Anthem For Doomed Youth

On Remembrance Day voices call to us from a century ago

Another senseless waste of youth looms if we do not come to our senses. Let our ancients speak — and for God’s sake listen to them.

Nov 11, 2021

On November 11, 1918, in Shrewsbury, a messenger knocked on a door. It opened to the peal of English church bells celebrating Armistice Day. A military telegram told the couple that their son, Lt. Wilfred Owen, had died the week before.

One of the famous First World War poets, Owen had signed up after meeting soldiers in continental Europe where he had been teaching English.

Long ago I was a reporter in Hartfield, Sussex, where my beat included the home of a rather famous bear, Pooh, who is that emblem of childhood. It sticks in my mind for another reason: the war memorial in that tiny village is inscribed with name, after name, after name.

Every house must have lost someone. I read at about the same time the memoir of an earlier Lady Diana (Cooper) who recounts how even among the aristocrats, almost every young man of her acquaintance was gone. A generation wiped out.

The perpetrators of WW1 (which was actually had begun with the genocidal attack upon the Boers and ramped up from Africa) and those who prolonged it for profit, are the same interests behind Event Covid.

In the book Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, Gerry Docherty and James MacGregor make the case that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was really a way to channel supplies to Germany to prolong the war. They show how the committee was almost entirely composed of bankers. [1]

In 1954, Norman Dodd, chief investigator of the Reece Committee, reported that the Carnegie Endowment trustees had tried to involve the U.S. in WW1 and to make sure that the conflict did not end too soon. [2]

Dodd recalled their minutes in which the Carnegie, which worked closely with the Rockefellers, enquired:

"‘Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?’ And they conclude that no more effective means to that end is known to humanity, than war. So then, in 1909, they raise the second question, and discuss it, namely, how do we involve the United States in a war?

Well, I doubt, at that time, if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country, than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. And finally, they answer that question as follows: we must control the State Department.

And then, that very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? They answer it by saying, we must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country and, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective. Then, time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time, they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatch to President Wilson a telegram cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly."

And We Know

Today we know that the Boer War and the First and Second World Wars were part of an imperial project that was driven more by bankers and corporations than the monarchs who grace the pages of school textbooks.

The Boer War gave us concentration camps and the First War gave us mass production and railway lines that carried munitions from the factories right up to the front line. The motives for war had as much to do with reshaping society at home as beating enemies abroad — the same motive as 9/11, the Patriot Act, the War on Terror and Event Covid.

Today we witness the Fusion Doctrine and the Phoenix Program, both perfected in the Vietnam war, brought home to integrate government into a seamless surveillance state in which the domestic population is the enemy, just as Douglas Valentine forecast when he revealed Phoenix in 1990: "Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers."

They knew

The soldiers in their rat-infested trenches, like the Viet Cong in their tunnels, were able to intuit from the contrast between daily experience and broadcast propaganda. They may not have had the information to piece together the complete jigsaw but the very duration of those two wars spoke of agendas.

Owen’s writing was motivated by the horrors inflicted upon the young. He had visited soldiers in hospital before he even enlisted in 1915, aged 22. He had no doubt that this was the sacrifice of a generation; a carnage if not inflicted by parents, then one that they failed to stop. [3]

The Parable of the Young Man and the Old

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen

In one of life’s ironies, Owen’s friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon was a member of one of those wealthy banking families. Owen had been wounded in a shell blast in 1917 and evacuated to Edinburgh where he met Sassoon, a fellow British officer.

With cinema just taking off, poetry, often purchased in penny magazines, was the multimedia of the day — just as theatre had been in Shakespeare’s. The two men discussed how to use their skills more effectively to convey the trauma of prolonged bombardment, the relatively new machine guns and, perhaps, worst of all invisible poison gas. Both men went on to share Britain’s third-highest recognition of valour, the Military Cross and to become the foremost representatives of their fellow soldiers.

Sassoon opted not to return to the front [a reader has since informed me that Sassoon did return]. Owen, being enlisted had to go back. In addition, Sassoon’s brother died at Gallipoli and Siegfried became, writes Mac Caltrider, even more defiant in his criticism of war. [4]

Suicide In The Trenches [5]

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Siegfried Sassoon

As we turn, turn, turn again back to conflict, it beseeches us to ask why we are doing it and who drives us. It is the same question that Owen declared was not sufficiently asked, nor adequately answered — even when we marked the centenary’s start in 2014.

If we do not stop and question why we are injecting five year-olds who face less than a one per cent risk of injury from Covid with an experimental gene-altering modified-RNA, then we are walking down the same path.

We will end up with Anthem for Doomed Youth. [3]

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen

Doctor’s view

I like the poem of the Canadian physician-soldier John McCrae, In Flanders Fields, for the way it speaks to us. McCrae envisions soldiers reaching out to us from their graves, eager to spread the word.

Perhaps they and the author knew the war was not "legit". That it was not being fought for the stated purpose. If we fail to listen to those dead soldiers what, then, was the purpose of their deaths?

McCrae himself died in Jan 1918 in Boulogne, of pneumonia, presumably making his way towards the ferry that carried troops to Folkestone pier and the boat train to London. [6]

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

One group often forgotten were the Chinese youth, hired en-masse from China by a company owned in part by future U.S. president Herbert Hoover, who dug the trenches and cooked meals for the troops. When the war ended they stayed on for two or three years to dig graves, bury the dead, remove ordnance and fill in the trenches. One hundred years ago they were just returning to China, though many stayed on in France becoming the bulk of the country's Chinese community.

[1] Gerry Docherty and James MacGregor, 2013 - Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War

[2] Testimony of Norman Dodd, Supreme Law

[3] Wilfred Owen poems, RJ Geib Com — Thoughts, Abraham

[4] Mac Caltrider, Coffee or Die, Apr 2021 — Great Poets From ‘The Great War’ — The Story of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon

[5] Siegfried Sassoon, Poem Hunter — Suicide in the Trenches

[6] John McCrae — In Flanders Fields