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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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A teenage boy shamed into volunteering to fight isn’t a hero, he’s an exploited victim

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Earlier this month an analysis of Royal Navy records revealed that more than 100,000 of the volunteers who enlisted to fight in WW1 were boys aged 14 to 17, too young to either fight or vote.

In addition to these boy sailors, as many as 250,000 underage recruits enlisted to the Army. Their service records showed that the younger the soldier, the more likely he was to be killed.

By any common moral standard – by which I mean precisely the same moral standard we use to judge the actions of gaolers who force-fed Suffragettes – you’d think we would say those boys were victims of brutal state-sanctioned exploitation and vicious gendered discrimination.

You would expect national outcry and soul searching into what callous insanity could have led both society and the government to divide a generation of children along gender lines and decide one half was worthy of protection and safety, while the other should be subjected to unimaginable brutality.

Sepia-tinted tragedy

Except the story barely raised a ripple in the sea of voices that make up the mainstream conversation about gender, a conversation which focuses almost exclusively on the problems men cause, rather than those they face.

As an added irony, the news that one third of WW1’s Navy volunteers were in fact boys, appeared just two days before International Women’s Day, a day on which the only permissible narrative about men is one that describes their power and privilege.

There have been a handful of articles and documentaries addressing the issue of WW1’s boy soldiers to mark the centenary of the war, but I’ve yet to see a single account that frames the issue as one of gendered discrimination, let alone express outrage at that injustice.

Instead, they fall into a cosy narrative of sepia-tinted tragedy and heroism – it’s terribly sad that all these young lads lost their lives, to be sure, but that’s just how it was then, don’t you know. And anyway the main thing to remember, with misty eyes, is what heroes they were.

Image: BBC

There are two things these articles always emphasise – that the boys were heroes and how enthusiastic they themselves had been to enlist. By the same token, there are two things that are always glossed over – the horror and terror of combat and the social pressure imposed on boys and young men to prove their manhood.

In other words, these reports employ pretty much exactly the same techniques that have always been used to disguise both the reality of war and the state coercion and social stigma that forces men to sign up for it.

But at the heart of this obfuscation and spin is the need to show these boys – boys who by today’s standards were too young to consent to sex, let alone make informed choices about going to war – ultimately made the decision to enlist of their own free will.

Rarely is there any mention of the psychological impact of the ever-present Kitchener’s finger, of the music hall propaganda songs, of the vicious shame of the White Feather, of the pride many parents took in being able to say their son was doing his bit, or of the girls giggling at the sight of young men in uniform.

Playground propaganda

I have a hunch why there is such reluctance to acknowledge the immense pressure these boys were under to sign up — it’s because that way both traditionalists and feminists get to hold on to their beliefs about men.

Traditionalists are able to maintain the idea that any right-thinking man and boy knows his duty as provider and protector, while feminists get to continue to perpetuate the myth that the history of gender politics can be reduced to one long saga of men’s agency and privilege.

Meanwhile, no-one is forced to confront the fact that virtually within living memory, Britain’s attitude to its boys was not so different to that of a Central African war lord.

One recent BBC documentary included a segment in which an actor read out extracts from a propaganda comic of the time, over a line-drawn image from the comic of a shell exploding in the middle of a make-shift football pitch.

“It would take a lot to put a British Tommy off his football. Here a German shell exploded right on the field of play. To show their contempt for the enemy’s fire, they continued their game.”

Kitchener’s finger

Incredibly, the segment was simply used as a colourful illustration of what one boy soldier asked for when he wrote home – a comic. Neither explicitly or implicitly did the programme question the messages or motives behind the comic, or how a diet of this kind of reading matter may have influenced boys to enlist.

(This, just to be clear, is the same BBC that regularly provides a platform for outrage over the harm caused to girls by half-naked women in Lads Mags.)

Another report in The Times, about the youngest soldier to have gone to the front – a 12-year-old boy who ended up fighting at the Battle of the Somme – emphasised how he and other underage boys managed to “trick” recruiting sergeants into believing that they were older than then they really were. Those poor recruiting sergeants, outwitted by children who were so determined to get to the front.

“What could have impelled a young boy to place himself in such danger?”, asks the article’s author, wide-eyed.

The real question is, why are we still so determined to pretend that when young men join the military, it has nothing whatsoever to do with what society expects of them.

By Dan Bell

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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. 

Since 1914 there has not been one year when Britain was not at war somewhere

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“The video with Vincent Burke’s On Remembrance Day is a timeline for Britain’s 100 years of endless war. Since 1914 and the ‘war to end all wars’, there has not been one year when Britain was not at war somewhere.” This video was originally posted on the website of the Stop The War Coalition.

— This is article #50 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys series

Lyrics

On Remembrance Day
When the army prays
And the flags go up
To remind us that they do it for us

On Remembrance Day
By the flower display
Where the church explains
How the heroes keep the villians away

There I’ll tell it to the careless wind
I’ll tell you when the good guys win

On Remembrance Day
I should stay away
From the BBC
Where they tell you how a real man should be

And the children watch
As the vicar walks around with a cross
‘Cause to love is fine
If you do it at a sensible time

Yeah, I’ll tell it to the careless wind
I’ll tell you when the good guys win
Yeah, I’ll save it for the next of kin

On Remembrance Day
On Remembrance Day
On Remembrance Day

You can visit Vincent Burke’s YouTube channel here

—Photo Credit: flickr/The Hills Are Alive

ALSO ON INSIDE MAN:

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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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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‘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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‘Do I look like I’m ready for war?’: 17-year-old boy on conscription and WW1

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No-one bothers to ask what conscription-age boys think about the gendered slaughter of WW1.

So we did.

Here are the thoughts of Josh O’Brien, a 17-year-old boy who during the First World War, would have faced the prospect of conscription and being sent to the trenches.

What do you think? Why doesn’t our culture and media discuss the slaughter of WW1 in terms of being a gender issue for men?

To watch more of Josh’s videos, check out his YouTube channel here.

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So why are men disposable?

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On Monday we posted an article questioning why news reports of armed conflict highlight numbers of female deaths, but tend to leave unmentioned the number of casualties who are male — even when more men than women have been killed.

The article triggered a passionate debate across Twitter and Facebook — some arguing men’s deaths shouldn’t be highlighted because men are responsible for starting wars in the first place; others saying that deaths of conscripted men and of male civilians, are being unjustly minimised by a “hierarchy of victimhood”.

One of insideMAN’s regular readers, Darren Ball, was part of the discussion. Here’s his response.

Biologically speaking, men are much more disposable than women. We are only here as a species because we have been successful at reproduction; because one man can father thousands of children, we don’t need many men. Scientists have been able to prove that throughout history a much higher proportion of women than men have passed on their genes, which suggests that women have been selective in their breeding.

Another clue is that men are generally stronger than women – this is a sign that men have an innate protective role. We would be a very badly adapted species if we weren’t innately more protective of women. If nature had selected a characteristic in which women, not men, were most inclined to fight off an invading force or hostile animals, then our offspring would have been slaughtered in the womb whilst the much stronger men cowered in a corner.

Some will counter that men are not more protective of women and cite male-on-female violence as proof. However, my claim is that men are innately more protective of women in their circle of concern (their own family, tribe, country, creed, etc.), but not necessarily of women of enemy civilisations.

‘Visceral and innate’

As for domestic violence, there are some cultures in which male-on-female domestic violence is allowed, and even encouraged, but this is not a human universal characteristic: it is only acceptable in certain cultures, so it is not innate. Even in those cultures, men protect “their” women from external assaults.

DV is quite common in all cultures, even where it is not tolerated; this may suggest that it is rooted in some innate characteristics. However, it does not disprove the theory that men are innately protective towards women. British men are twice as likely to be violent towards a male partner than a female partner, and women in lesbian relationships are at three-times the risk of heterosexual women. Similar patterns are to be found in other western countries. This evidence suggests that in societies where DV towards women is not an acceptable part of the culture, violent men exercise more restraint around women than they do around men, and women are more violent to other women than men are.

Men are more violent than women overall, but usually they are violent towards other men despite the greater risk to themselves.

Our greater outrage to mortar attacks on women is visceral and innate, no matter how much we rationalise it otherwise; it’s a reaction that has served our species well. However acknowledging that society is naturally more protective of women than men does not fit our current paradigm of women being disadvantaged everywhere and maleness being a dysfunctional mutation of the human species.

‘What about the menz?’

Acknowledgement of our greater concern for women, would require us to bestow a virtue on men for favouring the interests of women over themselves, and of bravery and chivalry. This wouldn’t fit our paradigm either: men are not allowed to have any particular virtues.

The reaction by many men (often myself) to our current feminist-inspired paradigm is to say “what about the men being [insert issue of choice]?” Is what feminists often dismissively describe as “what about the menz?”

These men have a good point: you can’t hold the view that men have nothing particular to offer and society discriminates only against women, and then start calling for special treatment for women whenever some nasty shit happens (which we don’t just do in war zones, but also in the criminal justice system, domestic violence, mental health, physical health, etc.).

Asking for equal care for men is valid and rational, but it’s only one way to square the circle. The alternative, which may sometimes be more appropriate, is to reject the paradigm altogether. Perhaps a war zone is one such instance where we allow ourselves to be more concerned for the women than the men, because men are a tougher bunch who should be protecting their women and children, as they have done since the birth of civilisation. Men are good like that.

By Darren Ball

What do you think? Should we give equal importance to male deaths in conflict as we do to female deaths? If not, why not? Tell us what you think in a tweet or a comment.

Photo courtesy: State Library of South Australia

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