One man can bring an end to this wretched war. By Peter Hitchens.
What is it about war that makes people so unimaginative and thoughtless? As the long-heralded Ukrainian offensive against Russia’s invading troops seems to have begun, I notice that much of the media write rather impersonally about it, as if it is just an event on a map far away. There is no excuse for this.
Large numbers of young men on both sides, scared out of their wits, will be dying horribly, or being terribly wounded in ways which will affect them for the rest of their lives. I looked at archive newspaper reports of the great battle of the Somme in July 1916, likewise intended to repel the German invader from French soil. One account, in The Times of July 3, proclaimed: ‘Everything has gone well, our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counter-attacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners have been taken.’
The main headline trumpeted ‘Forward in the West’, and the reports said (no doubt truthfully) that there were large numbers of enemy dead. I am not sneering at what these people wrote and what their editors published. Nobody knew, except the soldiers themselves, the ghastly horror of modern warfare when one huge army throws itself at another which has dug into strong defences.
They thought they were still writing about Victorian wars of dashing charges and noble combat. But there is no excuse for any such illusions now. We know the truth. If anyone is in any doubt about the grisly misery of modern war, please read John Harris’s marvellous book Covenant With Death. While they still lived, Harris interviewed surviving veterans of the Somme and turned their memories into a novel of extraordinary power. Nobody who reads it could ever choose to launch or sustain such warfare.
President Biden knows this war will end with negotiations. He said in June 2022: ‘At some point there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here.’ If he wants such talks, he can obtain them, beyond doubt. Ukraine can fight only as long as Washington wants it to.
But a regiment of army-barmy politicians and teenage scribblers, who have never seen a dead body or heard a bullet fly, urge war to the end and the young men are ground into the mud and slime, for the vainglory of others far away. MOS
