Hospitals are home to the truth of war

Remembering what war really is.

Simon Cansdale

Simon is a vicar in Winchester, Hampshire.

A black and white photo shows solider patients and nurses in a hospital.

Christmas in a German military hospital, Word War One.

Aussie~mobs, public domain, via Wikimedia.

I’ve been re-reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in the run-up to Remembrance Day. Remarque, born in Westphalia in 1898, uses his own experiences of the horrors of the Western Front to paint a gut-wrenching portrait of its futility and suffering, seen through the eyes of 20-year-old Paul Baum.

It had been towards the end of this First World War that Hiram Johnson, Republican Senator of California, observed that ‘the first casualty when war comes is truth.’ This is precisely Paul’s experience.

The newspapers delivered to the soldiers at the Front are hopelessly, naively, offensively optimistic. They present a painfully, laughably discordant tissue of lies that deny the most basic truths of daily experience. When Paul goes home on leave, truth is even harder to find. His remote father only wants to hear tales of glory and courage and well-fed soldiers. His blabbering former teachers - the very ones who had cajoled his whole class to sign up - are patronising, ignorant and opinionated on the best route to victory. They literally have no idea, and worse, they don’t want to know.

It’s only when he’s taken to a Catholic Hospital after an injury that Paul stumbles on an agonising truth -

‘A hospital alone shows what war is.’

Paul’s vivid description of life on the wards backs this up. He witnesses the unceasing production line of shattered bodies tumbling into every available space. He’s warned against ‘The Dying Room’ which is conveniently, practically, located next to the mortuary. He catalogues the surrounding wards - ‘abdominal and spinal cases, head wounds, double amputations, jaw wounds, gas cases, nose, ear and neck wounds … the blind … lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the testicles …’ He’s grateful for the gentle, joyful kindness of Sister Libertine, ‘who spreads good cheer through the whole wing.’

This hospital is more eloquent on the theme of the futility of the fighting than any newspaper article or speech, censored or otherwise.

For much of my adult life grainy videos of precision-guided bombs and leaders pounding their fist in defiant rhetoric have been the go-to guides to tell us the truth about modern warfare. I trust these sources less than ever, as I recall my instinctive respect for the ambulance drivers, nurses and doctors on the front-line - wherever it may be - marvelling at their courage and truth-telling and even-handed humanity.

Their voices are shamefully drowned out in the world’s conflict zones, dwarfed by propaganda as insulting and truth-lite as the newspapers that doubled as toilet paper for both sides on the Western Front. And I cringe at the thought of what Paul and his young comrades would’ve made of hospitals - those oases of truth - becoming the targets of today’s bombs, missiles and drone strikes.

We, rightly, remember the First World War as the very epitome of futility - Paul and his generation saw this truth far more clearly than we do. But let’s not congratulate ourselves, as we prepare for Acts of Remembrance in 2024, on having made any real progress in the last 100 years - hospitals across the globe’s conflict zones still tell us what war really is, if only we could hear, if only we would listen.

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Sustainability

4 November 2024

3 min read

Coal’s demise teaches us to be cautious about progress

Why the extinguishing of coal power should dampen attitudes to what promises to be progress.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A sky line shows steam rising from a power station's chimney and cooling towers.

Ratcliffe on Soar power station.

Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Chimneys. In our 1920s house, we have two of them, rising into the sky like solid brick antennae. Look across most big cities in the UK today and virtually every house still has them. Yet most of them remain idle, monuments of a bygone age. Useful for holding the TV aerial but not much else.

I thought of chimneys recently when driving up the M1 past Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station. On the last day of September this year, it was disconnected from the national grid, as the UK’s last coal-fired power station. The age of coal was over.

Back in the day, chimneys were busy. In the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s and 1800, coal was used to light towns, power railways, and fuel steam engines. By 1850 we were mining 62 million tonnes of coal every year. Coal was the fuel of the present, driving the technology of the future. Chimneys were a sign of a bright way ahead, churning out smoke from coal-fired factories and bringing safe fires into the hearth and home on those dark wintry northern European nights. Coal was leading us into the sunny uplands of prosperity, comfort and mastery over nature. The power behind the industrial revolution, it was as crucial to the present - and the future - as the smartphone seems to us today.

It began to dawn on us we had a problem with coal during the Great Smog of London in 1952. A period of cold weather, an unusually high number of domestic coal fires, no wind and an anticyclone which acted like a thick, stifling blanket, all of it kept the soot-filled fumes from escaping into the atmosphere. As a result, a miasma of dense, smelly fog sat for days over London, killing thousands of people. It led to the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968, banning emissions of black smoke and making residents of urban areas and operators of factories convert to smokeless fuel. Margaret Thatcher’s fight with the miners in 1982, leading to the closure of many pits, was another nail in the coffin of coal.

In October 2001, the Large Combustion Plant Directive aimed to reduce carbon emissions throughout Europe. The UK planned to end coal use by 2025, and we managed to get there a year early. On the domestic level, not many of us use coal or wood fires anymore. Since May 2023, it has been illegal to sell ordinary domestic coal in the UK. Wet wood is banned too. You can burn what’s called ‘dry wood’, with 20% moisture or less, but you can’t go into the woods and bring home random logs you find on a weekend walk any more. Wood burners remain popular, yet even they are suspect, as they produce high levels of CO2.

Gradually we realised that there was an order and a rhythm to the natural world that we messed with at our peril. There was, as Marilynne Robinson once called a ‘Givenness’ to the world. We simply had to learn to respect that givenness, that order, and live within the limits it placed upon us. And as a result, the chimneys lie idle.

The demise of coal - and chimneys - teaches us a lesson. Not everything that promises progress is good. Wisdom lies not in pushing forward with whatever technology or new idea offers more choice, more possibility, but knowing what will diminish us and what will give us life.