From Flanders Fields to Fallujah, Alemain to Afghanistan. Have Tweeting troops and Milbloggers brought us any nearer to Peace in our Time?



(This image - copyright Steven Danby)

It may be just me getting older, but the 11th Day of the 11th Month seems to come around again each year faster than the last. It is now more than 90 years since the Allies signed the Armistice with Germany, ending the Great War, in a railway carriage parked up in the forest of Compiègne in 1918.

The last swift 12 months also saw the sad passing of Britain’s last fighting Tommies, World War One veterans: Henry Allingham, Harry Patch and Bill Stone. Nobody who watched the 112-year old Allingham try, try again and finally fail, to lay his wreath at last year’s Cenotaph service can have any doubt as to the character of this man and of his generation.

My own father, Fred Jackson ISO, QFSM, CPM, a veteran of the D-Day Normandy Landings, also passed away last December, so this is the first year that I will watch today’s services of Remembrance alone, without Dad’s informed and emotional running commentary.

Many Great War survivors never spoke of the horrors they witnessed. Most extant documentary is limited to scrawled missives, somehow delivered home from the Trenches and, perhaps more affecting, some of the most powerful English poetry ever written, from such as Wilfred Owen and John MacRae.

Today, arguably, we know more about the theatre of war than we might honestly wish to know. Photographers and film crews embedded with US and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan may operate under official restrictions, but they are still able to give us a far more comprehensive picture of life on the frontline than we have ever seen before.

At the same time, the explosion in on-line self publishing, the rise of the Milblog and a recent profusion of frontline forces using Social Media tools, such as Twitter, has given anyone who chooses to tune in, a far more candid, soldier’s eye, view of what it is really like, day-to-day, defending Queen and Country. The Americans are already worried about the impact of these new, almost impossible to police, channels although they have yet to be banned.

But has this new, if still slightly tentative, source of grass roots information, and the supposed transparency it heralds, done anything at all to alter public opinion about the legitimacy of what is being prosecuted in the world’s most visible war zones?

I have already posted about Stars-and-Stripes draped caskets on my photojournalism blog and about whether or not the powers that be have legitimate cause to fear the widespread dissemination of these eloquent images. Here in Britain, we have seen a plethora of similar images over the last 48 hours, with the sobering total of six corpses repatriated only yesterday – five men, the victim of a single Afghan police assassin; one of them, Jimmy Major, 48 hours short of his 18th birthday.

Over the same news cycle, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has come under fire for his perceived callous treatment of grieving mother Jacqui Janes. If the blanket coverage of Mrs Janes’ grievances and of the silent tributes as cortège after cortège trundles through the town of Wootton Bassett is anything to go by, the Mainstream Media are now closely tracking a groundswell of public animus against the War in Afghanistan.


A total of 232 British forces personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001. I used to keep a tally of the fallen on my Babel@Bedlam blog but scrapped the widget months ago. It was simply too depressing. A recent poll for the Independent newspaper showed that 46 per cent of voters believe the continued presence of British troops is compounding security anxieties back home.

I haven’t been down to Wootton Bassett myself. I don’t need to. The hearses carrying the coffins of the latest broken boys drive practically past my front door, along the A420 trunk road from RAF Lyneham, en route to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. In July, I practically crashed the car returning home, as the chilling sight of not one, not two, but five Union Flag draped coffins filed slowly past on the other carriageway.

Only last month, I was held up by a stern police motorcycle outrider, as I attempted to join the main road, on my way home from walking the dogs along the Thames tow path at Radcot. This time, only one hearse went past, with an escort more usually seen in London, accompanying some visiting dignitary’s motorcade.

Yet one coffin was more than enough for me. I burst into hot, angry tears and wept so noisily, and for so long, that Harley, our young springer spaniel bitch, squeezed through the mesh of the dog guard and jumped onto my lap, to find out what on earth could possibly be so wrong.

Requiescat in Pacem.