Oh, What A Lovely Fraud!

Paschendaele, 1917: Death and Night stand sentinel over the scarred, embattled earth.  Shells burst in screaming fire above the battlefield, illuminating untold horrors: here, a single, severed hand clutching at nothing; a vicious tangle of bloodied barbed wire glitters with black rubies; a horse splayed in mud, sightless eyes bulging and grotesque behind a gas-mask.
Huddled in a trench, sharing cigarettes and the slow torture of ever-present fear, are two men: Sgt Dawson and Pvt White.  For them, the worst of the fighting has yet to come; for now, they must watch, worry, and wait; wait for a bullet, a shell, a bayonet - hopefully any of these will come the way of the cunt who's in the next trench aimlessly blowing long, plaintive notes upon a harmonica without ever getting anywhere near a melody.  The sergeant looks at his comrade: the boy is barely seventeen; frozen and absurd in his youth and an outsized army greatcoat.
"Chin up, lad," he tells him.
"Why?" asks Pvt White, "'Cos it'll all be over by Christmas?"
"It might be, Chalkie," Dawson nods slowly, "some Christmas, anyway - they weren't very specific as to the year, if I remember right..."
White throws his cigarette into a puddle; a pinprick of red light arcing through the night to fizzle and die in filth serving as an allegory for anyone inclined to see it.
"What's it all for though, Sarge?  That's what I want to know."
"We're not supposed to ask, son: King's Regulations - and," his voice drops to a whisper as though he's about to utter something improper "it's in a poem an' all."
Pvt White rubs his tired, reddened eyes with a muddy hand and sighs.
"I s'pose not, Sarge," he replies wearily.  "I just wish that ... I dunno; I just want it all to be for something.  I've seen three blokes I grew up with torn apart by bullets - actually torn apart - and for what? Can't you tell me that anything good is going to come from all this?  Can't you?"  By the end of this, White's voice has risen to a high, desperate screech.  Dawson has heard that tone before; knows it for pure fear and the death of hope.  He smiles a rueful, old campaigner's smile: finally, he thinks, I can do something for the boy.
"I'll tell you what good is going to come from it all, Chalkie," he says, easily.  "Though you'll 'ave to wait a bit, mind."
White looks at his sergeant, eyes wide with yearning.  He - and millions of other young men - need this answer.
"Yes," Dawson muses, "You'll 'ave to wait about an 'undred years, but believe you me, boy - it'll be worth it."
The private can't imagine a hundred years; can't even envision a tomorrow, in fact.  He lost the belief in a world without slime, horror, and carnage the day he lost his best friend.  Something in Sgt Dawson's tone is strangely soothing, however...
"In abaht an 'undred years," Dawson continues, "one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers that our Great Nation has ever had is going to pledge £50m of public money to a commemorative celebration of this war - now what d'you say to that?"
Tragically, a direct hit from a German mortar ended this conversation rather abruptly (while leaving the whining harmonica-player unhurt, nobody will be pleased to learn).  It therefore falls upon me (assuming I have the temerity - which I have) to respond on the terrified infantryman's behalf.
Broadly speaking, Mr Cameron can shove his Flanderspalooza up his arse.  Though by now - after a Royal Wedding, a Jubilee, and the hideously extended Sports Day we've all sat through - it should come as no surprise that the Government are pulling the old "bread and circuses" trick yet again, there really is something about this particular Crusty Cob that seems unusually indigestible.
Even assuming that it's possible to engage the whole population in thought about the Great War without trivialising its squalor and foulness by having Jedward knock out a hi-energy pop cover of "It's A Long Way To Tipperary" or drafting in the cast of The Only Way Is To Be A Self-Serving, Half-Witted Living Monument To Crass Vanity With A Tenuous Grasp On Reality to intone the poems of Rupert Brooke over footage of those iconic white crosses - and that's an assumption I'm pretty reluctant to make - what will be the point of any of it?
The point of it all is depressingly obvious if you give it even half a moment's thought: a colossal, months-long Party Political Broadcast for the Conservative Party paid for buy the taxpayer.  For what was World War One except a Tory war?  Alright; the historical fact is that it was a war that Britain entered into under a Liberal government, but let's not quibble over semantics: the values of WWI were pretty Tory, were they not?  Empire-building, influence and trade in the Balkans, xenophobia, and a callous disregard for the lives of innumerable Tommies - it had it all. And these are the things that we'll be urged to remember by unctuous commentators as we look at Cameron leaning his sculpted-Spam face down to confer a sickly grin upon the skeletal form of any Ypres veteran they can dig up for the Big Day.  Oh, there'll be the usual cant about "bravery and sacrifice" I suppose; it's all very inspiring to talk about that sort of thing - especially if you don't dwell too much on exactly who made the sacrifices, how avoidable they could have been had Edwardian Britain not been so fired-up with bellicose jingoism and capitalist greed, and just who actually benefited most from the countless acres of mutilated flesh and the thousands of tottering, broken figures screaming the rest of their lives away in mental hospitals that were the physical realities of these noble sentiments.
Of all the conflicts to have scarred the globe in recent history, The Great War is easily the most dreadful, pointless, and hideous: there was no ideology about it other than greed; it didn't even have the dubious provenance of being a "religious" war (on which all sorts of people are awfully keen) - yet it is to be marked in 2014 with a festival of flag-waving, hypocrisy, and propaganda, and an almost hypnotic insistence on the British Public's decency and courage as evidenced by the fact that they're happy to march forward unto their doom - be it in the form of German machine-guns, enforced redundancy, or an Atos assessment.
Yeah; it might cost a bit - but if there's one thing we've learned in the past couple of years, you really can't put a price on Britain's taste for their own servility or for what they're told is "prestige".  Does anyone else have a lump in their throat yet?  Don't worry: you will; a chunk of stale bread tasting of death and shit just like the ones those promised "homes fit for heroes" got to chow down on in the 1920s - and their descendants have been fed on ever since.