‘In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” The now almost immortal line opening Hemingway’s short story, In Another Country, has a continuing and sometimes desperate resonance: war as a permanent human avocation.
Certainly in my life I can think of no time when there wasn’t some sort of war going on somewhere. My very earliest memories are to do with war, which at the time I understood to be some kind of adult game being played away from home and where older people were sent as participants. All talk was of ‘our boys at the front” and ‘the men up north” engaged in a competition with someone called Hitler.
The only penalty I could determine was something spoken of in bitter tones and to do with a permanent shortage of food. To overcome ‘rationing” my mother kept a few gaunt chickens in the backyard and where a task for my sisters and me was to paint their fragile eggs with a thin yellow lacquer so that they wouldn’t go off. The lacquer sealed off the porous shells.
White bread was on the forbidden list during those years and so another task for the children of 232 Sydenham Road was slowly turning the handle of a small wooden device that sifted coarse wheatmeal through fine gauze and produced pure white flour.
We were told ‘never to tell anyone about this” as it was considered unpatriotic and venal to bake white bread. A tall loaf duly emerged from the oven and was kept out of sight. The residue bran went to the chickens.
If there was rampage and destruction on the distant fronts the only echo for me was in the observable ragings of my father, whose several attempts to volunteer for the armed forces were turned down on medical grounds. He tried to ‘join up” at a number of different recruiting stations but never managed to satisfy what was a cursory physical examination.
He must have been ailing because he faded and died a few years later. His disappointment was one thing, but nothing like the fury when one morning through the post came an envelope containing nothing but a white feather. This was the symbol of contempt, used to denote a coward, the last thing he was.
My uncle Nelson did, however, go off ‘up north” and we took greater interest in bits of war that came to us as every evening we crouched around our Zenith wireless, listening through shortwave static to BBC relays. It was blackout time and at dusk heavy house curtains were drawn. Outside cars crept about, following dim pencils of light emitted through pointed black metal shades fitted to their headlights and people spoke in worried tones about something called the Admiral Graf Spee, which I was later to learn was a German battleship lurking somewhere just over the horizon of the Natal coast.
Then, quite suddenly as it seemed, the war was all over and we were perched on a balcony above Huxtables tea room halfway up West Street in Durban, watching and cheering the long khaki parade of the returning South African troops, spotting a deeply suntanned uncle Nelson striding out proudly in short pants, long socks and gleaming boots, with his .303 bouncing on his shoulder. My father was engaging his own final battle then, wasting in his first TB ward.
So ended my first war and shortly afterwards the shape of my urban life. Till then I had been a sickly child, pneumonic and convulsive until a magical three-way operation by a visiting English ear, nose and throat surgeon had me pitched unwillingly into rampant health and, with that, dispatched to a ‘proper” school. Till then my mother — a trained teacher — had been given dispensation to educate me at home.
Shortly after my father died, I was packed off to a boarding school in the Natal Midlands and there another and more personal war was declared: between me and the whole idea of boarding-school incarceration. I had to abscond from the school some five times before a truce was declared and I was allowed home to the spoils of my minor victory: day school and home life.
My dictionary defines ‘war” as being ‘a state of conflict, between states or parties within a state (civil wars)” and further explains that wars are ‘carried on by arms”. By these definintions it seems incongruous for one boy’s homesick woes to be regarded as a war. That deserves a milder term, like conflict or skirmish, though later in life, when I fell under the tutelage of trained Catholic brethren, Christian violence entered the picture in no uncertain terms.
The whole of our standard education was stitched through with war. As if being prepared for military professions, pupils learned the dates and outcomes of, the alibis for numerous conflicts: biblical wars and Wars of the Roses and Wars of Independence and Spanish and French, wars religious and secular, Boer wars and First World Wars liberally interspersed with revolutions and uprisings, insurrections and revolts; a never-ending catalogue of carnage and bloodshed.
War was glorified in the exploits of military heroes in the endless rally of films and books on World War II that poured forth in those years. Fed with a diet as specific and concentrated as this, could a whole generation be blamed if we grew to believe that killing each other was not only the preferable way to settle differences, but an entirely natural state of human affairs?
By over-usage the word ‘war” has now lost much of its vigour: we now have ‘wars on poverty” and ‘wars on Aids” and even, as the other day, some ministerial spokescreature in his enthusiasm spoke about declaring a ‘war on the homeless”.
As is usual it has been politicians who have despoiled the word. As I write this, another, as it were, suitable war is on the pending list. It looks inevitable that the United States will invade Iraq early in next year. No matter what vacuous voices are raised in the United Nations, George W Bush and Tony Blair have already rolled their dice on this one.
Why is there always war? I believe there’s little doubt as to the prime reason: that supplying the needs of war has created about the biggest business of them all, the international arms industry. Stupendous sums are spent each year in the name of ‘defence” — no self-respecting politician will ever admit that arms purchases are for anything but that. I see that arms manufacturer Denel has landed a R796-million contract to supply the South African National Defence Force with a sophisticated air radar ‘defence system”.
The question is obvious: what imminent air attack does South Africa face? Also as must follow: why does this country, with its appalling levels of poverty and dispossession, need a R60-billion arms deal? So far the only beneficiaries of the obscene excesses of the South African arms deal seem to have been a few of the African National Congress’s elite and their cronies.
Bleak comfort to know that these corruptions happen elsewhere. This year Blair’s New Labour Party sanctioned the sale of an outdated military air traffic control system to Tanzania, at a cost of R1,3-billion. Tanzania boasts an air force comprising a total of 10 or 11 obsolete aircraft — half of which are actually capable of undertaking flight. For the efficient control of these buckets of airborne bolts, England sold Tanzania an air traffic control system capable of handling Heathrow, Stanstead and Gatwick airports — together.
Wars spell unimaginable riches for the businessmen who supply their consumables. Ethopia starves and has its hands stretched out for international food-aid to save the lives of 11-million people. At the same time as it begs for this relief, the Ethopian government conducts a war with its neighbour, where just one truck-mounted rocket costs R250 000.
To justify its contract for a R796-million air defence radar system, Denel speaks compassionately of how its contract will ‘create jobs” and involve ‘black empowerment”: today’s all-comers excuse for any level of commercial banditry.
War means money, lots and lots of it. The most compelling of the theories about the assassination of late US president John F Kennedy is that it was sponsored by the American arms industry, which stood to lose billions if Kennedy’s international peace missions came to completion. On the other hand, the hawkish ways of Bush increase his popularity in the big-business community by the day.
After which solemn thoughts, let me close with a superb and wholly offhand remark on the subject of wars, and which came from Beverly Pickford, one half of the gifted wildlife photographer team of herself and husband Peter. These two intrepid latter-day explorers recently covered a five-month land-trip around and across Africa — a sometimes perilous expedition.
‘What about the wars?” I asked. ‘Weren’t you a bit scared of the wars?” Beverly answered with a comment worthy of Hemingway when it came to putting things in perspective.
‘We never worry about the wars,” she said. ‘We just drive around them.”
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