'At the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month ... ': One hundred years on

I was born in February 1950, only just over thirty-one years after the Armistice came into force. As a child I can clearly remember the ever-dwindling group of ex-soldiers who had served in the ‘Old Contemptibles’ lead the march past the Cenotaph in Whitehall every Armistice Sunday. I can remember the old men (many of whom were younger than I am now!) who had empty sleeves or missing legs who one saw on our streets. Even my sixth-form mathematics teacher – Mr Cramp – had served as a subaltern on the Western Front during the latter part of the Great War.

They are now all gone … and today we will remember them.

My parent’s generation took part in the Second World War. My father served in the 6th Airborne Division during the campaign to liberate Europe and then went to Burma to help train the newly-formed Burmese Army, who were already fighting the ‘new’ enemy, Communism. My mother remained in the UK and worked as an airbrush artist for a film company, and both lived through the London ‘Blitz’ and – in my mother’s case – the V1 and V2 attacks. In the year I was born, young men from many nations went to Korea to fight the ‘new’ enemy … and like those who took part in the Great War, their generation is slowly but surely diminishing year on year.

They will soon be gone … and today we will remember them.

My generation – and the generations that have followed – have taken part in conflicts across the world as well as faced the dangers of terrorism within the United Kingdom. They have done their best to protect others and to keep the peace, sometimes in circumstances where their enemy did not always wear a uniform and looked just the same as their friends.

They are still with us … and today we will remember them.

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This Armistice Sunday marks the end of the Great War, the war that people hoped would be the ‘war to end wars’. It wasn’t … and the wars and conflicts that have followed have shown that the world does not yet seem ready to stop using war to sort out its differences. It is on this day that I – as a wargamer – particularly remember the words of H G Wells in the last chapter of his seminal book, LITTLE WARS, which was published the year before the Great War broke out.

ENDING WITH A SORT OF CHALLENGE
I could go on now and tell of battles, copiously. In the memory of the one skirmish I have given I do but taste blood. I would like to go on, to a large, thick book. It would be an agreeable task. Since I am the chief inventor and practiser (so far) of Little Wars, there has fallen to me a disproportionate share of victories. But let me not boast. For the present, I have done all that I meant to do in this matter. It is for you, dear reader, now to get a floor, a friend, some soldiers and some guns, and show by a grovelling devotion your appreciation of this noble and beautiful gift of a limitless game that I have given you.

And if I might for a moment trumpet! How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing! Here is a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster – and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence. This world is for ample living; we want security and freedom; all of us in every country, except a few dull-witted, energetic bores, want to see the manhood of the world at something better than apeing the little lead toys our children buy in boxes. We want fine things made for mankind – splendid cities, open ways, more knowledge and power, and more and more and more – and so I offer my game, for a particular as well as a general end; and let us put this prancing monarch and that silly scare-monger, and these excitable "patriots," and those adventurers, and all the practitioners of Welt Politik, into one vast Temple of War, with cork carpets everywhere, and plenty of little trees and little houses to knock down, and cities and fortresses, and unlimited soldiers – tons, cellars-full – and let them lead their own lives there away from us.

My game is just as good as their game, and saner by reason of its size. Here is War, done down to rational proportions, and yet out of the way of mankind, even as our fathers turned human sacrifices into the eating of little images and symbolic mouthfuls. For my own part, I am prepared. I have nearly five hundred men, more than a score of guns, and I twirl my moustache and hurl defiance eastward from my home in Essex across the narrow seas. Not only eastward. I would conclude this little discourse with one other disconcerting and exasperating sentence for the admirers and practitioners of Big War. I have never yet met in little battle any military gentleman, any captain, major, colonel, general, or eminent commander, who did not presently get into difficulties and confusions among even the elementary rules of the Battle. You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realise just what a blundering thing Great War must be.

Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but – the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realisation conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.

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‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.’‘When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.’

‘We will remember them.’

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Dedicated to the memory of all those who died in the Great War and in all the wars and conflicts that have taken place since then.