. It is called peace. To achieve it requires the sort of vigilance and deep moral and ethical bravery which so far has eluded us in this world. We still allow misunderstanding and affront and belligerence and tribalism to deliver us into further conflict. It will  continue to be so for some time to come. We are clearly still embroiled in the childhood of our growth into mature global citizens. We conspire, again and again, to diminish in our eyes and our estimation some 'other' out there, and in so doing, make them somehow that much less human, so that we can say we have slain them in some righteous cause, and that murder is not the work of a soldier, for the killing of an enemy is no crime.

The poem 'In Flanders Fields", by Major John McCrae, a Canadian military doctor and artillery commander at Ypres, offers these lines, speaking for the fallen soldiers: -

"Take up our quarrel with the foe
                                      To you from failing hands we throw the torch"

Here, the soldier encourages the soldier to keep up the fight  -  to die   -  to win.

But we may also remember the words of the old Edwin Starr song 'War'.

"War, whoa, Lord
what is it good for? -
absolutely nothin'!"

Lest we forget.


Phil Burpee
November 11, 2011