Protest for Peace - 11 October 2002

Last Sunday afternoon I took my nap earlier than usual because I wanted to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by four o'clock, to see if the best golfer in the world could sustain this season's astonishing dominance of the game.

However, I had no need of my little alarm clock.

At about 3.30 a large, distant roar, as of a series of breaking waves, woke me up.

Now the night before I'd watched a sombre television programme on the American Civil War and at the end of it I noticed, with relief, that it had not, so far as I'd seen, included scenes from the conscription, the so-called draft riots, of 1863.

I was relieved because the photographic record would have been as grisly as the long Brady panoramas of the trenches of the dead.

After almost two years of the civil war Lincoln found himself desperately short of recruits. And Congress passed a draft act.

Looked over today it's a cruel, preposterous act. But it was passed and approved by men who were as sensible and sensitive as any of us but plainly had, what we now call, different values from our own.

The act required all men between 20 and 45 to register. If you were called, however, there was nothing inevitable about your having to serve - you could be excused if you paid the draft board $300 or if you could succeed in buying a substitute to take your place for the duration or a three-year stint, whichever was the longer.

Of course this meant that the only people almost certain to have to fight for the North were the poor black and white, the down at heel, even inhabitants of European poor houses were cajoled, they were bought and shipped over here.

There was nothing furtive about this trade.

Federal agents strutted around the streets of all the northern cities rustling money in front of the poor, the layabouts, the saloon hangers-on.

And large posters were put up on notice boards and printed in newspapers, such as one I have and am looking at now.

A big black headline with an exclamation mark: "Avoid the Draft! Public attention is solicited to this order. All persons wishing to join any of the regiments listed below" etc. etc.

On the face of it this was a public invitation by the army to volunteer and not wait to be called in the draft.

But the brash headline made it plain that this order was also an invitation to arrive at the draft board with $300. It was signed John J Freedley, Captain, Provost Marshal's Office.

Inevitably the - in time, it took almost a year - the populace, those never clearly defined American people, rose up in outrage and there were infamous draft riots in many cities.

The worst were here in New York city. The mayor's mansion was burned to the ground, so was the Provost Marshal's Office and something called the Coloured Orphan Asylum.

The frantic mayor announced that he had suspended the draft.

Only after four days and nights, during which a thousand people were killed, did federal troops come in and disperse the mob that had overrun the city.

In other cities, indeed in other Northern states, the draft was just blandly ignored. About 30% of the total men on call never showed up.

Still of the two and a quarter million men who fought on the Northern side about three in four were volunteers. Had it not been so the Union cause would have long ago been doomed.

Well, it took quite a time, did it not, to tell why it took one second for me to respond to that outdoors roar with the dreadful thought - Oh my God, the draft riots!

In the next second I enjoyed that bath of relief that you always feel coming out of a remote and scary scene and recognising that you're awake in your own bed on a brilliant afternoon in October 2002.

However, in the wink of an eye that it takes to move from dream into reality your unconscious is still buzzing.

So in the third second I was saying, Oh my, it has happened.

It being what I have feared for some time and hinted at in my last letter.

Namely that if, as the last poll showed, the president goes to war with no declared allies, only 39% of the people will be with him.

What I foresaw and hated to foresee was a wave, eventually a vast wave, of anti-war riots.

And so after all my immediate reaction on waking was right - the breaking wave, the roar that woke me came from just below me in what's called the East Meadow of Central Park, where now I saw from my bedroom window a crowd of thousands chanting new slogans against the threat or imminence of a war on Iraq.

They were not scrawled on paper sheets, most were beautifully painted or printed and indicated that the rally had a sponsor.

Which indeed it had - an organisation called Not In Our Name. Its headquarters, need I say today, is a website.

The waving posters bore such messages and slogans as: "No War!" and "No More War!" and a sign I first saw in London in the 1930s: "We Love Peace" - the implication being that by saying so over and over is the best way to keep it or get it.

A very old speaker, a possible relic from the English 1930s, made the stirring announcement that "a large amount of the American people don't want our sons to be killed".

I think it's safe to say that a very large amount, probably all, of the American people don't want their sons or daughters to be killed.

There was one sign: "It Takes Courage Not To Make War", which reminded me at once of a sentence in a speech of President Woodrow Wilson, spoken a year or more before the United States came into the First World War:

"There is such a thing," he declaimed, "as being too proud to fight."

Not a sentence that stirred much applause in the French or British people who had, by that time, lost a couple of million of their sons, who also hated war and loved peace but volunteered anyway to go in against Germany.

Why? Because both nations had a treaty promise to protect in any future continental war the neutrality of Belgium.

I'd not meant, in fact I hated the prospect of talking yet again about Saddam Hussein, the Middle Eastern dictator it takes courage to do nothing about.

I've spent much of the past eight months, I should guess, going into the history of al-Qaeda - the 20 years, what I've called, the 20 years of our fools' paradise.

The 20 years of its birth and rearing and the careful planting of its active agents in 65 countries, its substantial bank accounts in over 200 countries.

The cunning variety of its deeds - the Trade Towers bombing only the crudest.

The main aim it seems and by now the most universally effective is to plant anxiety in large populations.

By now I, for one, should not at this reading be surprised to discover that the shooter or shooters responsible for the random murders of simple bystanders in Maryland and Washington DC turned out to be an al-Qaeda agent.

Certainly the effect must have been beyond the dreams of any simple loner.

To terrify the nation's capital city and all its surrounding suburbs so that interviews across a stretch of, say, 12 miles by 20 show parents of small children in villages and towns and shopping centres terrified of sending their children to school.

And the city of Washington has voted millions of dollars for a new school security programme.

The same suspicion to me is true of the anthrax scare which cost the federal government alone a billion dollars and remains unsolved.

Friends who drop in to see me at the "medicinal hour" of 6pm have been naturally in the habit down the years of talking over the news - the American news of the day - and tossing the opposing arguments back and forth.

About half my day has been spent on the subject for the past 65 years.

But since the nagging, unrelieved tension invoked by al-Qaeda and Saddam I've adopted a rule - no "shop" after 6pm.

Last Sunday I was alone, no need to enforce any rule.

I was up and sparkling - in a frosty old way - tingling with expectancy to see, as I said at the beginning, if the best golfer in the world could sustain this season's astonishing dominance of the great game.

I was not disappointed.

I'd had the foresight to tape the final round of what turned out to be a genuine world championship - composed of top players on the Asian tour, the European tour and of course the American tour, 22 in all.

So the present champ won over the rest of the abject universal field by six strokes on a tough course in Northern California.

Twenty-two under par, achieved with the easiest, the most unfussy, the most flawless iron play - long irons, middle irons, short irons - I can remember seeing in a great while.

It was the ninth tournament won by the same player this season, a feat only once matched on the men's tour since 1950.

I'm talking, of course, about the perky, modest, workmanlike, magical young Swede Annika Sorenstam.

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