The legacy of war

The legacy of war

Military conflict tortures the earth and leaves a devastating aftermath for the humans that survive, says Andrew O’Hagan, and modern technology is increasing the problem
 
My great-grandfather’s brother, Robert Lavery, fought with the Royal Highland Fusiliers in 1918. He died in Flanders Field and it was only recently that I found some letters he had written back home. What struck me most about these letters is that they didn’t speak about personal pain or human injury, but they did speak forcefully about injury to the landscape. In one of them he talks about the grass burned away, trees scorched from the earth, a wastedness and a blackness everywhere. He wrote of buildings tumbled to dust.
 
There weren’t any letters in my family, so I was especially struck to find these because part of the story of my family, in Glasgow, had been unrecorded. It had never been, from one generation to another, the kind of family, the kind of community, the kind of class, where people memorialised their lives and their experience. Glasgow had always represented a sort of absence for so many of us who came later; a mystery. The old city had been cleared away, both in wartime and in peace, as modernisation took hold and the slums were swept out. The bombers had made quick work of Clydebank. To look back on the history of one’s own family in such a place is to stare into a kind of void, an emptiness, a lack of description. For an artist or for a writer, this can become a true subject: how the past is always a scene of the unknowable; a place of doubts.
 
Thinking of my kinsman in Flanders Field, of course, I began to think of the poets of that great period who described that landscape so accurately. One thinks of Wilfred Owen and Dulce et Decorum Est, those bedraggled, lined, half-starved soldiers marching forward. “Trudging,” he wrote, “like beggars.” The relationship of individuals to their landscape has been, for me, both as a novelist and as a writer of essays and non-fiction, the central subject. It feels native to me, the notion that we do not just arrive haphazardly in any empty space but that our imaginations realise places, invent them, and that our imaginations, or the lack of them, can destroy those places too.
 
We are living through a period of massive destruction. When I was growing up and looking at those empty spaces where the tenements used to be, where my grandparents had lived and with no record of them having lived there – no photographs, few letters – I often thought of a line of the Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid. He wrote, “There are ruined buildings in the world but there are no ruined stones.” That has been for me almost a kind of rubric in front of everything I have tried to write. To get back to the landscape at its most naked and describe the human experience that occurred there.
 
An artist like Andy Goldsworthy finds it natural to return to those stones again and again. For some people they represent a sort of vacancy, I suppose. But for others, including many artists, I imagine, they represent the greatest kind of richness – a geological richness, a narrative gift, an embedded series of universal stories, perhaps un-tellable, unknowable, but there.
 
Coming out of my childhood, I encountered the films of Bill Douglas, who produced a series often referred to as The Childhood Trilogy. The first one, My Childhood, shows the experience of a young boy in a post-industrial landscape, in a mining community outside Edinburgh. It stood in direct contradiction to all we thought we knew of Bonnie Scotland and its tartans, its shortbread and its ruby-cheeked, ready to go, fearlessly optimistic individuals.
 
I said before that we’d lived through a period of unprecedented destruction. I mean very directly to posit such destruction against the achievements of the imagination. I think, as those of us interested in the arts might accept in the manner of a first principle, that this destruction has repeatedly contradicted the finer instincts of the human imagination and human empathy in our time. No matter what their politics or beliefs, an artist is by definition always an anti-war artist, because annihilation stands powerfully and ceaselessly in opposition to creativity. One can think a battle or a war just, but in the bones and in the heart, one knows that the entire enterprise – win or lose – is a shocking defeat of what is best in us. Artists have always known this.
 
As much lately as at any time, we have witnessed the vandalism of war, the destruction of culture that follows military intervention. I am talking about, specifically, the mindless destruction of Babylon, of ancient civilisations and their artworks, their landscapes. Bombing has no discrimination; technology impresses us with its accuracy yet not with its judgement. We have yet to invent a warhead that can side-wind round a beautiful thing. True hatred’s first hate is civilisation because its beautiful complications remind the hater how irrational he is being. So let us speak of vandalism, that thousands of years of culture can be levelled and insulted and degraded and denied and cancelled and made useless and made void in seconds. Let us notice that and ask ourselves again what our purpose is. But as well as vandalism and waste, in the war zones I have visited one is often overwhelmed by the man-made mess. What you often witness is the detritus of war – the toxic, horrifying, poisonous litter, from field to hallowed field. Water is polluted, trees are uprooted, life is made less, endlessly less, and that’s before you account for the loss of a single life.
 
Those of us who have visited war zones spend a lot of time watching where our feet go, just as people who live on the coast spend a lot of time looking at the horizon. In Sudan I realised not only that war endangered the land but, more than that, it made the land endanger us. We could observe that this terrible, dualistic experience is now part of the dualistic experience of our time. We all experience it at some level. Think about what a landmine is in a field. We can treat it in the abstract, of course, when we live here and we can walk up and down the streets almost mindlessly, almost without thinking, as an invisible citizen in one of Calvino’s invisible cities. But in these places, to stop concentrating for a second on the relationship between the sole of your foot and the surface of the land is to endanger yourself to the point of extinction. The earth becomes an enemy and it was man that made it so. I tell you from experience that a town surrounded by landmines is the most fearful abomination and abuse of the human imagination that it is possible to conceive of; where the simple business of a child running into a field becomes a hazard beyond thinking about. People who have tended olive trees for thousands of years, from generation to generation, are suddenly in mortal danger if they go near any of those trees. To be truly, imaginatively and realistically, cut off from your ecology turns everybody into a potential victim, an alien on their own soil, a victim of an intervention that might last their whole lifetime. I want to give you an indication of some of the fears I am talking about. Here are some statistics from what is called the first Gulf War: Iraqi forces destroyed more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait, spilling 60m barrels of oil. More than 10m cubic metres of soil were still contaminated seven years later. A major groundwater aquifer, two-fifths of Kuwait’s fresh water-producing reserve, remains contaminated to this day. Ten million barrels of oil were released into the Gulf, affecting 15,000km of coastline and costing more than $700m to clear up. A thankless task. During the nine months that the wells burned, average air temperatures fell by 10 degrees centigrade as a result of reduced light from the sun.
 
It has become part of the conventional wisdom of modern warfare to attack both military installations and chemical plants; this is a disaster for the world’s ecology. Looking back from the future, we might wonder how such military actions – such madness, really – could ever have been imagined. Could we ever have thought it would hurt regimes more than it was hurting the habitat itself? A war economy is always the enemy of a natural habitat. It alienates us from the very soil under our feet.
 
I grew up as a post-industrial child in Scotland, on the west coast, looking across the Clyde. We would see nuclear submarines making their way through that water. Every now and then the regularity of those nuclear manoeuvres would be broken by the appearance of a ship called SS Dalgarnock, which was the Glasgow sludge boat. Twice a day, it took the effluent from the River Clyde and from the sleeping inhabitants of Glasgow out to a point three and a half miles south of Garroch Head to drop 3,000 tonnes of effluent into the sea. I hasten to add that there wasn’t much swimming done in my childhood off the west coast. 
 
As part of our post-industrial nature, and now part of our mid-military nature, as artists we live at the very centre of an encounter with waste and destruction, as well as the other things we encounter within our work and within our lives. Every day we encounter what it means to suffer an attack from man’s obsessive carelessness. I have spent some time with the families of two soldiers who died in Iraq on the same day. One of them was an American pilot and the other a regular soldier from Newcastle; both died on 2 May 2005.
 
My story, The Atlantic Ocean, is an attempt to investigate what a writer can find out about the invisible aspects of a life and an environment in which people can be moved to fight and die. That was the effort. I found again and again – in Iraq, in America and in the north of England – that these individuals, invisible as they might be to our common understanding, represent a decline, I think, in our commitment to imagining what it actually means to drop bombs from 15,000 feet on to people you can neither imagine nor understand. The technological ingenuity of the fighter planes  is such that it disallows you from participating – that is the rub, the question of participation, in life and in death, and we have suffered a coarsening of our moral understanding in that way.
 
We have entered into a period of alienation in the air as on land in military situations. Just as our governments seem unwilling to think about the toxic destruction of war, so are single pilots unable to conceive of themselves as participating in anything more serious than a video game. I would remind you, dear reader, that as artists and enjoyers of art, as makers and takers of culture, it is perhaps our fundamental responsibility to comprehend the hatred in the eyes of our enemies, if they are our enemies. But it is also our responsibility to imagine what it must mean to be a child running towards a horizon in a landscape that has been made alien to them, even though elements of that land, that water, that way of life, are there in their DNA. Such children live as ghosts on the surface of their own soil. We are denying them the earth.
 
And that is the scandal of modern warfare and its methods: even those left behind are rubbed out to some degree, we are all rubbed out, and what is such an effort if not the very antithesis of art’s basic meaning as it has developed over several millennia: to render the presence of human beings on earth beautifully indelible? 
 
Andrew O’Hagan is an author and contributing editor to Granta. His book The Atlantic Ocean is published by Faber & Faber.