Sanitising war

I was cycling through the southern part of Hyde Park yesterday when I noticed freshly laid flowers at the side of the carriageway.

I immediately connected them with the IRA bomb attack against the Household Cavalry. I was in too much of a hurry to pause to read the inscription on the stone close by.

Today I awakened to the voice on the radio reminding me that the attack happened on this very day 28 years ago.

Eight soldiers and seven horses were slaughtered. I remember covering it as a reporter with News at Ten. It was a searing milestone in the struggle centred on Northern Ireland. 

All these years on, I find myself thinking of the soldier deaths I report today.

The litany is endless – last night, we named the latest of four soldiers who died in Afghanistan over the weekend.

Somehow death in war has become commonplace as it never really became during the war with the IRA. It has made me think of the devastating journey the families of today’s dead are now launched upon.

What will their memories be, twenty eight years from now? How do they explain their loved ones’ deaths to the young, and those as yet unborn?

I thought too of those who were wounded, the amputees, and the witnesses who suffered in the attack in Hyde Park, and of their successors in the Afghan War.

The strife with the IRA will have been no easier to explain that today’s war. The IRA bombers have long been freed.

And in the Afghan context, talking to the enemy is all the rage. It can’t be easy for the families who grieve.

The other day a sweet sixteen your old girl came to us for work experience – her father had died in action in Afghanistan.

I dared to ask to her about it. I was not wrong to do so, she was pleased to talk about him, she was composed, measured, and amazingly mature about the impact of her loss upon her life.

She had happy memories of her father, he had a place in her life, but in some extraordinary way she had found a way of moving on. She described how much more difficult it was proving for her younger sister.

I entered the Park yesterday through the gate next to the French Embassy in Knightsbridge.

The cycle route crosses the central reservation. There were dead brown flowers strapped to the iron fencing and the unfazed photo of a beautiful young woman who had died there crossing the road. I thought about the serendipity of death.

Last night I gave a talk at the journalists’ Frontline Club. We talked about the absence of bodies in our coverage of war.

I don’t myself like the ‘sanitisation of war’. But then I remembered the dead horses I saw on the carriageway 28 years ago.

Each was covered by blankets or tarpaulins. I thought too of the families of men who die in war.

We owe it to them to respect their grief. It could not be right, could it, for them to have their loss splashed so brutally and bloodily across our screens? Or am I myself busy sanitising war?