For Whom the Bell Tolls Read online

  The pretext was entangled in a lie,

  The costs were not so hard to prophesy:

  At home, the coffins carried shoulder high,

  The massed uncounted casualties abroad.

  The growing public clamour and discord,

  The deep misgivings of the Army Board,

  The doubts of diplomats were all ignored.

  The lawyerly advice was disregarded

  (So, what on earth were all those lawyers for?),

  Due processes were bypassed and discarded,

  Because of the temptations of a war

  To one who would so easily succumb

  To the seductions of a distant drum.

  Forty Five Minutes

  The claim was clear, without a caveat,

  No doubt or reservation left within it;

  That the dictator’s arsenal could threaten,

  And his assembled weaponry strike at

  Our soil within a mere forty-five-minute

  Time span – only a blink to Armageddon.

  The claim was false. There’s still a mystery why it

  Should ever have passed through the sifters’ screen

  As usable real world intelligence.

  Jack Straw admitted they’d been haunted by it,

  And so by God they surely should have been,

  Considering those who died in consequence.

  We wonder what on earth these people think,

  Enclosed within their parliamentary bubble,

  Who forfeit lives while hardly drawing breath;

  They’ll take a peaceful nation to the brink,

  Turn villages in target zones to rubble,

  And sentence unknown innocents to death.

  Political Gymnastics

  The practice of politicians that gives us the most bother

  Is that of saying one thing and then doing another.

  Nothing new there of course:

  Cromwell said they had no more religion than his horse.

  An MP who believes that the earth goes round the sun and that is that

  Will cheerfully vote for a government motion that the earth is flat.

  With only a despatch box as the prize,

  He’ll back a war based on a pack of lies.

  Consider the Right Honourable Jack Straw,

  Then Foreign Secretary (or Minister for War),

  Whose doubts about Iraq were quite emphatic,

  But whose twists and turns were downright acrobatic.

  He wrote privately that the case was far from clear,

  And then publicly defended it at the UN and elsewhere.

  If they disappoint

  To that extent

  And don’t repent,

  Then what’s the bloody point?

  Minister of State

  He made his reputation in committee;

  His special skill was to negotiate

  Conflicts of interest within the City,

  And now he is a Minister of State.

  Suited and suave, he’s ignorant of the pity

  Of war, and yet the power to annihilate

  Lies with the Honourable Walter Mitty.

  And his decisions seal a soldier’s fate.

  Retreat from Basra

  General Lord Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff from 2006 to 2009, is now Constable of the Tower of London.

  He was installed Chief of the General Staff

  When truths about the war were still unspoken,

  The costs and casualties were off the graph,

  His cherished Army close to being broken.

  We had of course fought in Iraq before,

  Emblazoned on so many battle honours;

  But had as often lost as won the war;

  Lessons of history rested lightly on us.

  His doubts and reservations were not shared

  By politicians who denied defeat.

  And so he risked his future and declared

  The time had come for orderly retreat.

  A deal was duly struck with hostile forces,

  His soldiers pulled out at the dead of night,

  Lacking the will, the strength and the resources;

  It was no victory, more a Dunkirk lite.

  Through all our history it’s been the fate

  Of those who ventured to speak truth to power:

  For challenging the wisdom of the state,

  The state would then consign them to the Tower.

  They did not hang him at the Traitor’s Gate,

  But still he felt the ministers’ displeasure;

  The Constable did not capitulate.

  Crown jewels are not the Tower’s only treasure.

  Hearts and Minds

  The operation’s winning minds and hearts,

  Or so we’re told, until the shooting starts;

  And then the hovering Apaches smother

  The Taliban (or not) with cannon fire

  And bombs and shells and missiles of all kinds,

  Under the euphemism of air cover.

  Collateral damage, once it was called ‘spillage’,

  Disintegrates another Afghan village.

  The casualties, both theirs and ours, rise higher;

  And all it’s ever doing for hearts and minds

  Is blowing them apart from one another.

  Wootton Bassett

  The flag-draped coffins now exceed twelve score

  And counting, for the news grows ever worse.

  The town’s become a funeral corridor;

  A tearful child throws flowers on a hearse.

  These last homecomings are a metaphor

  For feelings we can’t otherwise express:

  Condolences from Regiment and Corps

  Carry no comfort for the fatherless.

  And these are just the casualties we know;

  Others are shadows lurking in the past,

  The bruisings of the mind take years to show,

  But come to haunt their victims at the last.

  The overarching question: what’s it for?

  We cannot take leave of our history,

  We know we’ve fought these Afghan wars before:

  This is our fourth, who won the other three?

  And back at base, the men whose war this is,

  Men without medals, worry more and more:

  ‘These obsequies place too much emphasis

  Upon the costs and casualties of war.’

  To which we say: ‘Look well on scenes like this,

  The outcomes of your orders. Show the gains

  To set against this tide of casualties;

  And when have we prevailed on Afghan plains?’

  The Rifleman

  Felled by a roadside bomb he never saw,

  He lost both of his legs in ‘Panther’s Claw’,

  Another victim of our longest war;

  And with its scale of casualties revealed

  He has the right to ask what it was for.

  Or are we British going to do once more

  What we have done so many times before,

  Declare a victory and leave the field?

  Prisoners of War

  The 18th (East Anglian) Division landed in Singapore a few days before its surrender to the Japanese in February 1942. The division included three battalions of the Royal Norfolk Regiment and two battalions of the Suffolk Regiment. They are remembered each year, on the third Sunday in May, at a service in the Church of Our Lady and St Thomas of Canterbury in Wymondham, Norfolk.

  The doo
med 18th Division went to war

  To serve in undefended Singapore;

  And there, inside the fallen citadel,

  It suffered the captivity from hell.

  All but a handful have departed from us

  And each year, at Our Lady and St Thomas,

  We honour those who paid the final price,

  And wonder at their needless sacrifice.

  So to today – and is it not the essence

  Of folly that once more our battle groups,

  The best and bravest of our fighting troops,

  Are sent on far-flung, futile expeditions?

  The lesson of the history of these missions

  Is still the same: we do not learn its lessons.

  Loitering Munitions

  Americans don’t leave their foes to wonder,

  Their words of war both threaten and inform.

  An operation codenamed Rolling Thunder

  Will do just what it says, like Desert Storm.

  By contrast, ours are cryptic as they can be:

  Afghanistan is Operation Herrick,

  Gulf War One, mysteriously, was Granby,

  Its bastard progeny was branded Telic.

  But that’s the way with war. We are unwilling

  To look it in the face and contemplate

  The bloody thing it is, a way of killing

  That’s organised and licensed by the state.

  In warfare words like weapons can be fissile;

  A bomb is a ‘precision guided missile’.

  The battlefield is filtered through a prism

  Of weasel words and subtle euphemism.

  The sacrifice of innocent life and limb

  Requires a sort of verbal pirouette:

  ‘Collateral damage’ that we did to him

  Comes gift-wrapped with the spokesman’s ‘deep regret’.

  The human separations of a blitz

  Are outcomes that we find it hard to face;

  Blowing a crowded market place to bits

  Is merely ‘the control of battle space’.

  Pilotless aircraft, drones and UAVs

  Patrol the skies on surreptitious missions,

  Dispensing hell and havoc as they please

  Through laser-guided ‘loitering munitions’.

  ‘If you could see what we have seen of war …’

  That was the theme of Owen and Sassoon.

  Alas, there’s no such witness any more,

  Only a Reid, an Ainsworth or a Hoon.

  Foreboding

  Lines written in the Hiroshima Peace Park

  We can’t afford a future like our past,

  And, short of a redemption at the last,

  Our fall-out is so clearly one another’s,

  We need at least a better set of rules.

  The choice before us is to live like brothers

  Or else to die like fools.

  The Nuclear Option

  Consider the advances we have made,

  The science and technology of ours,

  The symphony, the waltz, the serenade,

  The arch, the dome, the spire, the colonnade;

  The benefits of industry and trade.

  We land men on the moon, reach for the stars,

  We photograph the surfaces of Mars.

  And yet … we deal in death in arms bazaars,

  We make a killing selling armoured cars;

  And with the Trident due for an upgrade

  The nuclear Frankenstein makes us afraid.

  And thus what threatens us in perpetuity

  Is just our own accursed ingenuity.

  It seems the Devil is a scientist

  And we, his most conniving of assistants,

  Through the equations of the physicist

  Can blow to kingdom come our whole existence.

  Our creativity’s of little worth

  If we unleash it to afflict the Earth

  And other forms of life by land and sea

  In every way less dangerous than we.

  Appeasement

  Children of Munich – I am one of them,

  Born in ill-favoured 1938 –

  Are short on heroism. Our ideal state

  Is not a shining city on a hill,

  Nor do we seek a New Jerusalem.

  We notice what the Triumph of the Will

  Achieved in Basra, Baghdad and Erbil.

  And over time we’ve had more than our fill

  Of those whose life’s ambition is to kill:

  Enough of fighting – let’s negotiate.

  Moonshine

  ‘I am sick and tired of fighting – its glory is all moonshine’

  General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1865

  Their dreams of war, straight from the silver screen,

  Are of John Wayne, George Scott and David Niven;

  They’ll take that trench and storm that hill. Dream-driven,

  The war games of the young can be forgiven.

  The truth of it is something yet unseen.

  They view the clash of men and arms as thrilling

  And, training for it, will be more than willing

  To play their part in state-mandated killing.

  The war they find is quite another story;

  Counting the costs of it, wounded and dead,

  Merely a waste of time and lives – its glory

  Is all moonshine, as General Sherman said.

  The fantasies of heroism subside,

  The bugle calls and muffled drumbeats cease;

  And those who soldiered on the darker side

  Are the most powerful advocates of peace.

  Libya

  The Typhoons and Tornados overhead

  Will spike his guns and waste his arsenals.

  By taking out the tank and howitzer

  They’ll turn the tide and stem the casualties.

  Beneath the No Fly Zone (the NFZ)

  His four decades of tyranny lie dead,

  The people win and the dictator falls –

  Except the story is a pack of lies.

  Recall the massacre at Srebrenica:

  It too happened under guarded skies.

  Airpower, the military Wizard of Oz,

  Was not decisive then and never was.

  No better strategy was ever found

  Than bashing on with boots upon the ground.

  History

  ‘What lessons should I learn if my ambition

  Is first and foremost just to stay alive?’

  The young man asked. The old man answered thus:

  ‘All other studies are superfluous,

  Where nothing counts but landmine recognition.

  If you don’t know it, you will not survive.’

  The young man said: ‘Then please address this mystery:

  In countries where the wars do not contrive

  To plant their devils’ gardens on the land,

  What does it serve us best to understand?’

  ‘History,’ he said, ‘just history and more history.

  Neglect that too and you will not survive.’

  Medal Parade

  The Generals of my youth were bright and zestful,

  Loyal, ambitious and extremely keen;

  But times were peaceful and they lacked a chest full

  Of medals given by a grateful Queen.

  The GSMs of course came with the ration,

  Like OBEs to which they all aspired,

  But gongs for gallantry were not in fa
shion.

  They turned to the right, saluted and retired.

  Much like the case of Captain Mainwaring

  Who had to cancel a full dress parade,

  Since medal-wise he didn’t have a thing,

  So Corporal Jones would put him in the shade.

  It’s different now. With politicians partial

  To putting on a military show,

  We’ve Sergeants with more gongs than a Field Marshal,

  And Corporals starting on their second row.

  And surely one must not be jealous, must one,

  To see the soldiers standing proud and tall?

  But knowing that the cause of war’s a just one

  Would be the grandest trophy of them all.

  The Lighthouse

  This seafaring legend derives from a series of radio messages said to have been exchanged between the Americans and Canadians in the north Atlantic in 1994.

  The Americans, sensing trouble up ahead,

  Confronted the Canadians and said

  They risked a course collision and should head

  Twelve degrees north, or else be targeted.

  The Canadians responded, ‘Zut alors!’

  (For they were Québecois) – ‘No one can force

  Us proud Canadians to change our course;

  We strongly recommend that you change yours.’

  The Americans, with mounting wrath and ire,

  Then upped the ante several notches higher,

  And ordered the Canadians to retire,

  Or the whole battle group would open fire.

  Came the reply, ‘We’re not a ship at all,

  But just a lighthouse on a rock – your call.’

  A Study in Contrasts

  The Honourable Humphrey Ponsonby MP,

  Now serving his fifth term, is not without

  A sense of his importance to the nation.

  His luxury’s a new plasma TV;

  An emergency’s a falling out

  With his constituency association;

  A fallen comrade is a party friend

  Whose term has come to a disgraceful end.