Century

A hundred, then. The number seems small, I suppose, to those of us who see war through videogames and history lessons. We are used to huge death tolls - at the Somme more than 19,000 British soldiers were killed in a single day. The total number of casualties in the Battle of the Bulge total more than 100,000 on both sides. Now, a hundred men have died fighting a war that is so far away it might as well be fictional - indeed, this must be one of the few conflicts that has inspired dramatic fiction before it is even over. The death toll holds some significance, at least. In a war such as World War I, the ratio of non-officer deaths to officers was 17:1. In the Iraq War so far, the ratio for these hundred men is 4:1, and a quick scan of the rollof honour shows that many of these men are middle-aged, family men. Perfect media fodder? Perhaps. But is shows something human and admirable about a war that is both controversial and unsupported. War is war. It is the aggression against another country, something that could be considered natural as we animals compete for land and resources and struggle to survive. But the point is that we are not merely animals, or at least we cannot simply use that as an excuse for being immoral. For thousands of years we have had ethical discourse, made huge decisions about the way the world should be. We have developed rights, understanding, honour. And so it is easy to criticise governments for their motives, for the lack of ethics, for their abuse of the general populace. It is easy to see why the public want Tony Blair to admit that the war is wrong and illegal. Sometimes, though, we have to look closer at the humanity that survives in such conflicts. We have to peer into the eys of the man who lives for one day longer on the front pages of the national press. Corporal Gordon Pritchard, married, three children. Fought as a soldier, against an enemy, with faith in his own values, his own decisions. Led men into warzones, but gave his own orders. If the Iraq War is denounced as illegal, these men will be war criminals, and those that survive may be prosecuted as such. Perhaps that is justice. Perhaps they betrayed an innate moral code. Or perhaps they lived as best they could, to follow the laws lay down by the state that nurtured them, and to protect the familes, the children, and friends that they left behind. A hundred lives lost. It is not the quantity of death that should shock, but perhaps instead the manner in which they lived their lives, and how we would have them treated.