Niall Ferguson - The Pity of War

John Gilmour Ferguson had just turned sixteen when the First World War

My grandfather was one of the lucky 73.6 per cent. He was shot through the shoulder by a sniper whose bullet would certainly have killed him if it had struck a few inches lower. He survived a gas attack, though his lungs suffered permanent damage. His most vivid recollection of the war or at least the one he related to his son was of a German attack. As the enemy troops ran towards his trench, he and his comrades fixed bayonets and prepared for the order to go over the top. At the last moment, however, the command was given to the Cameronians further down the line. So heavy were the casualties in the ensuing engagement that he felt sure he would have died if the order had been given to the Seaforths.

Not many records survive of John Fergusons war. Like the overwhelming majority of the millions of men who fought in the First World

All these, however, are no more than educated guesses. Apart from his rank and serial number, the only hard evidence I have is a small box containing a tiny bible, three medals and a few photographs of him in uniform a rather stony-faced lad in a kilt. The first of the medals, the British Medal, depicts a nude man on horseback. Behind the rider is the date 1914; at the horses nose, the traditional terminus 1918. Under its rear hooves apparently about to be crushed is a skull. (Does this represent a triumph over Death or some unfortunate German?) The other side resembles nothing more than an old coin. It bears the morose regal profile and the inscription:

The imagery of the Victory Medal is also classical. On the front there is a winged angel bearing an olive branch in her right hand and waving her left, though it is not quite clear whether this represents British womanhood welcoming the survivor home or the angel of death waving him goodbye. The inscription on the obverse (this time in English) reads:

THE GREAT
WAR FOR
CIVILISATION
19141919

My grandfathers third medal was an Iron Cross a souvenir from a dead or captured German soldier.

That my grandfather fought on the Western Front was, and still is, a strange source of pride. If I try to analyse that pride, I suppose it has to do with the fact that the First World War remains the worst thing the people of my country have ever had to endure. To survive it was to be mysteriously fortunate. But survival also seemed to suggest great resilience. Most impressive of all was the fact that my grandfather returned to lead a relatively stable and (at least outwardly) contented civilian life. He got a job with a small export house and was sent to sell whisky and hardware in Ecuador. That was as exotic as it got. After a couple of years he returned to Scotland, settled in Glasgow, married, set himself up as an ironmonger, had a son, lost his wife through illness, married my grandmother, and had another son: my father. The rest of his life he spent in a council house in Shettleston, an eastern suburb of Glasgow, then dominated by a huge, reeking ironworks. Despite inflicting further damage on his lungs by chain-smoking (a habit probably acquired in the trenches, where tobacco was the universal drug), he had the strength to keep his small business afloat through a succession of economic storms, and lived to dandle his two grandchildren wheezily on his knee. He seems to have been able to live, in other words, quite normally. In this, of course, he resembled the great majority of men who fought in the war.

He did not talk much about it to me; after his death, however, I came to think about it a great deal. It was rather hard not to. Shortly after the war, the school my parents sent me to, the Glasgow Academy, had been formally dedicated to the memory of those who had died in the war. Between the ages of six and seventeen, therefore, I was educated literally inside a war memorial. Each morning, the first thing I saw as I approached the school was a pale, granite slab which stood at the corner of Great Western Road and Colebrooke Terrace and bore the names of former pupils of the school who had died in the war. There was a similar roll of honour on the second floor of the main school building, a cavernous neo-classical edifice. Sometimes, on the way from Algebra to Latin, we walked right past it. The balcony was so narrow that we had to go in single file, and each time I had the chance to read one of the names: I seem to remember there being at least one Ferguson, though no relation of mine. And above all those dead names, in bold capitals, there was the legend which I came to know as well as the Lords Prayer we mumbled each morning at assembly:

I think my first serious historical thought was an objection to that stern injunction. But they did die. Why deny it? And, as John Maynard Keynes once sarcastically remarked, in the long run we are all dead even those with the luck to survive the First World War. Eighty years have passed since the Armistice of 11 November 1918, and as far as it is possible to know in the absence of an official veterans register no more than a few hundred of those who fought in the British forces are still alive. The World War I Veterans Association has 160 members; the Western Front Association around ninety old soldiers. Five hundred is the highest conceivable total of survivors. The numbers cannot be much higher in the other combatant countries. Soon the First World War will join the Crimean War, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War beyond the reach of first-hand recollection. Say not that the brave die? A schoolboy could accept, without giving it too much thought, the bald assertion that all who had died in the war had been brave. But the idea that engraving their names on a wall somehow kept them alive: that was unconvincing.