Summer of War (1)

It wasn’t meant to turn out this way, it just happened. 

It started with the Rebecca West novel I picked up from a bargain bin on impulse. The Return of the Soldier, written in 1918 is an astonishing novella about love, war, sacrifice and decency.  Read the Goodreads review here.  I took it to London to read during our week at Crystal Palace.   It must have been a subliminal buy because I had always planned to visit the newly refurbished Imperial War Museum and in particular the WW1 exhibition.

Normally I would avoid any glorification of war but as part of the commemoration to the start of WW1 I submitted my granddad’s 1918 diary to the BBC online resource.  The diary was the inspiration for my poem Scream In Dolce.

The museum is in Southwark in what used to be Bethlem Royal Hospital also known as Bedlam Asylum and was on the No3 bus route from Crystal Palace. Perfect.

I was worried the IWM would be all bluster about our great warriors, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The museum pulled no punches in its demonstrations of the futility of war.

Witnesses of War

The impressive Witnesses of War exhibits take over the atrium (including the aerial space). These include among others the Nery Gun, A Press Landrover involved in action in Palestine, a Russian tank and a rusting heap of a Bagdad car-bombed vehicle. All these exhibits were accompanied by display footage of their own particular story. I found the story of the V1 and V2 bombs particularly interesting and it set the tone for the rest of the visit. Slaves were used in the making of these bombs, a fact know by the inventor Wernher von Braun.  There were more people killed in the making of the bombs than in the actual bombings. Von Braun went on to work for NASA on rocket development and was awarded The National Medal of Science in the US in 1975, a fact the IWM is clearly disgusted with.

Other exhibits show twisted pieces of the Twin Tower, anti-Iraq War posters and a striking model called Beach Girl, showing the charred carbon remains of an atomic bomb victim. It is intended to shock and it works.

The WW11 section runs footage of the Normandy beach landings with commentary from the men who were there as well as the whole story of the war.

The main event is the WW1 exhibition. It is free but time ticketed for crowd control.   This section caters for everyone. As well as old fashioned factual information and artefacts, phone interactive games for the young’uns, there are stylistic installations where you can sit and absorb the enormity of what is going on.  One striking video rolls out the slow disintegration of a field in Picardy, from pleasant poppy field to craters and eventually into a sea of mud.

The last video is the most powerful. As the visitor leaves behind the destruction of WW1 there is a story of what happened next – after the war.  Aid to Germany, how borders changed and countries reorganised themselves to build their futures. It ends with the final frame - the words.

‘The War to End all Wars’

Poppies in the IWM gardens

 It was like a punch in the stomach and brought tears to my eyes.

Well done to all involved in this wonderful museum.