With the centenary of the first great, global imperial slaughter rapidly approaching, a simple parable like War Horse is sure to be drafted into active service. I haven’t seen either the stage adaption or the recent cinematic offering, but I hear nothing but plaudits for both. I did however, recently stumble across the original 1982 story and I’m pleased to say it had a distinctive and unambiguous anti-war sentiment. I sincerely hope the stage and film adaptions remained faithful to that sentiment.

It is always difficult for we humans to be able to absorb the real enormity of global cataclysms such as war, famine, flood and pestilence. Help a starving or war ravaged child with a three pound a month donation, or help finance the building of a much needed well in a sub-Saharan village and we will readily step up to the plate. But make a public stand against the root causes of war and famine and it is an altogether more difficult proposition. Care about the fate of a simple farm animal and the whole western world will shed a tear. But stand up and condemn the imperialist nature of war and famine and you will be accused of being an unreconstructed Bolshevik.

Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse will undoubtedly get caught in a tug-of-war between rational opponents of imperial slaughter and those who we might legitimately label as apologists for imperial grandeur, both past and present. So just in case there is even the slightest doubt as to where Morpungo stands on this divide, here is the man in his very own words from the original story:

I tell you my friends, I tell you that I am the only sane man in this regiment. It’s the others that are mad, but they don’t know it. They fight a war and they don’t know what for. Isn’t that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different colour uniform and speaks a different language. And it’s me they call mad. You two are the only rational creatures that I’ve met in this benighted war, and like me the only reason you’re here because you were brought here. If I had the courage and I haven’t we’d take off down this road and never come back. P108

No doubt there then. But the war-mongering propagandists will be hard at work to silence this unambiguous message and replace it with a far more ambiguous one that yes, it was a bloody mess but a necessary one in the defence of global peace and democracy. Try telling that to the countless millions of citizens living under the tyranny and jack boot of the British Empire. The brief respite they enjoyed during global hostilities soon enough came to an end once the warring European protagonists had, after four years of mayhem, finally exhausted themselves.

We need to be crystal clear here this was not a war for peace and democracy but one of British imperial defence against German imperial ambition. A resurgent imperialist Germany was no longer prepared to play second fiddle to the British, French and Russian empires. Germany wanted its slice of the imperialist action. There were absolutely no good guys involved just countless millions of hapless, nave young working class men, along with their long suffering farm animals, being cut to ribbons for the purpose of Imperial conquest.

Siegfried Sasson, once an apologist for the war, was soon to make a public declaration against it. Part of that declaration reads:

I believe that this war, on which I entered a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. On behalf of those that are suffering now I make this protest against the deception that is being practised on them.

Of course the war never was a war of defence and liberation, it was always, from the very outset, a war of aggression and conquest, in the very same way that today’s never-ending war on terror is nothing but a front for a new Anglo-Saxon war of conquest for resources and markets.
Perhaps the most poignant of all the war poems is Wilfred Owen’s Futility which ends with three existentially haunting lines:

Was it for this the clays grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break Earth’s sleep at all?

You can be damn sure that today’s imperialists won’t be quoting these or similar lines during the forthcoming sickening, four year jamboree, especially with Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan still freshly ringing in their ears. The good news however is that war horses won’t have to suffer anymore, they have been made somewhat redundant by US pilotless drones. That’s progress for you.