蜜芽传媒

Good morning

One hundred years ago today, the British Army was engaged in what became known as the Retreat from Mons. Pushed back by overwhelming odds, exhausted British soldiers suddenly saw, or thought they saw, a host of angels sent by God to protect them.

The legend of the Angel of Mons came to be widely believed in the early years of the war, though there is no contemporary evidence for it. But belief in the intervention of divine providence at moments of national peril was strong at the time, thereby demonstrating, as one historian drily put it, the importance of religion in warfare.

For me the best book about the First World War was by the American literary historian Paul Fussell, called The Great War in Modern Memory. It could have been subtitled "How the British Got Their Famous Sense of Humour". Its underlying theme is how the next four years witnessed an explosion, not just of shells and bombs, but of irony. It transformed our culture and language. Irony, in all its manifestations, came to infuse the very soul of the nation. It was the way we coped with the otherwise intolerable. And it still is.

Irony here means that things ain't quite what they seem, and while we all know this, it's a kind of shared secret. It says that behind real events and our real perception of them lies another meaning which may contradict the first. Indeed at its extreme it may show that reality itself is close to farce, albeit of a very dark kind.

"Oh it's a lovely war" was a popular music hall song of the time, before it later became the basis for a famous musical play and a film. That's the kind of irony that Paul Fussell was writing about. Interestingly it is irony suffused with anger. It is very British.
The legend of the Angel of Mons could not possibly have happened much later in the war, because it would've been killed off by irony. At best there would have been a satirical song about it, pure Trench Humour, that the troops could merrily sing as they marched to their probable deaths.

Irony also came to infuse the British sense of religion, and indeed may be one of the major underlying factors behind the gradual slow process called secularisation. It offers a kind of warning sign - danger, never take anything too seriously.

But I feel it now works in the opposite direction. In a secular world we are bound to act as if, to coin a phrase, "this is all there is." Yet at some level, deep down, we know this is only true ironically: there is more to life than nuts and bolts. What that something else is, irony cannot begin to say. So perhaps it's best left unsaid. But we haven't completely forgotten it's there.

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