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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Assisted dying

Care

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Death & life

29 November 2024

2 min read

Assisted dying: truly a black Friday

The UK takes a step into the bleak unknown.

Graham Tomlin

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

Four MPs stand at a table with heads bowed.

Assisted dying vote tellers acknowledge the result.

Parliament TV.

So, the House of Commons has voted in favour of assisted suicide. When the result was announced there was an audible gasp in the House. There were no cries of victory or whoops of delight. Maybe it was a sense of the gravity of what the MPs had just done. Presumably there was some relief for those who had advocated a change to the law but for those who were against it, a deep, deep sadness.

The arguments have been rehearsed many times over the past few weeks, although to be honest it feels like this debate has been extraordinarily rushed, given the gravity of the step we have just taken. Of course, the bill now needs to be scrutinised and voted on further, and it may yet fail.

Of course, not every Christian is against a change to the law. And I do feel the strength of the argument for individuals in extreme pain as death approaches. Yet the more I have thought about it, the more convinced I have become that this is a grave error. I worry that as we all grow towards old age, this decision will open the gates to an intolerable choice. Numerous people, especially the elderly and confused, those who go through depressive episodes or whose lives are in a mess and need encouragement and support not the suggestion of an easy way out, will be tempted to take a drastic step that before, would not have been possible.

Surely one of the best defences against suicide is simply to make it unthinkable, so it's not really an option, however bad things get. Once it becomes not only an option but even in some cases recommended, we have opened a door that should have remained closed. As someone said about the progress of MAID in Canada, what started as occasional permission gradually became a viable option, and now risks turning into an obligation.

Whatever happens, there is need for further vigilance - to protect the vulnerable, to hold those who advocated for change to the safeguards they put in place, to keep pushing for investment in palliative care. And as far as possible, to keep this as an option for the very few.

Yet those things seem much harder to do now. If life is the gift of God; if the attempt to control everything, even our last moments in the mystery of death is a pathological mistake of modernity; if exalting personal autonomy over all other considerations is a denial of our interdependence; if being cared for by others in our last moments is more important than the assertion of personal choice, then this seems to be a moment when as a society we have embraced death, not life. It does feel truly a black Friday.