OH, WHAT A SILLY NEWSPAPER

Leave it to the Guardian, to publish this "comment":

It's 2017, the centenary of the battle of Passchendaele. The army authorities have decided that one of the grisliest bloodbaths in British military history in which many thousands of young men died in the horrifying and unrelievedly squalid conditions of close-fought battle, should be commemorated with a re-enactment.

It will be a marvellous day out. The British army itself has shrunk, but we have many friends from around the world to share the festivities. Contingents will come from Serbia and Colombia, from Nigeria and Uruguay. The royal family will drive around the battlefield in Range Rovers, hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts will come in their own burnished armoured cars. Fun will be had! It will be a carnage party to beat all carnage parties, fireworks will imitate the whizzbangs, mopeds will mimic the artillery limbers. Grass will stand in for mud.

Unthinkable? Maybe. But today's jamboree down at Portsmouth, the "Second Battle of Trafalgar" as the Daily Mail describes it, is a scarcely less weird bit of historical forgetting. It's an Oh What A Lovely Trafalgar Day, a party more like something to celebrate winning the World Cup than one of the most blood-soaked naval battles ever fought. . .

First, that hypothetical is "unthinkable", no, not just "maybe" but "absolutely", because the two battles were so incredibly different. Passchendaele was killing on an horrific scale that accomplished nothing decisive. In contrast, Trafalgar was by modern standards tiny, yet was also a battle that likely saved Britain from a Napoleonic invasion . . . and could for instance therefore be considered a decisive moment in European history akin to the RAF's fending off the Luftwaffe 65 years ago.

Second, by the way, this "serious" comment in the Guardian bases an hypothesis on quotes of the Daily Mail's interpretation of today's events? No one's laughing about Trafalgar. However, at that Guardianite characterization of today's happenings, I am laughing.

Daily Mail silliness which so "offends" the sensibilities of this Guardian writer notwithstanding, what is happening today -- agree with some "political correctness" or not -- is actually not a reenactment of Trafalgar anyway. It is an "International Fleet Review" and a later there will be a mock Nelsonian-era fleet action. And none of that has been, believe it or not, organized by the Mail.

Anyway, the piece gets even better:

. . . Everyone on all sides knew the result before the battle began: the British, described in the Spanish press as "los usurpadores de la libertad de los mares" (usurpers of the freedom of the seas), would destroy their enemies.

That's just too glib. In war between two sides relatively evenly matched, it is rare that victory is ever quite that certain. Chance plays an enormous part, too. A wrong order at a wrong time, a wrong maneuver . . . and disaster awaits. (I think it was Confederate General Longstreet who noted what one would think would be the obvious -- but obviously isn't so obvious to everyone: no general loses a battle on purpose, and that every action that always looks so clear-cut to reviewers after the fact -- that "General A" should have done this, that "General B" should have done that -- is never, naturally, quite so clear-cut at the time. Eh, but what the heck did he know, right?)

So at 200 years' distance it's easy to say how, oh, "everyone" knew the British would win; but at the time, even on the British side, few were willing to be quite THAT certain. (Mostly, they all just hoped they'd live through whatever was coming.) Indeed, did "all sides" know that in winning the battle Admiral Nelson would be killed? And what might have become of the British navy subsequently had he lived on? We'll never know, will we?

Which is what they did: the figure you will not read in the Daily Mail graphics is the proportion of French and Spanish to British dead. In the battle and in the days afterwards some 650 British sailors and marines died. Over the same period, Nelson's fleet killed 6,500 of their enemies.

The Daily Mail must really irk this gentleman no end. In any event, I'm not quite sure what that comparison of higher French/Spanish to British dead is supposed to mean. Would it have been better for Britain had it been the other way 'round?

That Everest of slaughter was no chance effect. Nor was the killing of sailors collateral damage in Nelsonian war. It was the only route to victory. The ships themselves were virtually unsinkable. You won by making the enemy bleed to death. British guns were double- and treble-shotted to slow down the cannonballs, allowing them to ricochet among the crews they were aimed at. Trafalgar was victory by exsanguination. . .

"Everest of slaughter"? Talk about hyperbole. If Trafalgar was that, then what the heck was, say, Stalingrad?

Anyhow, for those of us not quite so erudite, "exsanguination" defined: "To drain of blood". A surprise that. What we all had thought was that killing didn't include bleeding.

Indeed, any exsanguination of fighting sailors is never collateral damage. Killing the enemy was what Nelson was about; that was his fighting fleet's job. And that fleet did a considerably better job of it than did their enemy -- and for Britain, fortunately that was the case. . .

. . . and after the battle ended, during the recovery and terrific storms that followed, the killing ceased and all sides worked together -- captured British and captured French/Spanish included -- to save sinking or endangered ships . . . and their own lives.

Another reason it is remembered today might be this, related reality. Although the battle was fought brutally, and while there was anger and bitterness among the victors after any ship struck its colors and surrendered, the victors were humane enough to agree, "Yes, enough". Amazingly, they didn't herd the defeated up at the rear of any captured ship and shoot them en masse, or make them all jump overboard, or slice their heads off. Nor did the defeated strap on suicide vests and blow themselves up, hoping to get those "72 virgins".

Anyway, all that said, it is blindingly refreshing how killing in a sea battle between two warring and armed to the teeth sides 200 years ago is so upsetting to that Guardian author/commenter. Progress is clearly being made. Next, presumably the paper will come to grips with its tendency to the romanticize the likes of Stalin, Castro, and friends, for whom a few thousand murders were and are but hum drum, necessary daily, "revolutionary policy".  ¶ by Robert, Tuesday, June 28, 2005