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| Something's been lost in translation here |
Recently I had a minor musical triumph but doubt anyone’s interested. Honest, making music beats listening to it. Not that the two are necessarily alternatives. Making music causes the listening ear to become more sensitive.
I’m recalling a warm day in 1955. June-ish. Before many of you were born. I’m holding an antique Lee Enfield rifle with a metal spike attached to the muzzle. The spike is an evolution of the sharp-edged sword (a bayonet) which British soldiers, fighting in The Great War, attached to their Lee Enfields. Resolutely I shut my mind to the sort of wound such swords would have made.
Five metres away (though they were feet in 1955) is a wooden frame surrounding a straw-filled sack. The sack has seen better days.
An RAF corporal instructor, sweating like a cart-horse, staggers into a jog-trot, roars something incomprehensible, and lunges his spike-equipped rifle at the sack. Spike and rifle muzzle project from the rear of the sack and the CI roars again. Approvingly.
Countries accumulate military personnel to defend against forceful threat. Note how reality is turned into an abstraction. Actually: to kill the threateners. I was later to maintain airborne radio equipment, not to kill. But that’s a fib. Radios helped guide planes to drop bombs which blew others to bits. Some threatened, some didn’t. Even RAF cooks indirectly participated in the killing. Keeping pilots and bomb-aimers nourished to meet the exigencies of their trade.
Later I had a go at the sack but my spike did not re-appear at the back. I suspect I moved slowly and, had it been for real, I might have come off second best.
Hey, I’m not preaching pacifism. But neither am I preaching war. I’m for sack attack. We all need to know just what war is. No euphemisms.
The RAF training for bayonet charges? The mind boggles.
ReplyDeleteThis country has not suffered enemy threatening to invade it since that last nasty in the 1940s. Then we were proud of our military and to see their uniforms being worn, off duty, in the streets.They were seen as saviours.
Our modern UK generations have no concept of such privations (thank god). Our military are paid to do our dirty work, kept apart and individual uniforms are no longer worn in public. The exception being the Chelsea Pensioners as seen in your heading image.Symbols really of an Empire which no longer exists.
Embarrassment has overtaken pride and maybe that is not a bad thing . When our coffined dead from Afghanistan were driven through the streets of Wooten Bassett the public turned out in droves to pay their respects. Eventually Blair's government were so embarrassed by this that returning dead were quietly unloaded elsewhere.
There were no "victory parades" after our involvement in that benighted country.
Avus: Any more remrkable than a Brown Job repairing radio equipment?
Deleteapparently the world has been at relative peace for too long. we may soon have to relearn how to stick them with the pointy end.
ReplyDeleteellen abbott: A little closer examination would, I think, reveal that warfare had been continuous
ReplyDeleteRe: your last paragraph. True that.
ReplyDeleteColette: For most people war is just a theory, something that happens in other countries. I can't pretend I came close to war but when I was repairing RAF radio kit on the island of Singapore, the so-called "emergency" was drawing to a close in adjacent Malaya (Note that we didn't call it a war; Putin isn't the only leader to go in for euphemism). As a result I did night-time guard duty equipped with a loaded rifle and manipulating a searchlight. Later, when my athlete's foot refused to clear up I was flown to a hospital at altitude in the Cameron Highlands (in Malaya) and we travelled as an armed convoy. I can also say I was lucky to avoid the shooting in Cyprus which was still going on during my two years' National Service.
ReplyDeleteIt always amuses me to learn how people in lofty government and other administrative positions managed to avoid doing their bit yet often spent time urging others, less fortunate, to risk having their head shot off in different parts of the globe. Trump is only one of many.
As I say, people who have opinions about war but have not put on a uniform, owe it to themselves to learn something about what this terrible activity consists of. A good start is to read Joseph Heller's Catch 22 - and , no, seeing the movie isn't at all the same thing.