I'll be quite candid with you here.
I couldn't get worked up about the Waterloo commemorations yesterday. [THU]
I wasn't even bothered about Bannockburn or the First World War last year, the first because it wasn't really allowed on account of being a Scottish thing, the second because we were warned we'd better commemorate it or be thought unpatriotic nationalists. How confusing it all is.
While I'm being uncharacteristically candid, let me also say that I'm not striking an attitude here. I can't abide the kind of journalism that sets out to be different and, you know, interesting. I didn't get where I am today by being interesting.
Let me say further that I think a lot about the First World War, perhaps on the selfish grounds that, had I been around then, I might have been killed. I find it particularly disturbing that these jolly recruits had no idea about the horrible reality they were to encounter in the trenches.
I don't like noise either, and would surely have been driven demented by the artillery fire, upon which I would have deserted and been shot by my own side.
Nor, let me clarify, am I against remembrance as such. Indeed, I think we should dig up those who ordered the shootings of "deserters", pile their bodies on a pyre and set fire to it in some kind of moving, if arguably sinister, ceremony involving curses and recriminations.
Only joking. But I'm not joking about the fact that, at the time of going to press, I feel overwhelmed by all the commemorations. It's been one battle after another. I have battle commemoration fatigue.
I expect there are magazines dedicated to commemoration as a hobby. In the section marked "Depressing/Uplifting". Of course, depression should be the outcome of battle or war commemorations: how could we have been so stupid? So often. To the loss of so many lives.
On the other hand, perhaps we've grounds for optimism. After all, we don't have wars now, do we? Well, at least not like the First World War, where a soldier's life was held cheaply. Today, on the other hand, it tends to be civilians who suffer more, and that seems to me the worst of it.
Of Waterloo itself, worse luck, I confess little knowledge. Something to do with Lord Nelson beating the Belgians. No, I tell a lie. It was the Duke of Wellington beating Napoleon Bonaparte.
It seems to have been personal, and 10,000 gave their lives fighting for this pair of stinkers. I'm sure that, historically, it was worth it and that the battle was, you know, pivotal and all that. Certainly, it has been credited with a century of subsequent European peace (when there were lots of Africans to massacre), until the First World War brought it all back with a vengeance.
So what is it about war and battle commemorations that vexes me? Maybe it's because I'm a pleb and worse still, a serial outsider, instinctively retching at the sight of the Establishment all dressed up and managing somehow to be simultaneously humble and pompous. Maybe it's the broadcast news of these events, with the presenters' contrived facial expressions and rehearsed tones.
Cover it up though they may, but I sniff the air and detect a whiff of something inauthentic, even risible. I just don't trust it. The people doing the commemorating seem to be the same sorts who gave us something horrible to commemorate in the first place.
Again, typically torn, I berate myself: you cannot forget these events. Agreed. I just don't want it revolving around these suits, uniforms, and royal muppets. Every November 11, for example, I do my own wee thing for a couple of minutes, and it has nothing to do with them. It's remembrance containing actual thought. Dress code: casual.
Casual perusal of the internet earlier this year led me to learn about the train crash at Quintinshill, near Gretna, in 1915. Two hundred and sixteen soldiers from the Leith-based 7th Battalion Royal Scots lost their lives on their way to Liverpool for Gallipoli. As a man of Leith ancestry, that hit hard, particularly since I'd never heard of it. I needed reminding about that. Quietly.
But here's something you don't hear trumpeted about Waterloo. According to a report this week, looters took the teeth of the dead and sold them for use as dentures by the rich. I find that jaw-dropping revelation well worth remembering.
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