The folly of fire and fury
October 12, 1917, lays claim to being our worst day. Ever.
While Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un issue bellicose threats about the destruction each could inflict if the other doesn’t look out, New Zealanders could do worse than pause from frowning from a distance and take a moment for introspection.
This pair’s mine’s bigger’n yours posturing makes for a shrill, if scary, soundtrack for the sombre memorial groupings that will happen around New Zealand today.
It’s a century since the day we came as close as we ever have to the sort of ‘‘fire and fury’’ that these disgraceful figures evoke in their rhetoric and, to an unknown extent, their planning.
October 12, 1917, lays claim to being our worst day. Ever.
Only we didn’t know it at the time. The damage happened out of sight, though hardly out of mind, at the Passchendaele battleground in Belgium.
In one fell morning 950 of our men either died or were mortally injured to endure days or weeks of suffering before they finally succumbed.
The greatest loss of life this nation has endured in any day of its recorded history.
Add the capacious ranks of the wounded, figures for which range upwards from 1900, and you have a toll that still wouldn’t conspicuously register if measured against the invocations of the Tweedletrump and Tweedlekim.
And the methodology of the longago massacre would doubtless seem terribly old-school.
In fact, it took a long time even for the bad news to get back home.
But what most alarmingly spans the century is the same sense that there’s still a lofty disregard for human life at play. As if some greater forces compel the conflict.
This is nonsense.
To this day school children have to swot, quite hard, to understand the chain of follies that led to World War I, the essential reason for which still confounds so many adults.
With effort, stories of some uplift and worth can be found from the Passchendaele theatre. Yes, the Germans stayed their guns so the wounded could be stretchered away afterwards. Yes, it is timely to marvel at the bravery of men like Allan Cockerell and George Hampton.
But we do a disservice to the dead, the harmed, the bereft, if we extend valid acknowledgment of soldiers’ bravery, sacrifice and mateship into some delusion that they were fighting for a truly worthwhile cause.
The hell of fire and fury must teach us one thing above all others.
The hell with fire and fury.