I read that the latest bizarre stick with which to beat the male of the species is that we’re all ‘obsessed’ with the Roman Empire and think about it, like sex, many times a day. The former element is news to me. And I’m a man. Bo Diddely style. Grr!
Despite this apparently universal masculine obsession, I gave up Latin at the earliest opportunity and think I Claudius is a clunky RSC first rehearsal. But I do love Gladiator and the Kenneth Williams howler, “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me.” From Carry On Cleo. Quod erat demonstratum, I suppose.
Where I might agree, vaguely, with this latest for flagellum for the male back is that we do have a tendency to alight on bits of history which we find endlessly fascinating. The feminist theory might have it that this is because the past seems full of masculine certainty, rent clothing and the heaving bosoms of groat-bought camp followers. Though these are images I rarely conjure when I think about members of the Sealed Knot. Which, if I’m honest, I rarely do.
However, parked in front of The World At War, the documentary series to which the word ‘seminal’ must be added by law, I can I suppose briefly sympathise with the notion that each man has within a lurking historical anorak.
There is, though, more to it than that. I distinctly remember from childhood that portentous music and those fascinatingly horrifying open titles in which face after face immolates before us.
Most awful of all is the face of an evacuee boy looking upward in a poignant blend of trust and anxiety. Whether he is looking at an adult who has him in charge or to the skies isn’t clear and he burns before we discover. It had a very profound effect on me. And that, of course, was the point.
There is endless testimony to the horrors of war. Flamethrowers torching their way across Pacific Islands, the massacre of the Falaise Pocket, Monte Casino. Topping the list, however, are twin obscenities. First of the animalistic conduct of war on the Eastern Front in which no cruelty seemed too base. And, of course, the hell of the camps.
We know the images. The piles of naked and emaciated dead. The ovens held open for the cameramen to capture. Lice and typhus huts razed. The sobbing, disbelieving woman holding the extended hand of a British soldier.
The point of all this, the very essence, was surely to remind us that, as a species, we should never descend so low again. That this particular form of madness should sear so deeply into our memories that it forbids repetition.
And yet here we are again. Jews killed. Jews taken away. The cameras once again recording it. Not for remorseful posterity but in triumph and in taunt. Once again, someone, somewhere, wishing a people – people – expunged.
Or once again, east, in Ukraine. Death from above. Torture, rape, castration, cruellest annihilation.
Or further east again, the abandoned city of Stepanakert. 100,000 Armenians join the displaced.
To see what this is, to see what it does, one need go no further than France and to Oradour-Sur-Glane. Left, as it was, after an SS Das Reich unit killed the town in retaliation for the Resistance slowing its armour on a move north towards the Allied landings in Normandy. 643 of its inhabitants, including 247 children. They locked the men in barns and torched them. The women and children were sealed in the church and grenades thrown through the windows. It was a habit they had learned punishing partisan actions on the Russian front.
Perhaps the celebrants of the attack on Israel should be taken there. Perhaps everyone should be a bit more obsessed with history.
In defiance of the rational optimist, the evacuee boy still looks skywards then burns. The world is still at war.
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