Listen

Can you hear it?

The soft thlump of iron shoes on damp turf, the gentle ear splitting crinkle of chain mail ringlets jostling, the high-pitched twang of twine slung between the tips of a beech bow. There’s the rasping, nervous breath of the men next to you, the shouts and jeers, mingling with the dawn’s dew, a dozen tongues, accents and dialects like alien languages all fumbling into one with fear.

This is 1346 and we are waist deep in farmland mud just outside the small French town of Crecy. We’re English and we’ve just developed a system that enables men armed with longbows firing in tandem to be the most destructive force on the planet.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe this isn’t Crecy, maybe it’s Poitiers in 1356 or Agincourt in 1415 – that was particularly successful for the English. Henry V’s army so decimated the French that they happily surrendered and agreed for him to be crowned King. Unfortunately, he managed to die a few weeks later from dysentery and it all began over again. So maybe it’s not a battle that the English win. Maybe it’s Orleans in 1429 or Castillion in 1456.

It doesn’t matter. What’s important is the dry smell of shit at the back of your mouth, the burning sweat on the back of your hands. It doesn’t matter when or where you are if you’re going to die.

This is the One Hundred Years War, the war between England and France which actually lasted one-hundred-and-nineteen-years. On and off. Over a century of near-continuous warfare between what are today peaceful neighbours, except we still laugh about hating the French and they, I am sure, do the same about us. So keen were the English, though, on fighting in the fourteenth century that we also managed the fifty-year long War of the Roses, the first major English civil war.

How did we get here?

We got here because of land and because of trade. Like most wars, really. Edward III of England had a claim to the French throne through his Mother. She would have been Queen had not the medieval inheritance laws been decidedly male biased leaving her cousin, Phillip VI, to succeed her brother instead. But what Edward really wanted was to regain Normandy and Anjou, the lands he claimed through Kings William the Conqueror and Stephen, the lands that had been lost to the French by Edward’s Great-great grandfather, John. The lands that had formed a natural bridge between England and the southern France English ruled territory of Gascony. The Angevian Empire once spread from Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyrenees and Edward wanted it back.

That’s the unfunny thing about Empires. They never end. Rome might have appeared to be all over in the fourth century when the Ostrogoths sacked the city for the umpteenth time, but the Emperors of Constantinople, of Byzantium, of the Eastern Empire never gave up trying to regain Western Europe until the Turks crushed them in 1453. And still Rome remained the hypothetical justification behind the medieval Germanic Emperors use of the term Holy Roman Empire.

The British fought, killed and died in America, in Malaysia and in Palestine, so desperate were we to hold onto our lands. The French did the same in Vietnam until the Americans took over in defence of an ideological capitalist-democratic empire.

Once you have it, you don’t want to relinquish it.

But all things must die.

As I write this a cat has killed a bird and left its corpse on the lawn. The recent combination of guilty heat and torrential showers means the decomposition process is occurring at an unexpected rate. I’ve yet to clear the body away. It’s just left rotting away amongst the tall blades of grass, merging back into the soils of life.
Everything happens in cycles. Nothing is new. What has been will be so again.

The 1789 French Revolution was a decade long foray into pre-socialism, but Europe’s oldest sovereign nation couldn’t exist without a single dominant character at the helm and so Napoleon, came to the fore. Revolted by the upstart’s appointment the rest of monarchist Europe formed a coalition against the French. Old against new.

In 1932 a former Lance-Corporal and frustrated painter from Austria became the Chancellor of Germany. Initially the world saw Hitler’s rhetoric and hard-line stances were seen as essential to drag the country back to its feet after the economic meltdown post-world war one.

History is like a mirror reflecting the past so it happens simultaneously. It’s like an onion, underneath the skin it’s just layers of the same stuff over and over again down to the core.

In 1797/1938 Napoleon/Hitler smile tightly and make their promises to Archduke Charles of Austria/ Chamberlain. No more, they promise. The Netherlands, Milan and Venice/The Rhineland, Austria and the Sudetenland are sufficient. Lands which had once been French/German will be so again. It is enough.

They are lying. They were lying then and they do so again now and every minute for ever more.

By 1802 Napoleon’s Empire stretches from the Spanish coast and into western Russia, from the Netherlands down to Sardinia. By 1941 Hitler’s territories run from Norway to North Africa and Greece, from Belarus to the Pyrenees.

Still, on they march.

Once it starts it will never be enough.

Listen.

In the distance there is the thump-thump of shells being fired and detonating in the soft earth, there is the metallic shriek of tank tracks crushing brick. A President speaks beleaguered rhetoric in a language that is not yours. There is no innovation in destruction today. Today, there are just people dying. This is Georgia. Today is tomorrow or next week or in the spring. Or in 1968 and Prague or in 1955 and Budapest.

Georgia has been Russia territory twice before. Once part of the Russian Empire, it briefly declared independence after the 1917 revolution before being absorbed back into the USSR.

No-one escapes an Empire easily.

History repeats ad infinitum.

In 1962 US spy planes identify nuclear warhead silos in Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev get itchy palms and the world holds its breath.

In 2008 Poland agrees to the installation of US sponsored ICBM defence systems within its borders.

Russian General Anatoly Nogovitsyn declares Poland a legitimate target.

Robert Hunter, the former US Ambassador to NATO, antagonises Russia by telling the BBC that it’s just “Saudi Arabia with trees”, not a world power.

In the 1930s The League of Nations declared that Germany’s rearmament posed no threat to Europe.

I blink in the unexpected sunshine and wrap a plastic bag around my hand. I bend down and try to pick up the bird’s corpse, but it breaks apart between my fingers. Its innards have turned to mush at my touch. There’s the faint smell of stale mustard.

I look up and see a cat sitting on the utility room roof. It cocks its head to one side, as though to ask ‘why bother’, as I tie the bag in a knot.

Its tail flips from side to side thudding rhythmically like distant mortar.

In the fourteenth century France was a pivotal part of the trade routes, it was the linchpin between the kingdoms of Spain and the rest of Europe. Marseilles was the only Mediterranean port to threaten the dominance of the Italian city states. In 2008 Georgia plays an equally pivotal role in the transportation of oil and gas, thousands of miles of pipes cut through its mountains, arteries pumping black gold to the world.

We never change.

An arrowhead momentarily glints in the French sunshine and then thousands block out the light like a plague cloud. They soar through the air in a beautiful arc and you raise your shield over your head, praying that the taut leather will be sufficient to protect you. In the glimpse of centuries the beech stick, steel head and goose feathers metamorphose into a hard, metallic cylinder with a burning tail. There’s a gasp as the air is pulled into a vacuum and you are gone.