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Why Kitchener’s finger gives me the arsehole

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Image: BBC Radio Times

If there is one image from the First World War that’s more iconic than any other, it is the Big-Brother stare and jabbing index finger of Lord Kitchener.

A century after the propaganda campaign ended, it’s an image that is still all around us — the original now re-versioned and re-deployed on everything from coffee mugs and duvet covers, to jaunty student union flyers, tourist T-shirts and even for David Cameron’s Big Society.

It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, as to have morphed into kitsch; the lazy go-to stock image for anyone who wants to knock-up a quick call to action.

But that accusatory forefinger isn’t just an old bit of Keep-Calm-And-Carry-On retro irony. It stands for a unique and brutal form of discrimination. What’s more, no-one either seems to notice or even care if they do.

The shame of fear

The explicit purpose of the Kitchener recruitment poster was to shame every man of enlistment age who saw it into signing up. It was a demand by the state that men and boys risk death and trauma or face becoming a social pariah if they refused.

In short, it is an expression of ultimate, state-sanctioned, socially-reinforced gendered discrimination – total control of the state over the bodies of one half of the population.

I’d like to suggest that you put yourself in the position of a young man walking past those posters back in 1914.

As he walked down the high street, or waited for a bus, or went into a post office or a library, that finger was pointing at him.

Jab in the chest

But more than that, no matter how crowded those streets and buildings were with women, each of them remained entirely untouched by its accusation. Every man, however, would have felt that finger jabbing into his chest, those eyes boring into the back of his head.

And the young man would have felt the force of that shame from the women who stood beside him too.

Kitchener’s two-dimensional jab in the chest was made flesh by women’s unique power to shame men for cowardice, a power that was ruthlessly exploited by the state and often enthusiastically adopted by women themselves.

Take a moment to think about it. An image that makes no explicit gendered statement at all – the simple words “Your Country Needs You” makes no reference to men or women – yet it was nonetheless totally understood only to apply to men.

What else must we be blind to?

That silent image was a manifestation of society’s deep and iron-clad demands on men and the stigma that stalked them should they refuse to conform.

The shame of male cowardice must have been like the weight of the atmosphere, so close to your skin that you couldn’t feel where your body stopped and it began.

The fact that now — fully 100 years later – we glibly fail to notice that this is the core meaning of that poster says a lot about how we view male suffering and disadvantage today.

Take a look at the Radio Times’ interpretation of the Kitchener poster on its front page. Then notice the headline for Kate Adie’s two-page spread on women entering the work force as a result of WW1.

Which one of these is most sensitive to the gendered sacrifices of the First World War?

If we can’t, even today, see conscription and pervasive social stigma as a gendered injustice for men, what else must we be blind to?

By Dan Bell

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How the local media shamed male readers into fighting in WW1

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Reporting what happened in World War One won’t make a difference unless we also take time to reflect, writes Glen Poole.

I spotted a fascinating article in my local newspaper this week, revealing how the paper had done it’s bit for the war effort in 1914 by shaming its male readers into signing up.

The article interested me for two reasons. Firstly it added to my understanding of the great web of social pressure that pushed men into the “protect and provide” mode of masculinity a century ago. In particular, it highlighted the role that employers played in pressurising their young male staff to die for king and country, a factor I hadn’t previously considered.

Secondly, it provided evidence of the way local newspapers shamed their male readers into sacrificing their lives and it did so with no sense of guilt, regret or reflection. In a section dedicated to showing today’s readers what the local media was talking about 100 years ago, the paper proudly declared:

“Sussex men were being castigated for any unwillingness to sign up……The Argus reported an appeal for the Sussex battalion of Lord Kitchener’s expeditionary force of 100,000 men was short of soldiers. Our reporter said the response from the county had not been sufficient, that our men were “lagging behind” and were in danger of reflecting badly on the honour of Sussex.”

Taking pride in shaming men

That’s right, the newspaper told its young male readers that they were bringing shame on their county by failing to join the slaughter of the First World War and appealed to all local men under 30 to enlist.

Furthermore, the paper gave its backing to local companies who were openly dismissing young male workers who failed to put themselves in line to kill and be killed, describing the businesses who sacked these young men as “patriotic employers”.

The paper gave the example of a local tailor who responded to the initial article “by questioning why shop assistants and clerks with “no outlook” were hanging around the streets after hours rather than enlisting”. Taking the matter into his own hands, the tailor told the paper that he “approached two assistants in his employment who were under 30 and left them under no illusions that he would have no need for their service unless they attempted to enlist”.

And that was it. No reflection, no regret, no shame (or justification even) for the newspaper’s role in shaming its young male readers into overcoming the most base, individual, human instinct—to survive—and to sacrifice their potential futures to the horrors of industrial warfare in the name of the greater good.

The silence is deafening 

Unwritten, between the casual lines of nostalgia that mark the violent deaths of young men in their millions one hundred years ago, is a huge, collective, silent shrug that whispers “what else could we do?”

It’s understandable. How can any individual make sense of the mass killing of global war? But this little question, the simple, childlike question “Why?” is so overwhelmingly ponderous, there is a danger we will avoid it altogether and simply report the centenary of World War One without reflection.

I don’t pretend to have the answer to this question. When I reflect on World War One, I simply count my blessings that I wasn’t born a man at a time when I would be required to either fight for my country or face the consequences of objection. I don’t have an answer to the question “Why?” but I will keep asking this question throughout the centenary of World War One.

Maybe the conscientious objectors in my local area didn’t dare to go to war, but they did dare to question it and when they asked themselves “Why?” they should enlist for the Sussex Battalion, they could come up with no acceptable answer.

As we look back on 1914 and consider the experiences of the men and boys who faced the fears of fighting (and the men and boys who faced the shame of not fighting), we owe it to each and every one of them to keep asking the question: “Why? Why? Why?”

—Photo credit: Flickr/Jenny Downing

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10 Ways the State divided men and women in World War One

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Does the state play a part in conditioning men and women into gendered roles? 100 years  ago it was certainly the case that millions of British men were sent to war because they were men, often being pressured into fighting by Kitchener’s omnipresent finger.

We’ve published numerous articles on men and war during the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, but we haven’t looked at the impact of war on men AND women. Then on International Men’s Day, I stumbled across a collection of World War I propaganda posters that made me think about the way the State ensured men were men,and women were women.

I’ve captured 10 of the posters below which show some of the ways the State divided men’s and women’s roles one hundred years ago.

1. Firstly, all fit men should rally around the flag

2. Young men should definitely be wearing a military uniform

3. Real men should follow their sporting heroes 

Don’t be a soft lad, be a real man and die hard, just like your favourite football players.

4. A good woman should get a good job

Meanwhile with the domestic workforce depleted by the recruitment of men into the armed forces, women were told to do their moral duty and serve the nation in the workplace.

5. Let women do women’s work

Try reading this one out loud and imagine the kind of clipped, stoical voice you’d need to say: “Keep the flag flying! Let women do women’s work and Essex Men join the Essex regiment.” Yes, fighting is definitely men’s work and anything else is unmanly and should be left for women to do.

6. Why should women join the army? 

From 1914, women’s organisations began to be structured along quasi-military lines, such as the Women’s Emergency Corp and the Women’s Volunteer Reserve. One of the primary aims was for women to do tasks previously viewed as “men’s work” in order to make those men available for the “real man’s work” of fighting the Germans. As this poster for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps says, “every fit woman can release a fit man”.

7. There are only three types of men, which one are you

For those men who weren’t first in line to sign up, there were constant reminders to think about what type of man they were—-do you obey, do you delay or are you a coward, Sir?

8. This one brought a tear to my eye

While the thought of being conscripted is terrifying, there is something brutally honest and straight forward about the finger-jabbing “you country needs you” approach to military recruitment. But this next approach really messes with the emotional bond between men and women and calls on couples to put their country (and the man’s life) before their love for each other. The thought of the state trying to persuade my partner to set aside her love for me and send me off to war to die in the trenches, touched me deeply…….

9. Women against the U-boats 

During World War 1 the Germans made a concerted effort to blockade Britain to prevent food imports such as wheat and flour entering the country. With the menfolk out of the country fighting the war, it became the patriotic duty of housewives as controllers of the nation’s domestic economy to make food stocks go a long way.

10. Get back in the kitchen! 

Cooking was definitely women’s work in World War I, when making food go a long way elevated women on the home front to an equal footing with men on the fighting front.

—Union Flag Image: Nicolas Raymond

—Posters: Methodist Central Hall

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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Grandfather, Father, Brother: Remembrance*

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This is a story that lives in a photograph. It is an old picture in a dusty frame, and I think of it sitting on chests of drawers for many years with nobody bothering to look at it much. But now I do.

The picture is of my father when he was fourteen. We all called him ‘Bob’ rather than Dad. I don’t know why, and I’ve never found out where the name came from. He wasn’t a Robert or anything – his real name was Peter. Growing up, I didn’t know anyone else whose Dad was called Bob. The name was a bit magical, it made him special in my eyes.

It is a studio photograph and the picture is set up as a profile silhouette with the photographer lighting Bob’s face from the side against a black background. You can see the photographer’s name at the bottom on the right – Noelfreda (with the accent on the ‘e’). And you can also just see the date on the left – 1930 (which is how I know he was fourteen years old when the photograph was taken).

He is wearing a white peaked hat, and there are markings on his epaulette signifying that he is a Royal Navy cadet. I imagine the formal photograph was taken to mark his completion of the first part of his education and training to become a naval officer. Perhaps he is wearing the uniform for the first time.

From darkness into light

So It captures an important transition moment in my father’s life, and his rite of passage from boyhood education to young adult life. It is one of the many things I love about this photograph. I don’t know if the photographer asked Bob to tilt his head forward for the photograph or he chose to do this himself. Whatever I also love his humility in this gesture of looking down.

The young man has passed through the cave of darkness and is emerging into the light.

I get a timeless quality, the sun is forever rising in front of my father, even if he does not wish at this moment to raise his head to look directly at it. It always gives me a feeling of confidence: here is my father as my humble guide across the years. Even now I am old, indeed old enough to be Bob’s grandfather in this photograph, I still get this reassurance from him, from the youth entering adult life in humility with head bowed, and forever showing me the way.

Except by not looking at the light directly himself and looking down, and there is a second possibility. Perhaps he is not refusing to look towards the future. Maybe he is in a place of darkness and is refusing  to look at the past from where the light comes from the wreckage of history which is on fire. After all Bob was born in 1916. He is a child of the First World War.

In this second possibility the flames of the past are burning in the darkness of the night. The future is being denied my father,  and his head is turned away from what is to come. Maybe this turning away is actually an act of wisdom on his part. In 1939 he was twenty three, and by then a Royal Navy officer on active service on destroyer warships. So he was pitched straight into the Second World War, and the ships he was on got involved in fighting, first in the Mediterranean and then on Russian convoys which accompanied merchant ships to Murmansk in 1942.

I don’t know what he saw of the horrors of war, and like many men of his generation, and the one before, he refused to talk about it. I also never saw him wear his string of medals. Like in the photograph his head remained bowed and he kept silent. And each year in November around Remembrance Day I find myself conflicted in my feelings about his submissive gesture in the photograph.

“There is a better legacy from history for men than war”

Yes, on the one hand in his submission I do feel a personal sense of pride for what he did, and the service and sacrifice of his generation which, I have no doubt, has given me a better life. And on the other hand, I hate his gesture of submission to war and the violent and destructive aspects of men, and the masculine systems of authority whose acts of aggression and folly lead to the death of so many, and wrecked and traumatised the lives of so many others.

Above all I hate his silence, because of course when you don’t speak about shadow things – including the horrors of war – you can’t speak of other loving things as much as you want to either.

And still it goes on today. As I get older, and especially during the Remembrance Day month, I want to speak out more and more passionately against these old aggressive and violent patterns of men and masculinity. I need this photograph of Bob to remind and show me how to be different. Inside we men are vulnerable – of course we are! Inside, my father say, men want none of these legacies of violence and long to be free of them.

I use the photograph of Bob this way to cut through my sometimes conflicted feelings about the past, and what always shines through to me is the tenderness on my father’s young face. So I speak out because I know there is a better legacy from history for men than war. It is this tenderness.

And so I also know Bob’s gift of love.

*Remembrance: this is one of three stories I have to tell about men in my family who mean the most to me – Grandfather, Father, Brother.

Max Mackay-James is Director of Conscious Ageing Trust – growing Diealog Communities to improve the experience and practice of all our ageing, dying, caring and loss. Men Beyond 50 is a special project in Diealog working to reduce isolation and loneliness in older men.

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

‘Your country needs you’: why did so many volunteer in 1914?

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By Toby Thacker, Cardiff University.

On the first day of the war in 1914, British newspapers published appeals for young men to join the colours, and to fight against Germany. Following the advice of the new Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener, the government decided to raise a huge volunteer army, hoping in two or three years, when the other armies were exhausted, this would tip the scales in Britain’s favour.

Over the next few weeks, thousands of young men came forward. When the first grim news of casualties and of the retreat from Mons arrived in late August, more volunteered, and after the fall of Antwerp in early October, there was a renewed surge. On some days, more than 10,000 men enlisted.

By Christmas 1914, hundreds of thousands had come forward, and this continued well into 1915. Men from all social classes and all areas of Britain volunteered. Others who were overseas in August 1914 travelled thousands of miles to get back and enlist. Whole groups from individual companies, offices, and universities joined up together. There were far more volunteers than the government could arm or equip, and most had to spend months training in civilian clothes, without proper weapons.

Why did so many volunteer? There was a huge recruiting campaign, led by newspaper advertisements, and supported by posters, including Reginald Leete’s famous image of a mustachioed Kitchener with pointing finger. Meetings were held in every town and village where politicians, priests, and local worthies exhorted men to do their patriotic duty.

Who could say no?

There was a broad national consensus that Britain was fighting a righteous war, and that volunteering was, put simply, the right moral choice. We should not underestimate the climate produced by years of pre-war public discourse, which had anticipated a war against Germany in which young men would be needed to reinforce Britain’s small professional army. Since the Boer War there had been calls for conscription. These had been supported by invasion scares, and by novels such as Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands. Reprints of this book were prefaced by the author’s call for every British man to do national service, “with the rifle”, or at sea. Officer Training Corps had prepared middle and upper class schoolboys for leadership, and given them some rudimentary training.

So strong was this mood that some volunteered even before the actual declaration of war. Siegfried Sassoon was one who enlisted, together with his horse, on reading in The Times that volunteers would be needed in the event of war. Rupert Brooke, who became the most widely read war poet, similarly recognised before the actual outbreak of hostilities, that he would affected: “It will be Hell to be in it, and Hell to be out of it,” he wrote.

Undoubtedly the narrative of young men volunteering in a shared mood of patriotic enthusiasm has some strength. But others faced painful choices. For many men of military age the call to arms initiated a period of soul searching, often lasting for months. It was not a decision they made alone.

Some, like war chronicler Vera Brittain’s brother Edward, were pulled in different directions by friends and relatives. In his case, his sister urged him to volunteer, but his father refused to countenance the idea. Rupert Brooke did volunteer, after some weeks’ hesitation, but he faced bitter criticism from former Cambridge friends, many of them pacifists.

Peer pressure

How many young men, now unknown to history, were pushed one way by friends and workmates, and pulled in another by anxious parents? Those who did not volunteer faced insults from the press, and were publicly ridiculed for their lack of “manliness”. Many were presented with white feathers by women, something which often left a lasting sense of shame. In the family, amongst friends in the pub, and in the workplace, they faced derision, contempt, and intimidation.

For some it took more courage not to volunteer than to yield to the pressure. Strikingly the only areas where volunteering fell below the high national average rate were in the countryside, where young men were exposed to less social pressure, and in places like rural Wales, where there was a tradition of pacifism.

It was indeed this growing social pressure which helped maintain the flow of volunteers well into 1915. The painter Stanley Spencer and the poet Edward Thomas, who both volunteered in July 1915 after months of indecision, are good examples. When, reluctantly, the government introduced conscription in March 1916, it found no great reservoir of manpower to tap. A high percentage of those conscripted appealed for exemption, and had to be coerced into service.

The narrative of voluntarism has given the British perception of World War I its particular poignancy. The soldiers who went over the top at the Somme were not conscripts, or pressed men. But we need, before succumbing to this mythology, to remember what the poet Charles Sorley pointed out after Rupert Brooke’s death: that it would have been more difficult for him not to have volunteered.

Toby Thacker is affiliated with the Labour Party

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo courtesy: State Library of South Australia

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Why does Sky’s comedy series ‘Chickens’ think it’s funny to humiliate men who didn’t fight in WW1?

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Picture this opening scene from a series currently being shown on Sky.

A furious woman smashes a milk bottle on the doorstep of a small cottage, before storming off in disgust. The camera pauses for a moment to show the front wall of the house. It’s covered with scrawled and abusive graffiti: “Evil parasites.” “House of shame.” “Just die.” “Sad little wankers.” “Cowards.” “We will never forgive you.” “Stinking Judas rats.” “You are cancer.”

This must be the hard-hitting opening shot for a gritty drama, right? Perhaps it’s exploring the treatment of men who crossed the picket lines during the miners’ strike? Or maybe it’s about a community’s reaction to finding out a convicted paedophile has been resettled in their town?

But you’d be wrong. This is a scene from a Sky 1 comedy series about how a village of women treat the only three men from their town who have not gone to fight during WW1. The series is called “Chickens”. I am not making this up. You can watch it online right now.

Image: Sky

The show is essentially a series of set pieces in which the three men — a conscientious objector, a man who is medically unfit to fight and man who is simply afraid – are shamed, laughed at and humiliated by scores of women.

At first I assumed I must have been missing something. Surely, somewhere, there would self-reflection or criticism of the humiliation being milked for laughs? But there wasn’t. The men are the butt of the joke and their weakness and cowardice is the punchline.

In one scene, after a woman demands that Cecil — who incidentally is the one discharged as medically unfit — justifies why he hasn’t enlisted, he says: “I really believe in this war and I’m really keen to help.” She replies: “Rubbish, if you were really keen to help you would have killed yourself to raise morale.”

‘Most-hated man in the village’

In another, the three men encounter a group of women standing around the village green notice board, posted with three sheets of paper with their names at the top.

One of the men asks enthusiastically: “What’s going on here then?” One of the women replies: “We’re voting to decide who should be the Guy we burn on bonfire night.” “Oh, look how well I’m doing!” says one of the men. Another of the three men cuts in: “Don’t get too excited Burt, they’re essentially voting for the most-hated man in the village.”

Just in case you might be thinking the contempt of the female characters is really about reflecting badly on the women of the time, this is what one of the lead actresses has to say in a behind-the-scenes interview for the series, also available online:

“What’s great is to see a village full of women who are just really getting on with it, just couldn’t give a toss that the men have gone, really, except for basic plumbing issues and the occasional need for someone to shag them,” she trills happily.

The men receive daily hate-mail from the village’s women (Image: Sky)

And according to the writers of the series — the same men who are responsible for The Inbetweeners — the series is actually intended to celebrate women’s roles during WW1.

In an interview with the Guardian, one of the writers said: “Our hope, and the thought behind it, is for it to be a quasi-feminist sit-com. When we originally came up with the idea, there was a worry that it could be a bit misogynistic – this idea of us as the only men left and isn’t it horrible living in England now it’s full of women. But you see, actually, that the women cope very well. It’s the men who don’t.”

“They are three pathetic men in a village full of people who hate them,” agrees another one of the writers. “Hopefully, you’ll end up empathising with them, because their social prospects are impossible, really. People throw things at them in the street.”

We have truly gone through the Looking Glass here into some kind of Orwellian understanding of justice and compassion.

A hidden history

Perhaps you think I’m being po-faced and humourless about a series that’s just meant as a bit of fun. But the ugly and rarely acknowledged truth is that women really did shame men and boys into going to their deaths.

According to historian Nicoletta Gullace, in addition to the relatively well-known white feather movement, one female-led campaign enrolled 20,000 women “to persuade their men to enlist and to scorn those who refused”. The women were said to have encouraged hundreds of thousands of men to sign up. According to Gullace, this was “merely one of a multitude” of such campaigns.

You can also hear what those men went through in their own words. Their stories, recorded before the last of the First World War veterans died, are held on tapes in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London.

One man recalls walking across a bridge in London when four girls surrounded him and gave him white feathers – the symbols of cowardice given by women to men who were out of uniform.

‘The look in his eye has haunted me ever since’

A lifetime after the event, you can still hear the pain in his voice as he says: “I explained to them that I had been in the Army and been discharged and I was only sixteen. Several people had collected around the girls and there was giggling and I felt most uncomfortable… I felt very humiliated. I finished the walk over the bridge and there on the other side was the Thirty-seventh London Territorial Association of the Royal Field Artillery. I walked straight in and re-joined the Army.”

Another man quietly describes the morning his brother, a miner, received a feather in the post. “He opened the letter at the breakfast table and a white feather dropped out, there was nothing else in it than that. Just a white feather. He got up off that table, white faced, and he went out of that house. That was the last time I ever saw him alive.”

Another recalls how his under-age cousin was “blew to pieces” after women’s taunts led him to enlist, and how insults drove an over-aged friend to insanity and eventually death. “The look in his eye has haunted me ever since… The cruelty of that white feather business needs exposing.”

This is all but deleted from our collective memory of WW1. Now this comedy series, one of the few occasions when the vicious practice of shaming men for cowardice is remembered at all, chooses to humiliate and mock those men once again. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that very funny.

By Dan Bell

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Who wants to hear about the psychological damage that war does to men?

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Mike Payne works with people who are living with the hidden wounds of armed conflict. Here he explores the psychological damage that war does to men. 

 

As the country continues to mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War it seems we still tend to hear an edited version of events which fit only a narrow perspective, particularly around the psychological impacts on those who wore uniform.

So what exactly have we learned in 100 years?

The cluster of feelings and ‘stuff’ which goes with the personal aftermath of conflict is currently called ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD). Increasingly there are calls for it to be called ‘Combat Related PTSD’, to recognise the specific nature of war and its impacts. A few years ago it was called ‘Combat Fatigue’ or ‘Combat Stress’, in the First World War ‘Shell Shock’, in earlier centuries ‘Soldiers Heart’, ‘Nostalgia’, ‘Homesickness’, ‘To Be Broken’. This has been going a while; the ancient Greeks were talking about it.

The impacts of war are cumulative 

In the UK PTSD is diagnosed for ‘individuals who have experienced a traumatic event’ whereas the impacts of war are normally cumulative, a series of events which build on top of each other. The NICE guidelines which define what treatments are available do not mention war trauma. The evidence of the treatments available for PTSD – CBT, EMDR alongside some drugs – show these help at crisis point but are less effective for long term recovery, even when available.

There is an assumption that soldiers are well cared for post service and injury. Support for physical injury is fantastic now, the early days in Iraq were not so good. As for psychological injury,  well here you hit a blind spot. It is OK to glorify the dead, to honour the physically injured, support wives and families – but those who cannot sleep for decades, whose red anger feels ready to explode at any moment, there seems an inability to fully look at this issue in the face.

We can’t blame men for not getting help

In the stage play ‘The Two Worlds of Charlie F’, which is about being injured in Afghan and acted by soldiers all whom have been injured, they joke about how good the support is. However the second half focuses on the emotional and psychological impacts, they certainly don’t joke about how good the support is there.

And when men don’t seek help frequently the blame is placed on them for not reaching out. True, no one can be helped unless they seek it. However how are men met when they do? And what effective support is available? What support is available from those who understand the complexities of our armed forces being consciously subservient to the democratic authority? Can they also handle the fact that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction and deal with the question “so what was it all about anyway”?

It seems that those who live with the hidden wounds, those labeled with a mental health problem, are barely acknowledged and little understood.

Take the man who doesn’t talk about his experience in war. Don’t blame him for not talking, firstly understand that is part of the trauma and more importantly that this goes way deeper than just ‘a mental health problem’.

Not all of you comes back at once

One quote which stood out in ‘The Two worlds of Charlie F’ was “Not all of you comes back at the same time”. Understanding that is a great start point.

And if he really told you, when words are not enough, could you handle it?

How can that voice be heard today?

Here is a suggestion. A picture of Wilfred Owen hung on the wall of my Regiment’s Officers’ Mess, my home as a young man. How about we create the space for the soldier’s voice to be heard now from this generation, just as the war poets did for theirs.

This is what war is still doing to young men and why you don’t know about it (Warning: graphic images)

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Injured First World War soldier

Image: Queen Mary’s Hospital, London

I worked as a journalist for one of the country’s leading news websites for four years during the height of the conflict in Afghanistan.

Not once did I see a report which conveyed the unvarnished horror of what was happening to our young men as honestly and powerfully as the clinical description by a medical journal that follows.

“The most common injury resulting from an IED is traumatic or immediate surgical amputation of the legs. Shrapnel is blasted upwards and outwards and can cause extensive damage including abdominal injuries, trauma to upper limbs including amputation, extensive soft tissue damage or burns, bony fractures from being flung away from the blast and facial injuries including penetrating eye injuries.

“Wounds need to be constantly inspected and remain open for long periods of time, often weeks after injury. The patient may require surgical debridement every 48 to 72 hours.

“Patients may experience disorientation as they wake up from sedation and this may be accompanied by flashbacks of their experiences, the incident or colleagues being injured. There are degrees of flashbacks, from disorientation that simply require reassurance to more severe hallucinations. Patients may believe they are being held captive by the Taliban, groping for weapons or trying to jump out of bed to escape.”

Nursing Times, 7 January 2011

‘The brightest and the best’

What I did see – and was required to produce – were short reports “marking” each new death.

The content of these initial reports were entirely made up of information provided by the Ministry of Defence press office.

This included a vague statement of the circumstances of his death, such as “came under enemy fire” or “killed by roadside bomb”, the general region in which he was killed, along with his name, age, rank and regiment. There might also be a photograph of the young man, taken while he was still alive and in dress uniform.

Soon afterwards the MoD press office would provide a list of approved quotes that we would weave into updates of the article.

Pristine coffins

Here are typical examples.

“A spokesman said the soldier was ‘the brightest and the best” who had “died defending his comrades’.”

“Those who served alongside him were privileged and feel his loss most deeply. Our prayers and thoughts are with his family at this extremely difficult time.”

The article would rarely be published as a lead story. Very soon afterwards the news agenda would move on.

Later, when the bodies arrived back by military aircraft, we would report on the mourning wives and families lining the streets, showing pictures of spotless black funeral cars, carrying pristine coffins draped in immaculately-folded union flags.

This is what I saw

I decided that if it was impossible to report on the reality of how these men died I would report on the consequences of the injuries for the men who lived.

But I soon found out that serving soldiers are not allowed to speak to the press unless given permission by their chain of command. For those who have been catastrophically wounded, the best care available was at the military rehabilitation centre at Headley Court in Surrey. Headley Court only offered care to serving soldiers.

The MoD told me that repercussions for soldiers speaking to the press without clearance would not be “substantial” and that in any case twice a year the press are invited to meet injured personnel at an honours ceremony.

I went to one, it was heavily stage-managed, not a situation where you could speak privately with a soldier about his experiences. I wondered whether someone who was angry and resentful about what had happened to them would have been invited in the first place.

I was also told that very understandably many recently-injured men do not want to face the glare of the  press when they are so damaged and fragile and that it was the duty of the MoD to protect them from that intrusion.

The images of wounded soldiers we most-often see are those that accompany charity expeditions and fundraising events, once they are feeling much stronger and on their way to recovery. Images of smiling veterans, their blasted and shredded limbs now replaced by neat, hi-tech prosthetics.

I felt that as a journalist I was being shown a sanitised version of reality. So one day I decided to go to the hospital injured men were flown back to from Afghanistan and just walk in. Not as a journalist. Just as someone who cared and needed to see the truth behind the press releases.

This is what I saw.

I saw a man being pushed in a wheelchair backwards along the hospital corridor, his shoulders were draped in a white medical blanket, but I could still see the back of his head.

Silent pain

All but a few tufts of hair had been seared off, the skin was blotched and peeling, his head a round swollen lump.

Walking along beside him was a soldier in Army fatigues, facing him as the wheelchair rolled backwards along the corridor, was a woman with dark hair talking quietly to him, she looked straight at his face, pretending not to notice what was in front of her.

As he was wheeled past, his face came into view. I quickly looked away. His lips and eyelids were swollen and protruding, as if they had been turned inside out. The soft internal skin a puss yellow colour. His mouth was slightly open, taught with silent pain. Where his eyes should have been, there were two black holes in the bloated red and pink flesh of his face.

His features were almost too destroyed to make out any expression, but as I snatched another glimpse at the three black slits of his eyes and mouth, I could see they were frozen in a stunned, bewildered agony.

I remember looking down and noticing one of his hands poking from beneath the white blanket, resting on the material of his hospital-issue pyjamas, it looked like a withered and charred claw. I suddenly realised the reason they were pushing him backwards was so he didn’t have to see the expressions on people’s faces as they saw him coming.

This is what’s still happening to the young men we still send to war. It’s time to take a long, hard look.

By Dan Bell

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Do men start wars?

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As we mark the centenary of the start of World War I, Glen Poole considers the question: “Do men start wars?”

Asking if men start wars may seem like a stupid question. Whoever heard of a warmongering leader called Adele Hitler, Wilma the Conqueror or Matilda the Hun? Nobody!

It only takes a cursory glance at the history books to reveal that the major players in the history of warfare have always been men. But then again, how many of us actually know a man who has started a war? I certainly don’t and the last time I looked, I was still a man and I still haven’t launched any major armed conflicts.

And yet somehow, as men, we are expected to share collective responsibility for the horrors of war (in a way that women aren’t). In February, for example, the then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, told us the use of rape as weapon of war “should shame all men” and that to avoid confronting this issue “is in itself unmanly”.

Do “men as a class” start wars? 

And therein lies the true meaning in the question “Do men start wars?” It is not a question of whether men like Adolph, William and Attila start wars, because we know they surely do. The actual question I want you to consider is this: “Do all men— men as a class—start wars?”

It’s certainly a belief that many people hold. As the anti-war MP, George Galloway, righteously observed on BBC Question Time this year:

“[We were told]…for years in the Labour Party, if only we could get more women into parliament there’d be fewer wars, less aggression and all of that. There was 101 ‘Blair babes’ elected in 1997 and all but three of them voted for every war that Tony Blair took us into.”

So where does this idea come from, this notion that men as a group collectively start wars? Is it a post-modern invention of what the right-wing media might call the trendy, liberal left?

The ancient Greeks linked voting and fighting

It may sound like a feminist-inspired belief, but you could argue that the idea that “all men” start wars is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, whose democratic city states were founded on the principle that citizens were given the privilege of voting, only by accepting the responsibility of fighting.

Fast forward to 1914 and in Britain, millions of men bore the responsibility of fighting, without enjoying the privilege of voting. These brave men fought for King and country, not because they were male and liked to have a bit of a war every now and then, but because of the social expectation that it is “men’s work” to protect women and children, even if that means putting your own life at risk.

Some experts, like Dr Amanda Robinson at Cardiff University claim that “masculinity is associated with violence in most cultures”. If this is true, then we should ask ourselves if masculinity is a cause of violence or a consequence of violence?

Is masculinity a cause of violence?

When war kicks off, do we want the men around us to be more or less masculine? As conscientious objectors have learnt at times of war, we all (men and women) seem to carry an expectation that men will live up to the primordial masculine directive to protect the weak.

If men as a group are responsible for starting wars, then we should also remember that men and boys die disproportionately in wars accounting for 83% of violent deaths in global conflicts each year. And more importantly, men should be given credit for ending wars too.

In reality, war is far too complex to dismiss as a manmade problem. It wasn’t a man who took us to war in The Falklands, it was Margaret Thatcher; it wasn’t a man who took India to war with Pakistan, it was Indira Ghandi; it wasn’t a man who was Secretary of State when U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, it was Hilary Clinton.

And it was Hilary Clinton who famously said in 1998 that “women have always been the primary victims of war”; the same Hilary Clinton who complained last year that the media failed to highlight the fact that when bin Laden was killed, they moved wives and children “to a safe location so they wouldn’t be hurt”.

Notice how politicians like Clinton and Hague tell a story of war where women and children are the victims and all men should be ashamed. This demonstrates just how deeply ingrained our beliefs that “men should protect women” are. For as long as women and men believe this, there will always be an expectation that men should be “real men” and fight our wars if needed.

So what does this tell us about the question “Do men start wars”?

War is simply and brutally the use of force to get others to do what you want them to do. It’s a tendency that is inherent in all human beings, as a trip to any pre-school nursery at playtime will show you.

To war is human and it is not men, but the people in power who ultimately make the choices that take us to war. If the last Labour government is any guide, more women in power does not mean fewer wars, it just means more women have the opportunity to vote for men to fight and die.

From Boudica to Bloody Mary to the Iron Lady, British women in power have been sending British men to war for centuries and as we have written elsewhere this week, women who are not in “power” can also play a huge role in applying social pressure on men to fight.

What’s changed in the last 50-100 years is that there are now more women than ever before with the political power to vote for or against war. The “masculine” role of political leadership is no longer reserved exclusively for men of  the political classes.

It’s still men who are dying in war 

At the same time, the “masculine” role of warrior, as defined by the people we send to kill and be killed, has remained almost entirely male, for example, 99% of the 453 British military personnel who have lost their lives in Afghanistan since 2001 are men.

Our belief that women and children’s lives are more valuable than men’s lives has also not changed. If we want to approach war as a gendered problem, it’s not the proportion of women in power we need to focus on, it’s the proportion of women in the military and our unequal concern for the death of men and boys in conflict.

Men don’t start wars, humans do and most humans still have the expectation that if a war comes our way, then it’s men who should protect us with their lives. For as long as we hold onto that expectation, men and women will continue to send men and boys to their deaths.

As we continue to mark the centenary of the start of World War I, it’s time to question the sexist use of men’s lives as the primary human resource in the wars that men and women start. It’s time to ask the question “Why do we send men and only men to die in war?”

—Photo credit: Flickr/Jayel Aheram

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Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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‘He refused to fight’: The bravery and brutality of being a conscientious objector

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John Hoare’s diaries will be serialised as part of the Quaker’s project

A new online project telling the stories of men who refused to fight during WW1 has been launched by the Quakers to mark the war’s centenary.

“The White Feather Diaries” will serialise the diaries of conscientious objectors describing the prejudice and personal conflict they faced, the diaries are published in conjunction with powerful filmed oral-history accounts from their children.

The series is named after the symbol of shame and cowardice given by women to men who were out of uniform — a white feather.

One of the moving filmed testimonies is from the son of Donald Saunders, a talented pianist who was forced into years of hard labour due to his pacifist convictions.

Hard labour

“He had an ideal and believed strongly that it was wrong to kill another human being in any circumstances,” says his son — now an old man himself.

Saunders was nonetheless ordered to register for service, but after he refused to put on the uniform, he was court marshalled and sentenced to six months hard labour, breaking rocks.

Even for the time, conditions in prison were brutal — “because of his views, he suffered terrible treatment from warders and prisoners”.

Spat on in the street

The contempt society had for men who refused to enlist, also impacted on his wife outside prison, who was insulted, spat on in the street and sent white feathers.

He spent several years in prison, eventually being released in 1919 — a year after the war had ended. Even then, however, he was haunted by the prejudice against presumed cowards and remained a marked man, with few willing to employ him.

To follow the diaries visit the daily blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page.

The project will run at incremental periods over three years (2014-2016) up to the anniversary of the 1916 Military Service Act which introduced conscription and recognised conscientious objection.

By Dan Bell

Photograph: © 2014 The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain

What do you think of the actions of conscientious objectors? Why do you think the shame imposed on men who did not enlist during WW1 is so rarely discussed? If the nation faced an external threat again on the scale of WW1 or WW2, would we still expect men and boys to sign up? Tell us what you think in a comment or a tweet.

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