There you stand at Paddington, solid, calm, inscrutable, next to the lounge for first-class passengers, and I find myself wanting to ask you questions.
The big one is probably unanswerable: was it worth it? The horrors that Europe went through during the second quarter of the twentieth century – in Stalin’s Russia, in Hitler’s Germany, in other parts of the continent – so directly flowed from your war that I have to ask it. To which of course you can reply: ‘How was I to know or imagine what lay ahead?’ And: ‘I believed I was defending democracy’. And: ‘I was only doing what everyone at home wanted me to do’. And quite possibly: ‘I was conscripted’. All these answers have their validity, and I must respect them. But I still wonder whether it was worth it.
And then, more existentially, I need to ask you about the experience itself. What was it like? What was it really like? Were your days and nights haunted by fear of death and mutilation? Or did you somehow bury those thoughts and just concentrate on getting through the interminable muddy, lice-ridden hours? I badly want to know. Perhaps because I come from a generation (I was born in 1951) which since childhood has known little except peace and plenty, and which – I increasingly think – has suffered from a loss of authenticity, compared to our parents and grandparents. When my English father was in his late teens, he took part in the D-Day landings; when my German mother was in her late teens, she was living in war-torn Berlin; when I was in my late teens, a state-funded student at Oxford, my biggest decision was whether to buy the latest Country Joe and the Fish album. The Great War – that adjective has its own justification – has now become the moral benchmark of our collective memory and judgement. We in 2014 stand small and diminished in its century-long shadow; and, let me be frank and admit it, I salute you, yes, but I also envy you.
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