If this Easter we celebrate Christ’s victory over Death through His Resurrection, we must do so knowing our thanksgivings occur amid a world mired in intractable conflict once again, including on the edges of Europe and in the Holy Land.
Pope Francis has attempted to address this and the subsequent slaughter and countless deaths of innocent men, women and children. As a Pope should, one might suggest.
Some, however, are not best pleased with such papal gumption.
“Pope declares Devil victorious and urges humanity to run up white flag,” chortled the News in Brief section in the March issue of Private Eye. “The meek shall surrender the earth.” Less amused were writers in The Guardian, “outraged” and “shocked” at the evidence of Francis’s “pro-Russian sympathies” and “deep-rooted anti-westernism”.
What both media outlets demonstrated was a basic misunderstanding of what the white flag means in military and international humanitarian law. Also revealed was how modern culture commonly conflates two very different things: striving to end intractable conflict through recognising the enemy’s humanity, and the abdication of any sense of purpose or values.
For the record, these were the Holy Father’s actual words in the interview with Swiss channel RSI: “I believe that the strongest are those who see the situation, think about the people, and have the courage to raise the white flag and negotiate.” In this, he is correct. The white flag is a sign that the bearer does not intend violence and should not be targeted: that he or she is approaching in good faith with the intention of negotiating. It can indicate a wish to surrender, but not necessarily; it can also be to receive the enemy’s surrender.
As an illustrative example there can be none better than the conclusion to the Battle of Goose Green, May 1982, during the Falklands conflict.
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The Second Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (2 PARA) was in a bad way. Having come up against unexpectedly determined and well-organised Argentinian resistance, the advance had stalled – and worse, the commanding officer had been killed in a heroic attempt to restart it.
Command passed to (Roman Catholic) Major Chris Keeble. As the battle wore on, the situation became increasingly dire. Eventually, Keeble took himself to one side and prayed Charles de Foucauld’s Prayer of Abandonment. Immediately, he knew what to do. Under the protection of a white flag, he sent forward captured prisoners-of-war to propose and accept the Argentinians’ surrender. Relieved, they did so – to a much smaller and more depleted British force than they had anticipated.
During my own officer training at the British Army’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, these events were taught with a faint air of discomfort. In the late 90s, Goose Green was the most impressive tactical victory the British Army had achieved in recent times. Here was the reversal of an apparent defeat, thanks to inspired leadership and a bold, almost cunning decision.
Yet it was won in such an unorthodox way that it carried a disturbing implication: that battles are determined less by technical military competence and more by the mysteries of the human character, and luck, and that God and faith might also play a significant part in them.
Though it might appear something of a side issue, some current thinking has it that the spiritual aspects of war have been vastly undervalued in US and UK military thinking, a factor which has contributed to the catastrophic and humiliating debacles in recent decades, especially Iraq and Afghanistan.
The point remains that thanks to their use of the white flag, Keeble and the Paras prevailed, against the odds, with many lives saved on both sides. Reportedly, two or three attempts had been made to approach the Argentinians with white flags, and we can speculate that these earlier “failures” may have had an incremental effect on the final acceptance.
It exerts a subtle psychological pressure: if one knows that a determined enemy is simultaneously offering to make terms, it undermines the will to fight. Amid the carnage and misery, an alternative hovers in the air – the “golden bridge” of Sun Tzu’s dictum. To give it a modern parlance: the white flag bearers can “own the narrative”.
It’s also possible that an offer to negotiate, even if rejected, affords a moral superiority that will stiffen subsequent resolve. (Neville Chamberlain does not receive enough credit for this.) Granted, it’s unlikely that Putin would accept a Ukrainian peace deal, but we won’t know until that offer is made. As a thought-experiment, we can ask ourselves how we in the West would feel if Russia were to clearly and publicly offer realistic peace terms – and Ukraine refused them. Admittedly, everything indicates that Putin – to his shame and detriment – almost certainly wouldn’t accept such a move by Ukraine.
As it is, successful peace treaties, such as the Good Friday agreement, also have a better chance of lasting if founded on the mutual recognition of the other side’s spiritual value – as opposed to “victor’s justice”: crowing, punitive humiliation, during which the loser bides their time for revenge.
A point-blank refusal to consider any ceasefire betrays a deep concern about one’s own justification, as if sheer bloody-mindedness can stand in where righteousness, faith and justice are absent. I am not intractable because I am right, these nations say; I prove myself to be right, by being intractable.
In any case, there seems little appetite in the UK press to support negotiation. Western journalists and academics are still enjoying their bloodthirsty virtue-signalling too much: far, far from the conflict, they can, as ever, make their brave declarations of supportive inflexibility in perfect safety.
One shocking aspect of the Ukraine conflict has been the soi-disant liberals’ and progressives’ enthusiasm for it, from supporting massive arms spending to social-media relish of drone-clips of explosively de-turreted Russian tanks. I think of my own tank, in Iraq, crewed by men of a similar age to, and, in the case of my tank driver, younger than the Year 13 pupils I now teach.
For combatants, surrounded by the crippled bodies and corpses of their comrades, it requires superhuman, almost scandalous courage to go to talk with the people who have inflicted this horror. But it can be done, as Keeble and others have shown.
Rather less noble are the voices decrying the possibility of negotiation, mocking the white flag, shoring up their spurious moral authority with vicarious shouting from the sidelines.
Sooner or later, every war ends with talking to the enemy, and perhaps it is worth saluting the bravery of the Argentinian commanders who accepted Keeble’s terms.
But the bravest of all, as Pope Francis reminds us, are the ones who make the first move.
Photo: British troops arriving in the Falklands Islands during the Falklands War. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images.)
Christopher Yates is a teacher and former British Army officer and tank commander in the Queen’s Royal Lancers, also known as the ‘Death or Glory Boys’.
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