100 years since Armistice, are we facing up to the true cost of war?

READ MORE: On Remembrance Sunday my thoughts are with all victims of wars

Just 18, I quickly felt ashamed of blundering in on a private anguish that daily they re-lived, with my editor’s fatuous demands ringing in my ears – “get quotes about what it was like”. Fortunately, as I glanced at the semi-circle of men at their Cheshire Royal British Legion Club, my youthful instincts kicked in.

There would be no quotes, indeed little said. I was just there. Why on earth should they reflect on any of this with some fresh-faced kid? They had come across plenty like me a long time ago. Indeed, my initial focus was on trying to avert my gaze from the amputees of legs and arms, a side head partially torn away, blindness and other facial scars. Not forgetting the trembling limbs and violent, spasmodic shudders.

Of course they were still out there, somewhere on the northern bank of the Dardanelles, where they had left not just remains of their bodies, but inevitably dear dead comrades, who yet again they grieved over that evening, recounting desperate, humorous, punctuated tales that started up from nowhere and were left hanging in the air.

They were still out there because quite patently that was the savage source of their daily trauma, the indescribable barbarity that they had been forced both to endure and, at the same time, inflict upon fellow human beings. Time is absolutely no healer of suffering on that scale.

To such an extent that what was left in those navy blue blazers bedecked in batteries of medals that evening were not just vague manifestations of what these men may have become, but a psyche so damaged that unremitting purgatory can be the only valid description of what they experienced for the rest of their days. Whatever masquerades of fortitude they were able to put on for whatever happy events were to transpire. All of them tainted by the grotesqueness of all that had gone before. All of this so unmistakeable in their utterly drained eyes.

Such is the consequence of war for those who actually fight it. Harry Patch, the last surviving combat soldier from any country in the Great War, was unequivocal, “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”

Deafening, respectful and prolonged silence is the only legitimate response to this blunt yet scathingly accurate conclusion.

Yet silence is not something our politicians are in the business of, of course. Witness their need to pontificate especially as we approach this the 100th anniversary of that very first Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918, at the end of the “war to end all wars”. A highly unfortunate phrase at a highly unfortunate time as still they seek to justify legalised wars, not forgetting the illegal ones, rather than being absolutely committed to resolving disputes peacefully. Forever using nationalist, economic and strategic reasons to justify global arms sales which have now risen to over £70 billion. There was no attempt to justify war or anything else by the Gallipoli veterans that night. No attempt to claim any kind of vindication or solace for all they had borne and lost. For there was so little left full stop.

So in what fitting way would they choose to commemorate this 100th anniversary, we may wonder?

With the inevitable flag-waving remembrance that always veers dangerously close to celebration, infiltrated by the kind of nationalism that contributed to those calamitous events themselves?

I think not, as I reflect on their altogether deeper, shattered, tortured reflection that night. It should hardly come as a surprise that we have shifted our perspective of remembrance a long way from the “Peace Day” of 1919 which many ex-servicemen refused to participate in publicly.

Tragically, our modern leaders will never settle for anything that demands such a profound level of soul-searching. So that “never again” could just possibly mean “never again” at some point in our global future. For them the infernal, subhuman realities of war are best shrouded in, yes, populist commemoration. So that they can continue to outbid all others the next day whilst claiming astonishment that there could be another way.

Therefore the Great War could never be the “war to end all wars”. The guns will never fall silent. Unless Harry Patch finally gets his way and those in power are actually forced to look deeply into the eyes of veterans like those from Gallipoli and allow themselves to be engulfed in their suffering. Only then might their deeper empathy and humanity take hold.

Those men that I came upon on that extraordinary evening were not only crippled by their experiences – they were hollowed out by them in ways they could never possibly have envisaged. The atmosphere was, inevitably, something I had never experienced and never have since. It defined my attitude to everything warlike. Butchery, violent killing, psychological trauma, it was all there, in every tremor, in every convulsion, in every distant glare.

It told me that our claims to be a civilized culture are shallow unless we face up to this hideous conflict about ourselves. Especially with the UK Government apparently considering increasing global arms’ sales to compensate for the economic fall-out of Brexit.

If we decide that it is our course of action then tragically so be it. But let’s at least face up to its shameful hypocrisy and the dishonour it does to those men from Gallipoli and all who fought in The Great War. And ensure that this public commemoration is the very last unless the day finally dawns that we are far more enlightened in both our intentions and actions.