Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

The Falklands War (1)

The compelling drama surrounding the “War of the Falkland Islands,” or whatever it will come to be known as, made most of the week’s television seem nugatory — or, to put it in a more charitable way, highlighted its essentially artificial and fictive nature. Radio won the day, however, with its live transmission of the emergency parliamentary debate on Saturday morning. If there was ever a time when one wished TV cameras had been allowed into the House of Commons, this was surely it. Equally astonishing was the blare of xenophobic, jingoistic sentiment that erupted. It was an unsettling experience seeing the bellicose clichés being dusted off and reading the trumpeting headlines and leaders in the national press. This must have been what it was like before the Crimea, the Boer War or 1914, one thought bemusedly. Edward Du Cann’s absurd but surely to be immortalized assertion about the impossibly stretched lines of communication summed it all up: “I don’t remember Wellington whining on about Torres Vedras,” he said with no trace of irony. Yet we were whizzing further back through time by Monday morning as an ITN Special Report brought us the departure of the Invincible and the Hermes for the South Atlantic. “There’s a curiously seventeenth-century atmosphere about Portsmouth today,” the reporter opined. Sir Francis Drake and the Armada were regularly alluded to. However, the irate gung-ho spirit seemed to have subsided to a degree. The analyses offered by various experts were in a tone that seemed to imply a faintly unreal air about the whole undertaking. Were we really sailing off to wage war against the Argentinians? Were these prognoses about the superiority of the British Fleet, for once, not part of some hypothetical war game?

And yet the crowds packed the quayside, there was cheering and flag-waving as our gallant boys sailed off to do battle with the foe. The most alarming aspect of all the multitude of words so far expended is that comparatively few of them have been concerned with the actual fate that may greet these servicemen. “People will get hurt” appears at the moment to be the favourite euphemism for “killed and maimed.” “I’m afraid people get hurt in war,” was John Nott’s variation during a commendably vigorous and aggressive interview by Brian Walden on Weekend World (LWT), as if he were talking about pulled muscles or tennis elbow. Once again the bleak sense of déjá vu descended: images of chateau-dwelling, claret-swilling generals during the First World War, staff officers planning strategy hundreds of miles from the front line. The front line in this particular case looks like being halfway round the world. If I were a naval rating on HMS Invincible I would feel very uneasy about what I was being asked to do.

But then that’s not a characteristic response from people who volunteer to join the armed forces. This fact was made evident by a coincidental repeat of The Woolridge View (BBC2) about the Navy fieldgun teams which participate in the Royal Tournament. Here men volunteered to “learn to withstand unreasonable physical pain” within a training regime whose working conditions were blind obedience to the unbelievably tyrannical discipline of the NCO coaches. These men mercilessly knock their teams into shape. “Once fit,” a coach boasted, “they become beasts.” I suppose at this point one should growl “Look out Argentina,” but on reflection — not much required — it seems demeaning and sad. Clearly there’s nothing terribly sinister about it being applied to sport, but, equally clearly, one knows that these same values on display are intended to function on the battlefield as well.

1982