11-11-11-11

Matt ArtPix's 11th November blog is particularly poignant this year. Matt's interest for the First World War started in very strange circumstances when he was 17. I hope he will write about this experience once day as it is quite disturbing. But ever since, he has tried to understand what happened to those people and their very personal, very individual experiences. MATT ARTPIX 11 11 11 11

I will borrow from Matt's blog:

Great Men

The great ones of the earth
Approve, with smiles and bland salutes, the rage
And monstrous tyranny they have brought to birth.
The great ones of the earth
Are much concerned about the wars they wage,
And quite aware of what those wars are worth.

You Marshals, gilt and red,
You Ministers and Princes, and Great Men,
Why can't you keep your mouthings for the dead?
Go round the simple cemeteries; and then
Talk of our noble sacrifice and losses
To the wooden crosses.

© Siegfried Sassoon, 17 August 1918


Unfortunately, as Matt says really well on his blog, we keep being obsessed with history but we don't learn. The phony wars our leaders are waging these days are useless, and don't even get me started on the religious authorities always trying to hijack remembrance day celebrations, when it is well documented that most of those men had lost their faith if they had one in the trenches. 
Absolutely disgusting. 

So years after year people "remember" then they go back to their shallow little lives and our government try and find yet another country to which to send their idiotic planes. Because they are so ineffectual in sorting out their own countries, they use "wars" to distract our attention away from their ineffectuality. 


My second book, The Book of Thoth, is set 7 years after the First World War and if I do not tackle it directly, the effects of the war play on part in the story.