The Second Gulf War has already
produced its first great work of oratory, a battlefield speech that
could stand, in an unassuming way, alongside Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address and Churchill's inspiring wartime rhetoric. A century hence,
people will still be reading the speech written by Lieutenant-Colonel
Tim Collins, the 42-year-old commander of The Royal Irish battle group,
which he delivered to his troops in Kuwait on Wednesday afternoon, just
hours before they went into battle. Colonel Collins has a history
degree, but does not look like a poet. Readers of The Times will
have seen his photograph, in shades and combat gear, a cigar clamped
between his teeth. He has the air of a Rambo, but the literary touch of
a Rimbaud.
Imagine you are in the Kuwaiti desert, your face sandpapered raw, scared
to your bowels and stoned on adrenalin, knowing you are about to fight,
and kill, or die. And hear this:
19th
March 2003
"The enemy
should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing
about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who
have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of Hell for
Saddam. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to
this place. Show them no pity. But those who do not wish to go on that
journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock
their world.
"We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in
their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only
flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Don't treat
them as refugees, for they are in their own country.
"I know men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts.
They live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to
you, then remember they have that right in international law, and
ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to
fight, well, we aim to please. If there are casualties of war, then
remember, when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did
not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them
properly, and mark their graves.
"You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest, for
your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history.
It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood, and the
birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will have to go a long way
to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis.
You will be embarrassed by their hospitality, even though they have
nothing ...
"There may be people among us who will not see the end of this
campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back.
There will be no time for sorrow. Let's leave Iraq a better place for
us having been there. Our business now, is north."
The words of Colonel Collins
will long survive this war, for in their raw clarity, they capture its
essence, and a military sensibility that is peculiar to our time. In
sharp contrast to the gusts of war rhetoric from politicians we have
been hearing for the past month, Collins spoke of history, family,
respect, dignity, and the individual moral choice between killing
justly, and just killing. Saddam may merit the fires of Hell, but
Collins's men will also remember the ordinary man who got dressed this
morning in tattered Iraqi uniform, with a culture older than ours.
Collins' oration echoes the
King James Bible, but it is also the language of the Playstation rock
their world. It comes without demons, or plastic martyrs; he does not
promise Dulce et decorum, but sharp modern irony we aim to
please. Put out fewer flags, he urged them, and tread lightly. This is
precisely the reverse of the battlefield oratory used to motivate
British troops a century ago.
The language of war was
changed forever by the First World War. Before 1914, battle rhetoric
strictly followed the cadences of Henry V and Henry Newbolt "We
few, we happy few"; "Play up and play the game." But
after four years of carnage, the holy abstractions of honour, patriotism
and duty, framed into set-piece epitaphs by Rudyard Kipling and carved
on numberless gravestones, seemed grotesque.
"I was always embarrassed
by the words 'sacred', 'glorious', and 'sacrifice'," wrote Ernest
Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. "Abstract words such as
'glory', 'honour', 'courage' or 'hallow' were obscene beside the
concrete names of villages, the numbers of regiments and the
dates."
The language of the Second
World War was more honest, but it still harked back to an ancient
tradition of patriotic warrior poetry, while introducing the grim
dishonesty of military euphemism, memorably lampooned by Joseph Heller
in Catch-22, that continues in such cowardly combinations as
"collateral damage" (dead people) and "target-rich
environments" (lots of dead people).
Collins, by contrast, spoke in
an emotive modern vernacular ferocious, but also slangy, ironic, and
gentle. God and country are there, but in undertone. The valour lies not
in bloodshed, but in decency; not in winning, but in leaving well. And
at its heart, his speech offers this unlikely truth that war is not
glorious, or fun, but complicated and morally messy; not a matter of
sacred shrouds, poppy fields and noble deaths, but of dead friends,
wrapped in sleeping bags.
Millions of war words will be
spilled in the coming weeks, but none more powerful than these. Perhaps
Collins does not know it (Lincoln genuinely thought few would remember
his speech at Gettysburg), but he has written a simple and stirring
prose-poem for the 21st-century soldier.
You will have to go a long way
to find a more decent, generous and upright evocation of what modern war
means. |