Old hatreds

As I sit down to record this talk – a little earlier than usual, since I'm 6,000 miles away from its destination at Broadcasting House – I can't help noticing the bizarre coincidence that it's the 1,918th talk in this series and that it's being recorded on Monday 11. So, if this were a newspaper dispatch, it would bear the dateline, Letter From America 1918 11 November. I suppose that's a date which now has to be taught in schools since most of the people who lived through it in France, in Russia, in Britain, in every part of Australia, India, New Zealand, not to mention Germany and Austria and Turkey, are dead and gone.

But for those of us still around, it's as solemn and as indelible as any date in our lifetime. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, what we called the Great War and then the World War and then, ruefully, the First World War and now what's known to younger generations as simply, the '14–'18 War, was all over.

I was up at the first flicker of dawn because our newspaper had promised the day before that it would print, on the 11th, the terms of the Armistice. I took out several pages of what we then called 'cartridge' paper and in a laborious, but pretty fast script for a nine-year-old, I copied out the entire Armistice terms, gummed the pages together in a long scroll, rolled it up as stage plays and early movies had taught us to believe was the proper shape of a diplomatic document, tied it with a little red, white and blue ribbon and marched off around our seaside town, my left hand in my mother's hand, my right clutching this state document.

It should have been, to the neighbours, an early-warning signal of the emergence of a ham. It was, I recall, a crisp and sunny November day but the only other memory which is as sharp and mouthwatering as last night's dinner is a shop window. After our walk about on the way home, we passed by our local, what was then called our confectioners; I imagine today they're called pastry boutiques, just as in Paris the chicest boutique I know calls itself simply, Le Shop.

Anyway, a confectioner's window was of all window in war time, the most barren, the most pitifully denuded of all shops' windows. Sometimes there were two or three loaves of brown bread and sometimes there was none, but on that still, blissful, bright November morning, there stood glistening in the centre of the empty window a cut-glass cake stand and on the stand stood a bun, a round bun and on top of the bun was a circle of snow, of ice, no! – of something I'd never seen before – white icing! It was an iced bun and it was, for the long moment we stared at it, a thrilling symbol of the fact that we'd come through.

Well, last Monday, I paused in this reminiscence as the clock of San Francisco's nearby Grace Cathedral struck 11. I paused and looked out down on the graceful little rectangular park that surmounts Nob Hill. The hour struck, but nobody else was pausing. I don't know for how many years at that hour on that day and in how many countries everything stopped for precisely two minutes – street cars, buses, motorcars, people, the men doffing their hats – everybody standing stock still. The most unearthly silence in all great cities and two minutes later, everything started up again and soon the cities were roaring again.

It must be... it must be 20 years at least since this stunning and admirable custom ended. Perhaps it isn't admirable. After all, or after a time, to forget old enmities, old wars is necessary for the sanity of the living. At any rate, the two-minute silence is long gone and I should guess forgotten by most of the world's peoples.

You can't go on forever calling 11 November Armistice Day. In this country, it's been rechristened Veterans Day to commemorate the veterans of all the American wars from the first, the triumphant one which ended 200 years ago to the last, Vietnam, the bitterest one.

And on Sunday in Washington on a balmy morning, when it seemed everybody was out craning for a glimpse of the Royal couple, several thousand men and women and children, a silent troop of unforgetting mothers and widows and sisters and fathers took their turn to touch what is surely the boldest and most sombre of all war memorials, the vast, black stone wall on which are chiselled 58,022 names, the men who died in combat in Vietnam.

In the past day or two, I've read a lot of newspapers – because of its place in the time zone, San Francisco can offer you at breakfast not only the local papers and the Los Angeles Times, but also that morning's New York Times and London Times. I have read or scanned hundreds of pages but, only here, in the San Francisco Chronicle, have I seen a piece devoted entirely to recalling the first Armistice Day, 11 November and what it meant to a generation or two that is now white-haired or gone for good.

This was a piece by Herb Caen, a local columnist who is San Francisco's resident Mr Pepys. He remarked on how the importance of the day has waned and added, regretfully, that too many of our holidays are disappearing or becoming homogenised. As school kids we were so proud to remember 12 February as Lincoln's birthday and February 22 as Washington's, but now they've been telescoped into a long weekend. So much better for business, so much more convenient.

This is literally true. Whatever day of the week 22 February fell on, the entire nation used to close its businesses and schools and store windows displayed pictures or busts of George Washington and gave him a swag or drape of the Stars and Stripes. I ought to tell you, though, that while on Lincoln's birthday many states performed the same obeisance for old Abe, 12 February was never a national holiday and no president dared proclaim it as such, so long as the South retained its own resentful image of Lincoln as a tyrant at worst, at best, a northern conqueror. And, to this day, 120 years after the end of the Civil War, most Southern cities and towns – and they're embraced by a third of the nation's geography – don't exactly make a fetish of ignoring Lincoln's birthday, they pay it the passing tribute of a nod and go about their business.

So, it seems while many decent, solemn dates dim and vanish, the bitter taste of others keeps its tang. I noticed in the long spring commemoration of the end of the Second World War in Europe, the hideous fate of the Jews in the Holocaust was properly retold and mourned over, till however there came a point when I, for one, began to feel uneasy that this necessary but prolonged act of remembrance might have the opposite effect to what was intended, to stir in sullen or bigotted people their old anti-Semitic impulses.

Now this is not the sort of fear that respectable commentators put into print or over the air but I mention it because several friends, mostly Jewish friends, confidentially felt the same way. And this fear came very vivid to me when, after one of the many documentaries we saw about six million people being treated like pigs on a spit, one New York television station showed a family of Armenian Americans celebrating or bemoaning their own particular annual festival.

It was the seventieth anniversary of the infamous massacre of the Armenians by their Turkish conqueror. It had been going on since the 1890s but, in 1915, the Turks, in a final spasm of hatred, slaughtered all the able-bodied Armenians in sight and drove the rest out into the Syrian desert on the wholesale charge that all Armenians existed to help the Russian armies. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in the desert of starvation and/or sunstroke and, in the end, the official estimate of the Armenian dead was over one million.

This outrage was, of course, thoroughly reported at the time in Britain, all the more colourfully since Turkey was a fighting enemy, but after the war, the indignation cooled and the war hatreds eventually languished and died. In Britain, I mean, but not in America where there were, and are, always large colonies of immigrants, from every part of southern and central and eastern Europe. They feel acutely the sufferings of their relatives, partly, no doubt, from the guilt of not being there to share them.

When I came to this country in the early Thirties, small children everywhere were scolded for not cleaning their plates. 'Think', the parents used to say, 'of the starving Armenians!' And in several great cities and in one valley of California, almost entirely populated by Armenian immigrants, the old grievance against the Turks was nursed and kept green, but not, I should have thought, into 1985.

However, on the television programme I mentioned, a great-grandfather and a grandfather were on a night last spring instructing their small grandchildren, slowly, patiently, as you might teach them a nursery rhyme, instructing them in hatred of the Turks. I don't know why this scene horrified me, whereas the recall of the Nazi Holocaust seemed timely and right. Do an extra 30 years make all the difference? When will the Germans feel free from the stigma of the swastika? They are, to me, unanswerable questions.

But one thing was painfully clear last weekend. The war in Vietnam ended ten years ago but the wound to American morale is only partly healed. It was the first, great military defeat in the country's history. The veterans' administration calculates that between 300 and 400,000 of the men who served are still afflicted with what they call 'post trauma stress disorder' – what in the First World War was more bluntly called 'shell shock'.

One veteran who touched the black stone last weekend called it a memorial to desolation. So, Veterans' Day this year did, at least, remind us of the tenacity of old hatreds and leave us with the uncomfortable question, when will the Turks and the Germans and the Vietnamese be welcomed as equal members of the human family?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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