The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

“Why are you fighting?” my son asked.

  And me with my rifle on my shoulder and my pack on my back,

  While I’m fastening the laces of my boots.

  And my mother, with water and mirror and Koran in her hand,

  Putting warmth in my soul.

  And again my boy asks: “Why are you fighting?”

  And I say with all my heart:

  “So that the enemy may never take your light away.”

  The war had been over seven years now. Iranian diplomats were visiting Baghdad. The sons of the revolution—those who came home from the war—didn’t find a land fit for heroes; it was they who were now angrily denouncing corruption in President Khatami’s new “civil-society” Iran. But they came back, it seemed, having found faith rather than lost it, after an ecstasy of martyrdom that must leave us—horrified at the slaughter of two world wars, fearful of even the fewest casualties when we at last intervened in Bosnia, fixated by our own losses in Iraq— aghast and shocked and repelled. We mourn lost youth and sacrifice, the destruction of young lives. The Iranians of the eight-year Gulf War claimed to love it, not only as a proof of faith but also as the completion of a revolution.

  For Iraqi soldiers, the war remained a curse. Hussein Farouk, an Iraqi military policeman, remembers the ceasefire as the moment an officer told his men that if they wanted to take revenge for the death of loved ones, now was the time. “One of our soldiers went into an Iranian prison camp. He had a brother who was killed. He just chose one of the Iranians. Then he shot him. He was the only one who did this.” Farouk recalled the day he was himself guarding a group of Iranian prisoners. “They were all standing together and one of them asked me for some water. Of course, I gave him water. But then he picked up some soil from the ground and mixed it with the water and swallowed it. I watched in amazement. Then after a little while, the Iranian walked away, right past the guards. I ran after him and asked him what he thought he was doing. The Iranian looked puzzled. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Can you still see me?’ ”

  Fati Daoud Mouffak, the Iraqi cameraman who had filmed the first casualties on the border in 1980, found that his experiences grew more crippling as the war continued. “We would go to the headquarters on the central front and they would say ‘battle in Fakr’ and they’d tell us the direction and we would go to the front and find a hole in the sandbags and point our lens through it. I saw many martyrs of both sides—I considered that both Iraqis and Iranians were martyrs.” Mouffak filmed Iraq’s prisoners—“Some were very young, fourteen or fifteen, they had gone through the minefields on motorbikes and were captured”—and saw an act of heroism that briefly lifted his spirits: an Iraqi soldier running onto the battlefield under fire to rescue a wounded Iranian, lifting his enemy onto his shoulder and bringing him to safety in the Iraqi lines. But he was to see other, more terrible things.

  Outside Basra, an Iraqi military intelligence officer was screaming at an Iranian prisoner, demanding to know when the next attack would start. “The Iranian wouldn’t talk and so our officer said he’d cut off his ear if he didn’t give the information he needed. We journalists tried to stop this but we were told that this was none of our business. The Iranian still remained silent. So the Iraqi intelligence man cut off his ear. Then all the other Iranian prisoners started to talk.”

  We were paid three dinars each day to be at the front—that was nine dollars then—and we would pay for our own food at a hotel behind the lines. We’d come back tired and start drinking gin and tonic and whisky. We had another cameraman with us, a friend of mine, Talal Fana. He was so worried that he never had breakfast; he just drank Iraqi arak— he wanted the power to die. He would get completely drunk—that was how he would go off to the front because he was sure he was going to die—but he survived. Many soldiers drank. At al-Mohammorah [Khorramshahr], one of our television cameramen Abdul Zahera was wounded in the hand and lost a finger. Abbas, another film crewman, was hit in the chest. In 1987, Abdul Zahera was killed filming on the front at Qaladis on a hill called Jebel Bulgha. Abbas was killed in Fao in 1988, in the last battle there.

  At the battle of Shalamcheh, Mouffak was stranded between the Iraqi and Iranian front lines, trapped with Iraqi soldiers who would have to surrender, hiding in shell holes and protecting his drunken friend Talal. He was ordered to fly in a helicopter—on Saddam’s personal orders—to film close-quarters battles between Iraqi and Iranian troops outside Basra, “so close that they were stabbing each other with bayonets and we could not see which was an Iraqi martyr and which was an Iranian martyr. Saddam had ordered me to take two rolls of Arriflex [film] and I used two whole rolls and later Saddam rewarded me with $3,000 and a watch.” Attached to the 603rd Battalion of the Iraqi army in 1987, Mouffak found himself climbing a mountain in Kurdistan to film the scene of an Iraqi victory. But, lost on the mountain in the dark, he stumbled into a killing field. “There were so many bodies, I couldn’t tell whether they were Iraqis or Iranians.”

  In 1985, Mouffak was to lose his own brother.

  Ahmed was twenty-nine and one of his comrades had a wife who was expecting a child, so Ahmed volunteered to do his job for him while his friend went to Baghdad to see his newborn. It was May 5th, 1985. My brother escorted an ammunition convoy to the front and it was ambushed and we never learned any more. I went to the front there and spoke to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Riad, and he said he did not know what happened. “I do not know his fate,” he said to me. Perhaps there was an explosion. We got nothing. No papers. No confirmation. Nothing. I was in Baghdad when the war ended in 1988. I heard shooting in the air. People said that the war was over. I went to have a drink—whisky and beer. I thought that people would be happy and we would survive. I thought of my brother—we had a hope that he would return if he was a prisoner. We waited for years and years but no one came. He was lost. There was no letter, nothing. He was married with two daughters and a boy and his family still wait for him to come home. They are still waiting for news. Because there was no body, because there were no details of his death, his name was not even put on the war memorial.

  Mouffak would survive to film Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and then, under sanctions and no longer able to buy his beloved Kodak film—he still believes that film gives a definition that video will never provide—he was reduced to taping a documentary on reconstruction. Until, that is, he was reactivated as a news cameraman to film the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of his country. Yet he remains, even today, haunted by the brutality he witnessed, especially by two deeply painful experiences during the war with Iran. In Suleimaniya in northern Iraq, Saddam’s army suffered a serious defeat on Maout mountain in 1987.

  There were military police on the roads below the mountain and they had express orders from Saddam: that anyone who was found retreating must be executed. Unfortunately, they caught three soldiers and they were to be shot. I didn’t have to watch. But I was a witness. I couldn’t film. They were between twenty and twenty-six years old. All three said the same thing: “Our brigades collapsed—we retreated with the commanders.” They were all crying. They wanted to live. They couldn’t believe that they would be executed. There were six or seven in the firing squad. Each of the men had his hands tied behind his back. They just went on weeping, crying and sobbing. They were shot as they cried. Then the commander of the firing squad went forward and shot each one of them in the forehead. We call this the “mercy bullet.” I vomited.

  Yes, the “mercy bullet,” the coup de grâce . How easily the Iraqis learned from us. Outside Basra, another young soldier was accused of desertion and again Mouffak was a witness:

  He was a very young man and the reporter from Joumhuriya newspaper tried to save him. He said to the commander: “This is an Iraqi citizen. He should not die.” But the commander said: “This is none of your business— stay out of this.” And so it was the young man’s fate to be shot by a firing squad. No, he did not cry. He was blindfolded. But before he was executed, he said he was the father
of four children. And he begged to live. “Who will look after my wife and my children?” he asked. “I am a Muslim. Please think of Allah—for Saddam, for God, please help me. I have children. I am not a conscript, I am a reservist. I did not run away from the battle— my battalion was destroyed.” But the commander shot him personally—in the head and in the chest. Then he lit a cigarette. And the other soldiers of the Popular Army gathered round and clapped and shouted: “Long life to Saddam.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Sentenced to Suffer Death”

  Et puis mon souvenir s’éteindrait comme meurt

  Un obus éclatant sur le front de l’armée

  Un bel obus semblable aux mimosas en fleur

  And then my memory would fade

  As a shell blooms, bursting over the front line,

  Magnificent, like mimosa in blossom

  —Guillaume Apollinaire, “Si je mourrais là-bas,” written on 30 January 1915, Nîmes

  WHEN I WAS A BOY, my father would take me on his knee and place one of my fingers on a very small dent in his forehead. Running from it was a thin, old scar. “That’s where the Chink got me with the knife,” he’d say. And there would follow an odd story about how Bill Fisk had to solve a problem with a Chinese man during the First World War and how after he was attacked he shot dead his assailant with a revolver. “My Dad shot a Chinese man,” I used to tell my friends at school. I could never explain why.

  My father had a strange relationship with the 1914–18 war. He rarely wanted to talk about his own brief participation in the conflict, but all his life he read every book on the subject. He read the poems of Wilfred Owen—who, like my father, lived in Birkenhead—and he studied every official history of the Western Front. I can still remember his gasps of horror as he was reading the first critical biography of Earl Haig and realised that a man he once regarded with veneration was a proven liar. In a nursing home where he was recovering from cancer in the mid-Eighties, I asked him to recall his own memories of the trenches. “All it was, fellah, was a great, terrible waste.”

  My father called me “fellah” from the first day he saw me in my cot. He had been reading P. C. Wren’s saga of the French Foreign Legion, Beau Geste. When one of the heroes bravely suffers a wound in silence, his comrade calls him “stout fellah.” Never realising that fellah was an Arabic word for peasant or farmer, Bill always addressed me as “fellah” or “the fellah”—which was irony enough, since I would be spending half my life in the Arab world. Indeed, I was in Beirut when Bill Fisk died in 1992 at the age of ninety-three, unafraid of death but an increasingly angry and bitter man. He had been faithful to my mother, Peggy—his second wife—and he never lied or cheated anyone. He paid his bills on time. For about thirty years, he was Borough Treasurer of Maidstone in Kent. Every Sunday morning, he would wait for my mother to accompany him to All Saints’ Church, striding up and down the hallway singing the 23rd Psalm. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.” He was a patriot. In 1940, he unhesitatingly agreed to a request from MI6 to form a resistance cell in Kent when it seemed likely that German troops would invade south-eastern England. At school, I used to show off his plans—to the envy of every boy in my class—for blowing up Maidstone East railway bridge while a German troop train was passing. Had the Nazis arrived, of course, Bill Fisk would have been shot as a “terrorists.” For years, Karsh of Ottawa’s great photograph of Churchill speaking over the wartime BBC from Downing Street loomed over our sitting-room in Maidstone— until, after my father’s death, Peggy mercifully replaced it with a gentle water-colour of the River Medway.

  Unfortunately, there were two sides to Bill Fisk. While he was loyal to my mother, he was also a bully. He would check her weekly housekeeping expenses as she waited in fear at his side for a word of criticism. If I interrupted him, he would strike me hard on the head. And his patriotism could quickly turn racist. In later years, and to my increasing fury, he would call black people “niggers” and when I argued with him he would turn angrily upon me. “How dare you tell me what to say?” he’d shout, while Peggy stood wringing her hands in the doorway. “Nigger means black, doesn’t it? Yes, I’m a racist, and proud of it. I am proud to be English.”

  My mother would try to soften his language and would sometimes end up crying. At the age of nine, I was sent away to boarding school. I hated it—its violence as well as its class distinctions—and pleaded with my father for weeks, for months, for years, to take me away. My mother appealed to him too. In vain. Boarding school would enable me to stand up for myself, he told me. I was to be a stout fellah. His pride when I passed exams was cancelled out by his ferocity when confronted by a son who would not obey him. My clothes, my ties, my shoes were all to be chosen by him. Years later, when I told him I was sick of hearing his racist abuse—he had taken to cursing the Irish—he threw a table knife at me. My mother once told me that Bill had punched a council official on the jaw when he thought the employee was making a pass at her. Only after Peggy’s death did my aunt tell me that it was the Mayor of Maidstone whom father laid out.

  I was usually an obedient child. My father was for me—as fathers are for all young children—a protector, as well as a potential tyrant. I liked him when he was self-effacing. I tried to soften his temper by calling him “King Billy,” which somehow satirised his dominating personality. And when he called himself “King Billy”—acknowledging his flaws with self-deprecation—he became an ordinary human. He taught me to love books and history, and from an early age I learnt of Drake and Nelson, of Harold of England and of the Indian Mutiny. His choice of literature could range from Collins’s Children’s History of England to the awful G. A. Henty. By the time I was sent to boarding school, I knew about the assassination of an archduke at Sarajevo that had started the First World War and I knew that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 brought an end to the First World War but failed to prevent a second. So it was that at the age of ten, the “fellah” was taken on his first foreign holiday—to France, and to those battlefields that still haunted my father’s mind.

  When my mother died in 1998, I discovered the little scrapbooks she had compiled of this 1956 holiday, a cheap album with a green fake leather cover in which she had stuck a series of small black-and-white snapshots: Bill and Robert standing by our car—an Austin of England, it was called, and I can imagine why my father chose it—outside Dover Marine station, waiting for the old British Railways boat, the Shepperton Ferry, to take us to Boulogne; Robert in his school pullover sitting beside Bill, the car boot open and a paraffin stove hissing beside us; Robert loco-spotting French steam trains; and Bill and Peggy together by the car, slightly out of focus, a picture that must have been taken by me.

  But it was clear where my father’s mind was. “Through Montreuil, Hesdin, St. Pol, Arras,” Peggy wrote in the album as she mapped our journey, “to—Louvencourt.” And beside the word “Louvencourt” was a photograph of a road, framed by tall trees, with on the far side a barn with a sagging roof. I knew what this was. My father spoke of it many times later; he had found the very house on the Somme in which he slept on 11 November 1918, the last day of the First World War. On our 1956 holiday, my father had been too shy to knock on the door. Another snapshot shows him standing before a memorial of 1914–18 to the French dead from Louvencourt. He is wearing the tie he always wore, at work and on holiday, for seventy-two years: the navy-blue and maroon tie of the King’s Liverpool Regiment.

  He was wearing that tie one night in our hotel in Beauvais, waiting for my mother to join him at the bar. I had been suffering from food poisoning and Peggy had stayed with me until my father suddenly opened my bedroom door and said to her: “I want to speak to you—now.” I listened at the thin wall that partitioned my room from theirs. “How dare you leave me waiting like that? How dare you?” he kept asking her. Then I heard Peggy weeping. And my father said: “Well, we’ll say no more about it.” He used that same phrase many times to me in later
years. Then he would refuse to talk to me for weeks afterwards as punishment for some real or imagined offence. He didn’t talk to Peggy for several days after he was kept waiting at the hotel bar. In the holiday scrapbook, we are always smiling. There were other holidays and other snapshots later, always through the battlefields of what Bill called the Great War. We went to Ypres many times. And to Verdun. By then, my mother was taking early colour stock home movie film. And in those pictures, too, we were always smiling.

  Although Bill was reluctant to speak of his war, I had several times pestered him to tell a few stories. He had, it turned out, been bitten by a rat in the trenches in 1918. For several nights he lay in a first aid station actually inside Amiens Cathedral, its roof blown off by German shellfire—he remembered looking up at the stars as medieval gargoyles stared back at him. He had once shown me a photograph he had taken of the Western Front, a tiny, inch-long picture of muck and dead trees. My father had—against every military rule—taken a camera to the war in 1918. It sounded quite unlike the Bill I knew, who was usually as subservient to authority as he was jealous of his power in his home. He didn’t say much about the war in the trenches—he had only arrived in August 1918—but when, in 1976, I was leaving to cover the Lebanese civil war for The Times , Bill turned to me and said: “Remember, fellah, it’s not the shells you have to worry about—it’s the snipers you have to watch out for.” Advice from the trenches of the First World War. And he was right.

  Not long before he died, he told me of his first marriage—it had been a secret from me until I discovered in Maidstone cemetery one day, by chance, his first wife’s grave. She had been a childhood sweetheart, but when he had married her she had not returned his love, not even on the first night of their marriage. Matilda Fisk died in 1944, during the Second World War, which is how Bill came in 1946 to marry Peggy. She was twenty-five. He was forty-six.