IN another war, in a different age, one of my grandfather's brothers was killed by Muslims.
They didn't know they were doing it – an artillery barrage is anonymous – and the place where a shellburst puked earth over an Edinburgh teenager no longer exists on the maps. In those days, it had a Biblical name: Mesopotamia. No body was recovered.
As best as I can work out it was a lousy campaign, run by incompetents, fought by youths who didn't know, most of the time, where the hell they were, or why. By their lights, amid the usual imperial catastrophes, they did their jobs. The Turks lost, we won, and the world was made safe for Edinburgh's stinking slums. Lots of families have these stories.
For some, the stories are overlaid, generation upon generation, like a child's whispering flicker-book. My story, the brief tale of Private Alfred Mackay, ended almost a century ago. Lying about his age to serve his country's cause didn't help Alfred much. I know nothing about him save the brevity of his existence. Thanks to Mesopotamia, there wasn't much to know. Memory is curtailed: the world ends.
Sacrifice becomes the official word of last resort in every sanctioned war. It becomes revealing, too: those with power have nothing else to say. They invoke a word that seems sacred, for lives that are sacred, when all the vaunted policies are verbiage and dust. Why did he die? It was "a sacrifice". The power of human pain to reduce each of us to silence is exploited, over and again, to shut us up.
Some things are new, though. I had heard, though only half believed, about the ritual of photographing all squaddies deployed to Afghanistan. Proper images are required, for the records and for the media, if the worst befalls. I have it on good authority that getting the photie has indeed become quite the game. Boys dress with care for it, and have the colours at their backs. A day is set aside to capture scrubbed faces as they would wish to be remembered. Do these youths understand? Ken what? Your last smile had as well be a good one. If no', there's likesay a laugh, right? Because I know some of the sounds from some of the places, I think I can almost hear them.
But I can't. The pictures are the ones displayed, generally, just before the latest defence minister appears on TV to tell you of his belief in sacrifice and the inflexible purpose of the latest policy. The six dead from the Yorkshires each have their pictures on the screen now: caps set, jaws out, the tribal colours at their backs. Proud.
They are astonishingly young; they believe in what they are doing; they believe they can see off all-comers; and they are dead. That makes 404. I don't know why the latest and best of imperial wagons proved susceptible to a roadside device. When I'm in my armchair, I lay aside my marshal's baton. What do I know?
Were I called in aid, though, I would bring up Ireland, and say that no-one packs quite so much explosive into one spot just to hit one target, not unless their intelligence is precise, and because they enjoy local complicity, and because a stunt is being pulled. The Yorkshire Regiment is not being invited to interrogate ministers in the government of Hamid Karzai, however, and nor am I.
In the second of the 20th century's big wars, all concerned got handed a pamphlet, a talk, or an inspirational film. It varied by political degree, or according to language. The Nazi version was Wofur wir Kampfen. Soviet Russia had Why We Fight For Communism. The Americans went for a Frank Capra movie series, Why We Fight. Even in the most fundamental conflict of the age an explanation was deemed necessary. Death is never self-evident.
Why do we fight? The soldiers would say that it is not theirs to reason. They are not always honest about that. Only if you believe that we send automata out under our flag can you believe that soldiers don't think twice about what they are doing, or why. You would have to be stupid to think that a serving person does not wonder about the job, or doubt.
Service morale towards Afghanistan is not high. A decade of blood loss, while one politician after another formulates this week's tale, is ending with the usual Afghan rearguard while the redundancy notices are handed out. Even in the Victorian age, things were managed better. In that age, a catastrophe was given its name.
Any war that lasts a decade is a failed war. Any war whose declared aims alters – terrorism, drugs, democracy, the rights of women – according to the weekly media needs of Downing Street, is a bad war. "Strategic"? If you want a long article on the vast mineral wealth beneath the Afghan dirt, or the relationship between America, Russia, China and trans-global Islamism, wait another day. Why do we fight?
Those who killed the Yorkshires were probably not much older than 20 or 21. They probably had a lead NCO in his early 30s. Young men are sent to kill while old men shuffle the pieces. Afghanistan, for Britain, might count as the last catastrophe. After each of those truncated sentences, bereft even of the grim poetry of war, what remains?
Regimental pride does not serve our young men well. There are too many corpses, for too many stupid reasons, and most of those corpses are Afghan. Flags are not worth that game. So here's a blasphemy: when we mourn our dead, who counts the people they killed, rightly or wrongly, in our name? Who then attends to the habit of indoctrinating our young men into this cult of death in places they could not otherwise find on a map?
It's not their fault. They believe, because they are told to believe, that they are defending the gates. Perhaps they are. History's repetitions suggest instead that words such as sacrifice and duty and loyalty give thin cover to this generation's slaughters. Blinded by grief and loss, we cease to think.
Why are we in Afghanistan? Because someone in the White House once thought it a good idea. Why will we quit Afghanistan, a couple of years down the line? Because the White House wants rid of a tactical error. Will a girl-child in Afghanistan inherit her rights because six boys from Yorkshire had their death-images made by a camera?
(Not even. President Karzai's office has just published, unquestioningly, a declaration by the country's top clerics that women are subordinate to men, shouldn't travel without male guardians and should be segregated in work and education.)
If you need to find a fault, seek it within your own democracy, the one that gives honour to the dead and forgets to ask who issued the orders, or gave licence to a decade of killing for no reason named. Then ask why we go on training young men in habits of Spartan pride, beautiful as their mothers made them, innocent until they kill or are killed, beneath a tribal flag.
What makes it worse is that this time we will not have the nerve to claim a victory. Back in Mesopotamia, poor innocent Alfred was counted among the winners. We should all have sons so lucky. We are better off with sons alive.
