The Anxiety of War - 28 March 2003

Dr Johnson, the great lumbering Dr Sam that is, said something the truth of which hadn't struck me until it was almost too late to act on.

"A man," he wrote, "should repair his friendships."

He was implying that of course the most agreeable people to be with are your own generation but in case you outlive them make friends with the young, you'll never regret it in the end.

Alas, the truth of this remark did not start to sting me until about six, seven years ago when my intimate friends were either gone or going, which is the saddest thing to watch.

But I got busy and acquired two, three new friends - kids, in their early 60s that is.

When you do this the first thing you have to do is rake through your separate interests and see what you have in common.

In a special way - I don't mean he's interested in carpentry but not golf and with you it's the other way round.

It's harder than that. It starts with the discovery that his whole culture is new to you.

If you're lucky there will be overlaps here and there. By which I mean he does not share your popular music or you his, authors, idioms, slang, politicians. your favourite movie stars he never saw or even heard of, your sports heroes and heroines.

In two successive days one of my new, cherished friends said:

"Who was Frankie Trumbauer?"

And worse:

"Who was or is the Babe?"

The Babe! Never to have heard of the Babe.

In May, Annika Sorenstam may help us to go on about her.

And then there was a studious type, 60-ish, had vaguely heard of Oliver Wendell Holmes. And I said not the doctor, not the essayist.

A blank, my lord, a blank, though I was referring to the man who for the past 50 years at least has been my intellectual load star - the son of the doctor, Mr Justice Holmes.

What hurts most, I think, is the change in manners.

I still start a little when a very nice, strange man comes into the room and says: "Hi".

That seems to be the most formal of standard greetings. Though he's greeting a man whose headmaster once said:

"The most abominable form of rudeness is casualness. Never, never boy talk to a lady, whether a girl or a woman, with your hands in your pocket."

And I still can't get used to letters addressed to my wife as "Jane Cooke" - worse, "Mrs Jane Cooke". She's not divorced.

Well it's possible to hurdle these obstacles and find a little common ground on which you can nurse a friendship.

And propped up there the other morning with the New York Times and the teacup I was delighted to hear over the phone the voice of a new close friend - I've known him only about eight years.

"Happy birthday," he said.

"What. How's that?"

Happy," he cried, "57th anniversary."

Bless the man, I felt like Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning. an intelligent boy, what a remarkable boy.

Nobody else in the world - no family, no friend, no officer of the BBC at home or abroad, had thought of it.

But somehow this alert, on-the-ball Irish American had filed at the back of his mind March 24th and what it meant to this old crone of an Anglo-Irishman.

Last Monday, not to keep the suspense unbearable, was the 57th anniversary of the first broadcast: Letter from America, 1946.

And then in the mail - the post - by one of those freakish coincidences that make you wonder if there isn't more to coincidence than coincidence, I had a letter from a man I should guess well into middle age, I suppose you could say it was masquerading as a fan letter.

He'd latched on to these talks and he wrote in a nicely patronising way that he thought they were rather good, he'd listened to quite a few, he understood they'd been going for quite a time.

"But I must say," he added, "you don't tell us much about yourself - where you come from, grew up, family and so on."

By a feat of deduction I decided he'd not been with us for 57 years or maybe even 57 weeks. Anyway I'm afraid I have this time to confide a personal note.

I take, I have to take, a nap in the late afternoon in order to be alive and agreeable in the evening.

For the past week or longer I've not napped, I've lain there - it's called resting I believe, but my mind turning over many things. "fretting" I think is the right word.

"It's the war," said my helpmeet with the wagging finger.

She was right. It was time to do something about it.

I let myself think the unthinkable and realised that my trouble was anxiety and you don't need a Freudian analyst to tell you that anxiety is bred by repressed fears, not suppressed, the fears you don't know you have or you don't want to recognise.

Well I've done a little digging and I find one fear at the back of my mind for months and it's time to haul it up front.

Instead of throwing down at you an abstract noun and I'm saying I'm talking about casualties, I believe I can make things plainer by telling a story which goes to the root of the fear.

You must bear with me if I take you back in imagination 87 years - 1916, the summer.

In France, a summer of heat and much rain. In any street in Lancashire, women and children mostly, going about their daily chores.

I was eight years old, an inquisitive age, well aware of what's going on.

What I recall going on was my mother indicated, the awful monotony of the newspapers - everything the war, the war, every day, heavy casualties.

Especially now - the battle for a river, the Battle of the Somme.

I'll make this revelation as brief as possible.

The battle began along a 20-mile front, just north of the River Somme.

It began on 1 July and on that day alone we, the British, lost 20,000 men.

The battle lasted four and a half months and at the end of it the Germans, for the time being, had been pushed back about 10 miles by the two allies - the British and the French.

At the end of it the total French dead were 200,000, the British 400,000.

It ended the day before my birthday. And next morning, when the papers were printing headlines about our glorious victory, I remember I had a candle stuck in a plain cake - we had no sugar, I'd never seen icing.

In the following weeks I noticed that more young women than usual in my street and the next one were dressed in black and old men and young boys having black armbands.

Otherwise we went uncomplaining about our daily chores. To an eight year old whatever happened - the flu, a thunderstorm, a war - was life.

I went fishing with my great uncle.

Why? Almost half a million men gone. Why?

We didn't know then or ever guessed at numbers. All we knew was "heavy casualties". But the main thing was there was no television, there was no radio.

Now this war, the invasion of Iraq, had been on for only a few days and there were - the words sprung to many lips - casualties - eight Britons, five Americans, some prisoners of war - one a woman.

More protests, more vocal protests. The president talked of going off to visit bereaved families.

The bad news came in: stiff resistance. And then the possibility that hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, in Basra might starve from lack of food and water, children die from dysentery.

The popular support for the war wobbled and dropped a little. Television interviews with scandalised housewives and young people.

And in this war, as never before, the reporters are way up front there in the blood and sand.

Here's a young housewife in Ohio:

"It's making me crazy to see what people are going through. I thought we'd get in there boom, boom, boom, and get out."

So I'm afraid did many millions.

This bared my long held fear that a country, a people, that has not known war in its own land for 138 years, a generation that never saw filmed coverage of a war - an actual war, not in the movies - would they, will they, have the stamina to stay with their belief that it is a necessary war if the casualties go beyond the hundreds into the thousands?

Over 30 years ago I said here these words for an audience that was seeing war for the first time from the correspondents in the field.

Quote: In the First World War the statesmen and generals and correspondents waited many years before they told us of the horrors and the scope of the casualties.

Here now in Vietnam young correspondents in sweaty shirts poke microphones into a soldier's face and hear him say he doesn't know what he's there for. There is now no gap between the battlefield and the memoirs.

I don't think it's possible to exaggerate the shattering capacity of television to tell it now and what is shattered, I suspect, is morale - both at the front and at home.

It puts a crippling burden on the statesmen and the generals, most of all on the field commanders, who in a democracy are trying to conduct any war.

It raises the profound question whether any nation not under a dictatorship can ever again fight a war with a steady spirit. And this I believe is something new under the sun.

Unquote.

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