The Hell of War - Who do we listen to? Michael Gove or those who were there?

.... It is through the faces of the soldiers that Stanley Spencer finds his most poignant note. Take away the uniforms and the khaki and you could be gazing instead at a school camping trip. These soldiers are boys. Cherubic, mischievous, rosy cheeked, their chins not yet accustomed to razors; they revel in the temporary stay of execution that the hospital has granted them.  Rest assured that Michael Gove would not have seen this as a factor if he was in the place of Field Marshall Hague all those years ago.

"And is there honey still for tea?"

There are only a few weeks left until it closes, but if you get the chance, do try and see the magnificent (and free) Stanley Spencer exhibition at Somerset House. Depicting Spencer’s memories of war as a medical orderly and as a soldier at the Front, ‘Heaven in a Hell of War’ features a series of large canvas panels that serve as a poignant hymn to thwarted youth and a lost generation. 

Rather than focusing largely on images of the trenches - the sombre greys, blacks and browns of the Front, maimed limbs and gas attacks - these paintings dwell instead on those moments far away from enemy lines.  Encountering a temporary bliss at the Beaufort Hospital in Bristol, these wounded and shell-shocked soldiers enjoy clean and starchy sheets, feast on towering plates of jam sandwiches, or simply loll on the lawn in the hospital’s grounds as the sun shines. The simple acts of washing in clean hot water, sorting out kit, and taking afternoon tea are elevated to life’s greatest pleasures.

Unquiet dreams

But it is through the faces of the soldiers that Spencer finds his most poignant note. Take away the uniforms and the khaki and you could be gazing instead at a school camping trip. These soldiers are boys. Cherubic, mischievous, rosy cheeked, their chins not yet accustomed to razors; they revel in the temporary stay of execution that the hospital has granted them. 

You cannot but help turn your attention to the recent remarks of the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove. Last week this deeply controversial and abrasive man created a furore with his questioning of the way that the history of the First World War is being taught in schools. Choosing to write in the Daily Mail - no surprise there - Gove remarked that:

“The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are leftwing academics all too happy to feed those myths.”

Passing over the question of the youthfulness (surely his remit) of the generation that were obliterated, Gove instead chose to focus instead on his rallying call for the ‘elite’, those older men who sent these boys towards almost certain slaughter. Singling out the academics that challenge the so called ‘lions led by donkeys’ view of The Great War – for example, Professor Gary Sheffield, whose book is provocative and in places convincing, but is left smarting when you look to the actual documentation that came from the ordinary soldiers at the Front: letters, diaries, poetry, photographs, death statistics and suicidal advances, and, of course, the paintings by Spencer and his contemporaries – Gove, as is to be expected, places himself in the role of Commander in Chief, at best twenty miles behind the front, at worst sitting behind his cosy desk in Westminster. Or to put it another way – and I’ve done this – why not ask today’s military personnel what they think of the current set of politicians deciding their destinies thousands of miles away from modern conflicts? Or in an even more chilling aside, remind yourself that Gove is the man who is responsible for the way our young boys and girls are educated in today’s schools, and that his remarks signal a real nostalgia for a return to the rigid and inflexible class system that The Great War (small mercies) started to erode. 

Spencer's 'Poppies'

Gove is dangerous.  Much more so than many of his fellow Tories.  Boris’s ambitious amorality will always be curbed by the majority, Cameron is still largely playing the PR game, whilst Iain Duncan Smith is an incompetent idiot who must be amazed to find himself still in a high profile job.  Gove, however, is smart, not afraid of being disliked and appears to have an agenda that he would carry through no matter what the opposition. In a less democratic country and in a less forgiving time, a Michael Gove in the very highest echelon of power would make me feel very afraid.

There is more to the Great War than the wonderful Blackadder. Masses of it. And certainly not dominated by 'leftwing academics'. You could spend a lifetime alone reading the poetry - much of it starting off hopeful, and then, as the truth dawned, descending into the most horrific reflections on the horrors encountered. A trip to the Imperial War Museum will certainly yield very little sympathy for Gove. A cursory inspection of the diary entries and letters home in the Museum's library would disabuse you of any unflinching and unthinking notions of glory and country. Or trawling through the history books: I would personally recommend John Keegan's 'The First World War', a savage indictment on the incredible failures of diplomacy and communication by heads of state who were actual blood relatives. Perhaps Michael Gove himself should extend his research.  And whilst doing so, he could benefit immensely in talking to serving military personnel out in Afghanistan, although I would advise him to think long and hard about using the patronising and sneering tone that he currently employs with teachers and anyone else who fails to subscribe to his vision of the past, and more sinisterly, the future. 

Heaven in a Hell of War