The experiment Dannie Abse We are told by Plutarch that Julius Ceasar surpassed all other commanders for in his campaigns in Gaul, over a period of a decade, he stormed 800 cities and subdued 300 nations. He slaughtered 1,000,000 men and took another 1,000,000 prisoners. We may be taken aback by the sheer size of these figures but we feel very little. All that suffering, for which, of course, we were in no way responsible, occurred such a long time ago. We can neither respond deeply to the plight of Caesar's victims nor enthusiastically admire Caesar's victories. History has become a storybook, albeit bloody, but all that blood has rusted, is too old, ancient. Indeed the crucible of centuries has transformed it into mere theatrical red paint: great distance, the long perspective, the blurring of faraway scenes, makes even the worst savagery appear ritualistic, almost decorous. We feel otherwise about the wars and victims of our own century. Some men become hoarse shouting about them. In The Times today, I read that Senator George McGovern has made a speech in Beverly Hills, California. Despite the location, despite the proximity of the synthetic dream factories of Hollywood, he most earnestly shouted, 'Except for Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jewish people the American bombardment of defenceless peasants in Indo-China is the most barbaric act of modern times.' In 1947, Jung had already maintained, echoing others, that 'in Germany, a highly cultured land, the horrors exceeded by far anything the world has ever known.' But, of course, there is no competition: the man-made catastrophes of our times have only different names. Wherever modern man has been a wolf to modern man, whatever the roll call, call it Buchenwald or 54 THE EXPERIMENT Vietnam, whatever the name of the horror, there we are involved and there we must respond. Even the First World War has not yet become an opera or a prettified musical like, say, Fiddler on the Roof. We could not accept quite such a vulgarization or trivialization of that piece of our history yet. Oh, What a Lovely War at least owns a sardonic bite and is indeed a moral piece of theatre. After all, our fathers or grandfathers kept their heavy rainbowed medals in the bottom drawer of the bureau. We remember too the anecdotes they told us and the songs they hummed or whistled—the same songs that assault us so poignantly when we hear them today, played by some blind or crippled accordionist amongst the muffling traffic of a busy metropolis: 'Roses of Picardy', 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary', 'Smile, Smile, Smile'. We are moved by the silly heroism recounted in such First World War books as Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, or Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War; and the poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg continue to engage us in a meaningful, contemporary way. In short, the suffering of the First World War is still real to us—is not merely an epic tale told in a dark shadowy hall to the accompaniment of a melancholy harp. The pain and the suffering, though not our own but our fathers', or our fathers' fathers, was an expensive matter. So we hold on to it like a possession and we want no one to change it, to tarnish it. If the public calamities of our fathers' time are dear enough to us, our own seem barely supportable. We hardly think about them but they are always with us. We are all involved, every one of us, however far removed from those scenes of bleak, pale crimes. We are, metaphorically speaking, survivors because of them. We have lived through Auschwitz and Belsen, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and we did not know the enormity of the offence. We were not there. But with the passing of the years these catastrophes do not recede into history, do not become a tale in a storybook. On the contrary, something odd happens, the reverse happens, they come nearer and nearer, they become like scenes in a dream advancing towards us, on top of us, big, huge. For with...
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Sep 1, 1997
David Willings 
Open Access