Last Saturday night I went to see Enigma at my local cinema. I was very glad I did — not merely because I found it an unusually intelligent film, but even more because it offered a salutary reminder of just how much political and journalistic hype we have been living through during these past three weeks.
Whatever the fears and anxieties provoked by the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it simply serves no one’s interests (except perhaps those of Osama bin Laden and his fanatical followers) to pretend that the conditions they have created equate with those of actual war. They do nothing of the sort, as the genuine wartime atmosphere evoked first in Robert Harris’s 1995 novel Enigma and now in Tom Stoppard’s screenplay based upon it could hardly make clearer.
Why, then, do politicians — yes, and journalists, too — persist in trying to persuade us into a mindset matching that of 1943 (the year the film takes place)? The original fault certainly lay with George W. Bush, who should never have announced, as even he now seems to realize, “We’re at war” — any more than he should, with grosser insensitivity, have declared that the US was engaged in “a crusade”.
But the 43rd President does not stand alone in the dock. His statement about “war” was promptly endorsed by the Prime Minister and leapt upon by the London newspapers. I took a random look at the “strap” headings linking the mammoth coverage of the non-events of the previous week in the British Sunday papers. There they all were — “The World at War”, “The West Fights Back”, “The War on Terror; On the Brink” — with just an occasional more sober variant such as “Operation Justice”.
At least last Sunday there was, however, some sign of the worm turning. The BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, wrote a brave column in The Sunday Telegraph in which he baldly insisted: “This is by no means war — it is police action.” Even more remarkably, in The Mail on Sunday, Peter Dobbie, one of its regular columnists, actually accused the Prime Minister of having “induced a national nervous breakdown” with “his bellicose words”.
Maybe that was a bit rich coming from a journalist. In large part it has been the newspapers themselves which have fanned the war fever. I am just old enough to remember the Second World War home-front slogan “Careless talk costs lives”, but as a warning that seems to have gone out of the window in the offices of many newspaper editors who have plainly not thought twice before publishing reports on imaginary “fire fights” in Afghanistan. Worse, in some ways, has been the role some papers have adopted in trying to make our flesh creep. The Times itself carried a feature last Saturday headed “The Sensible Person’s Survival Kit”, while the Daily Mail earlier had gone even further with a double-page spread entitled “Germ Warfare: The Facts” taking in everything from anthrax through smallpox and cholera to plague.
Out of consideration for national morale, I do not believe any such material would ever have surfaced in the national press between 1939 and 1945. But then, of course, we really were at war, and this time we have merely been living through an ersatz version of war hysteria, which even William Randolph Hearst could hardly have whipped up more effectively. It has not, in my view, been the British press’s finest hour, if only because, having eagerly fallen in behind George W. Bush and Tony Blair, they have found themselves, as the days went by, very largely reduced to making bricks without straw.
There has been one interesting sidebar as well. Most of those columnists who have fulminated most fiercely for action not only have no knowledge of war but no memory of it either. Among such commentators there seems to be a determination to fill out what they believe to have been a gap in their lives — put most vividly by the author of Enigma himself, Robert Harris, writing in The Daily Telegraph, when he spoke of his generation having had “an odd sense of having missed out on something” and of wanting to discover whether they could have done what their fathers did.
Without coming the old sweat, I fear I have to tell all those who echo such romantic aspirations that war is not actually like that. True, I was only five when the Second World War started and 11 when it ended. But I am branded with its memories. Those memories are inevitably personal ones: of seeing my mother cry for the first time when, on my eighth birthday, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau broke out from Brest and sailed, bold as brass, through the English Channel; of the day during the Blitz that my father, as officiating chaplain at Highgate Cemetery, took 13 funerals of bomb victims on the trot; of the morning in 1944 when I learnt that the dashing 18-year-old who had just taught me to ride a bicycle had been killed within a fortnight of landing in France after D-Day.
Mundane stuff, no doubt, but those kinds of incident are what war tends to be about rather than fulfilling a need in any one’s nature by being tested for heroism.
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd
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