Tough Lessons For A Tough World

By Theresa Roche
Bristol, United Kingdom
THE TRUE SNOW WHITE’S DIARY
 
 


Are you ready for an eerie coincidence? In my last entry A True Romance I speculated upon the fate of Hilda’s young suitor who disappeared from her album after 1913. The very next day after writing about it I turned on BBC Radio 4, and a play called Memorials to the Missing by Stephen Wyatt came on the air.

This drama tells the story of Sir Fabian Ware, an ambulance man during World War I, who pioneered the concept of providing a memorial for every soldier who died rather than just for those who belonged to the officer class.

The ambulance men’s job was to collect the wounded and the dying. They often had to leave the dead lying in unmarked graves in the mud. During his work, Sir Fabian began to feel he had a mission to document the dead.

In the play he says:

“I am not a religious man but I have been haunted by these voices.”

This reminded me so much of the words of wisdom imparted to the Prince in The True Snow White:

“In the right place
At the right time is an art
You will master as you follow
The voice of your heart!”

Listening to Stephen Wyatt’s moving drama I felt just as I did when I read The True Snow White from cover to cover. It is all about self-knowledge and improvement through willingness to learn, and for me at least it also contains a strong message about duty. For when the true Snow White is struggling in the netherworld under the evil Stepmother’s spell, she hears the words:

“You’ve got to find a voice. And always strive to serve your people.”

War must surely be the ultimate embodiment of evil. Had they not been defeated by Snow White, can’t you just imagine the Stepmother and the Dark Count leading their kingdom into war to grab land, ports, trade, and wealth from neighbouring countries? Do you think that a woman as neurotically jealous as the Stepmother would have been content once she had been successful in killing Snow White with just being the fairest in her own realm when the whole world contained rivals?




In every war there are good and bad men and women. Good people on both sides are forced into evil actions. Whenever politics fail there is war. The comfortably off, well-educated elite who make the decision to send young soldiers to kill and be killed are not the ones who die. I want to focus instead on those who died in the trenches because their politicians failed. For it is those young men and women who dutifully served their people.

As we approach November 11, the anniversary of the 1918 armistice, Stephen Wyatt’s play has suddenly made the appalling statistics of the casualties of World War I spring into life for me – as real young men and women who loved and were loved by someone. They were each someone’s very own true Snow White or Prince of Hearts. They were in their 20s and 30s, and had their whole lives ahead of them.

Rather like the deceased good Queen’s voice talking to Snow White while she is under the deathlike spell imposed by the evil Stepmother, Stephen Wyatt’s exquisitely written play interposes the voices of the dead into the dialogue between the living characters.

One of the ghosts says:

“I was 21, I was at university. My men were ordinary working class people. I’d never met people like that before. My map reading brought us into enemy fire. They stood their ground. They gave me a decent burial – those that survived.”

This voice somehow makes me think of Hilda’s young man. I imagine him as idealistic and gentle, commissioned as an officer, a role totally unsuitable for an untrained Oxbridge undergraduate who wrote poetry and painted in watercolours.




Memorials to the Missing recounts how often all that was left to identify a body were tiny battered remnants. A small book of poetry in someone’s pocket is addressed “To my darling husband, from Agnes”. There was also a letter wedged inside the book, but blood had seeped into the knapsack and obliterated it.

Sometimes they had to work from people’s initials. In the play, as the finders struggle to ascertain names and are about to give up trying to decipher bloodstained relics, the voices of the ghosts encourage them, “Please – or Agnes will never know.” The ghost does not want to be labelled “Killed In Action – No Known Name”. A young lad’s voice begs, “Please don’t stop looking . . . for mum and dad. They don’t have two pennies to rub together. They’ll miss the money I brought in.”

There were many brave soldiers in war. But there were also soldiers shot for “cowardice” when in fact they were shell shocked and suffering from what in modern times is a recognised medical condition called Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There were brave conscientious objectors and pacifists, too, who refused to go to war. As they listened to “the voice of their own hearts”, the answer for them was that they could not take the life of their fellow human beings. And most were shot dead for it.

Stephen Wyatt’s play ends with the ghosts speaking as contemporary people visit the memorial built by Sir Edwin Lutyens to commemorate the dead of the Somme. The memorial consists of tunnels and arches running in both directions. The walls are made of Portland stone, and on these walls are the names of 73,357 missing men of the Battle of the Somme.

Memorials to the Missing brought home to me, in a way I had never quite understood before, why we should all wear our poppies to honour them. The pride belongs to the dead. The shame to their power hungry leaders who send them to war.

Today we cannot begin to conceive of the sacrifice made by these young war dead, nor the grief their bereaved families had to go on living with. Maybe we should indeed follow the dwarves’ advice and learn from experience – because of course the real horror is that wars are still taking place today.




Fyewyn tells Snow White:

“One day, man will arrive at his own inner conviction that preferring good over evil, indeed, has never been a question of religion or any special view of God, but personal intelligence . . . and that there simply is no sensible alternative.”

The wisdom of the seven dwarves in The True Snow White is of timeless relevance. Recently an army commander has resigned saying that his troops in Afghanistan had been killed because of “gross negligence” by the British government. The father of a female soldier – killed because she was sent to fight in a “tent on wheels” – is taking legal action against the Ministry of Defence over the case.

Nor are we told how many innocent and impoverished ordinary Afghan people we have killed in today’s “War on Terror”. This is not happening in 1914 or 1945. This is now.

Again this week we’ve seen news of the refugees in the Congo. There are women and children who have not eaten in several days. And it was somewhat refreshing to hear British Prime Minister Gordon Brown commenting on the current situation there, saying, “There is only a political solution to this: not by military force.”

Hilda’s album ends in 1919. Her new suitor, the rather witty Jack, has returned, and I hope her earlier beau, the artist and poet R Spackman, survived the war.

But as I closed the little book I felt poignantly sad. I had lost Hilda and her two fascinating young lovers to history. Or had I? I had not yet looked thoroughly at the second album I found, Mary’s album, dated Xmas 1919. And therein waits another story for next time.

Read Theresa Roche’s comments on
The Author
The Apple Of Knowledge
Discovering The Seven Dwarves
Like An Old Master Painting
A True Romance
I Will Always Be With You
Fairy Tales Can Come True
Life Is A Dance
Step By Step
Long Live The Queen!
What Makes A True Princess?


Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Sir Winston Churchill

---

Note: Comments appear in the order of most recent last and may be edited for suitability and clarity. You are expressly welcome to link to and quote from this article as long as you acknowledge both authorship and source. To link here, simply copy and paste:

Tough Lessons For A Tough World by Theresa Roche, THE TRUE SNOW WHITE’S DIARY
http://thetruesnowwhitesdiary.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/tough-lessons-for-a-tough-world

Advertisement