“There’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.”
Some years ago I was in San Sebastian, in the Basque Country of Spain and to kill a morning (my wife was attending a conference in the city) I set out to walk round that perfect bay to Monte Urgull – the hill which dominates its eastern end. I had noted in the visitors’ guide that on its slopes I could find the Cementerio de los Ingleses (the English Cemetery) and, curiosity piqued, I set out to explore it. I knew, vaguely, that San Sebastian had been the site of a fierce siege and battle in the Peninsula Wars of 1813 and I thought perhaps the British dead from that conflict would be interred there. I was wrong though; the graves all dated from a later war, the First Carlist War of 1833-40 which – I think remains, to most of us, an obscure affair.
It is an incontestable fact that we Brits have scattered our war dead promiscuously across every continent.
The cemetery was not particularly well cared for; many of the monuments were in poor disrepair and the vegetation was wild and untrammelled, lending the area a melancholic and romantic atmosphere. The names of the men buried there were still mostly perfectly legible and I got to wondering how and why these Englishmen had come to be lying in this Spanish soil. Rupert Brooke’s line about “…there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England” came to mind; it is one of those poems whose words ring true in locations too numerous to mention around the world. For it is an incontestable fact that we Brits have scattered our war dead promiscuously across every continent.
This fact – our widely scattered warrior graves – is no cause for celebration in these days callow reassessment of our imperial past by the essentially anti-western mindset of the woke. The mood of historical self-flagellation, which has become so fashionable, has intimidated our establishment to the extent that none of our “national heroes” seem any more safe from revolutionary iconoclasts. Fighting leaders such as Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill, revered for generations, now find themselves in the line of ideological fire, their effigies no longer safe on their plinths, contaminated and condemned by retrospective moral judgement. How easy and gratifying it is for the enlightened to condemn our ancestors! Those complacent dead white men, so secure in their posthumous glory, so unaware of their white privilege, who stomped around the globe, subjugating noble native cultures and taking what was not theirs to take. Which brings me back to the Cementerio de los Ingleses and the tombs of yet more British dead.
We cannot interrogate the dead to know how they felt about the war they were fighting, what their motivations were and how they viewed their service.
It turns out however that these men, who died on this obscure battlefield in north-east Spain, might at least have some claim on the sympathies even of the woke. They came to Spain to assist the Queen Regent Maria Christina, who was acting for her infant daughter Isabella, who inherited the Spanish throne aged three. Isabella’s uncle (and Maria Christina’s brother in law) Carlos de Borbòn wanted the throne for himself and started a civil war to seize it. Carlos (whose supporters were dubbed Carlistas) wanted to return Spain to absolute monarchy; Maria Christina, conversely, wanted the country to be on the road of liberal reform that was sweeping across Europe. She and her supporters (the liberales) envisaged some form of constitutional monarchy.
And that is why British soldiers died in San Sebastian; in the cause of liberal reform – reform which was supported by Britain and France who wanted Spain to join the European mainstream. I should point out that British support for Maria Christina was not entirely disinterested; the Spanish Crown had raised large loans from the London banks and military intervention was, at least in part, aimed at securing repayment. Nevertheless the men who died in Maria Christina’s cause can claim to be “on the right side of history”, insofar as there can be very few who today would argue for a return to absolutist monarchs.
We cannot interrogate the dead to know how they felt about the war they were fighting, what their motivations were and how they viewed their service. Were they filled with a burning sense of idealism for the cause of the Infanta Isabella? It seems unlikely, but I would hazard that they at the very least believed their cause was a just one; which is what every soldier down through the ages has needed to believe to make the sacrifice worthwhile. And I like to think (this surely marks me out as a complacent enemy of the woke) that across the span of history Britain’s contribution has been a positive one. Not all of our imperial history is glorious – some of its is cause for shame – but much of it, like our involvement in the Carlist wars shows the country “doing the right thing” – even judged by contemporary standards.
Not all of our imperial history is glorious – some of its is cause for shame – but much of it, like our involvement in the Carlist wars shows the country “doing the right thing”.
On Remembrance Sunday this year, I was nowhere near any historic cemetery but in my own back garden in north Oxford. In view of the Covid restrictions the city’s commemoration this year was a much pared down affair but at 11 o clock, in the still, dank morning air, the plangent notes of The Last Post drifted through. Is there any simple arrangement of notes more laden with significance, more likely to provoke internal reflection? Even for those of us who have never served in the armed forces the tune comes freighted with memory of sacrifice. It has been in use by the British Army since the 17th century and though it is now firmly associated in the public mind with commemorative events originally it had a different function.
After a day of battle The Last Post was sounded to alert any who were wounded, or separated from their comrades, that the day was done; the fighting was over, time to return to camp, if they could. The slain, of course, could not respond; like the soldiers resting on Monte Urgull, their race was run prompting us, in our own time, to ponder their sacrifice and the mysteries of our national historical legacy. I imagine that Rupert Brooke’s poem The Soldier is not much favoured by today’s woke folk. I learned it at school and the words still stir the heart.
If I should die think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field,
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth, a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Robin Aitken was a BBC reporter for 25 years and is now a freelance writer and journalist; his latest book The Noble Liar (Biteback) is now out, in a new edition.
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