Yesterday

the last 'British' soldier-survivor of World War One
was given a splendid funeral. Thousands lined
the route to the grave, and they appear on the front page
of today's newspapers.
Hundreds of thousands died in World War One:
cannon-fodder, only some of them 'British'
(including Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Manx).

The 'British' never get to hear about the French, whose countryside
was utterly destroyed, and a whole generation of whose males
were wiped out from Metz to Biarritz and Marseille to Dunkerque.

The crippling war-reparations that Germany
had to pay France in the 1920s went, largely, to fill in the trenches
and the craters, bury bits of corpses,
and to re-establish the local populations and
their farms, their livestock, and their copses.
Now you would almost imagine rural Picardy
had always been serene and lush.

The 'British' do not want to hear about the French who defended them
(and France) in World War One,
nor about the million Russians who died in World War Two
and kept the Germans from invading England.
Both France and Russia suffered terribly in both World Wars,
but it is the 'British' who keep droning on about heroes and courage
in two hecatombs for which they were
in great part responsible.
There were also Turks and Austrians and Czechs, Hungarians,
Ukrainians, Poles, Romanians and Lesser Subjects of the Evil British Empire
including many Irish and some Africans - and, last, but certainly
not least, envied Americans (many of them black).

Then there were the thinkers, the conscientious objectors, those
who refused to be deceived into patriotism, who were shot
as traitors because they rightly thought the war was wrong.

Who bothers to mention the tens of thousands of handsome horses
who were killed all over Europe ?

Coming up to date:
we have heard little about the tens of thousands of Iraqis
shot or otherwise murdered after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq
under false pretences - which didn't fool the French or anyone else.
We hear almost nothing about the thousands of Afghans
shot and blown up in yet another British Military Adventure.

And it is still criminal in the British Isles to help
a helpless friend who wants to die.