A Corner of Some Foreign Field

When you watch a good film, it hangs around in your head. Sometimes for years. I had 'Johnny Got Your Gun' imprinted on my mind for a few decades. The imagery of Jesus riding in the guard wagon of a troop carrying train on its way to the front line of the first world war, the paralysed soldier hallucinating that rats were jumping on his face. The horror was bald, raw and quietly excoriating. It was brought up again a few months ago when my son told me he had watched an horrific film the night before. I just knew what it was, and I was right.

I've read quite a lot about the horrors of war, the conditions in the trenches,the lives of the fighter pilots in the second and what Vietnam was like. It astonishes me that with so much literature and other documentary evidence available, young men and women will still go to war. Or maybe it is us, society, that is belying belief to still be sending them, to expect them to donate their limbs, lives or sanity for whatever cause is politically correct at the time.

That is not to diminish the bravery of those who take risks and show great courage in times of immense stress, but more to diminish all of us who's failure to find a better solution sends young men and women into their own personal armageddon. There are many MPs we can't trust not to fiddle their expenses, yet we trust them to make the decisions to send our best into situations so grotesque we may never be shown them. Heavy censorship will prevent us ever really understanding the conditions in places like Afghanistan, what we see in the press will always be a thin truth.

We need the artists, film-makers, poets and writers to find a way to bring the reality home.

And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country`s pride. Bertrand Russell 1914