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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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‘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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