The Abduction of Europe

          It  all started, as many of the best stories do, with sudden, overwhelming, peremptory love. The god Zeus, possibly struck by an arrow from Eros/Cupid, or possibly acting from his own impulses – fell for the most beautiful of the daughters of the King of Tyre (in modern day Lebanon). She, meanwhile had had a dream in which two continents in the form of women disputed her – the one where she was born, and the as yet nameless one over the sea. 

       When Zeus appeared to her in the form of a gentle and graceful white bull as she gathered wild flowers by the seaside, Europa felt no fear for the huge animal and mounted upon its back –whereupon it plunged into the water and took her across the waters to Crete. There she bore him many sons, the first of whom was Minos, legendary founder of the earliest known European civilisation.

          Going further back into its origins, the Greek name (which means ‘broad face’) is generally taken to indicate a link with an ancient Egyptian goddess representing the feminine principle in the form of a lunar cow. This seems to make intuitive sense, given the link with Zeus as a bull, as representing in some way the spirit and force of settled agriculture as the foundation of European culture as we know it now and have done so for thousands of years. By way of a further indication, the name of Europa was often given also to Demeter, goddess of corn and of harvests.
          So, taking the longest view possible, there we have the origin of our continent, and of the idea or ideal which lies behind all the bureaucracy, all the endless speeches in vast half-deserted halls, all the aimless wastage of taxpayers’ money/the impossible yearning to make amends for centuries of bitter conflict (depending on your point of view). Agriculture, fertility, abundance – and abduction, albeit in a consensual form.

          And now it seems that Britannia – who always occupied in any case a very different area of the mythological universe – is drawing away from Europa, and may sever her connection altogether. It isn’t hard to see why these two were never destined to get along together: their gender is essentially all that they share. On the one hand a submissive maiden, ravished by a gentle god and mother to dynasties of powerful men – and on the other a warrior woman, subjugated only through the overwhelming force of the Roman armies. In their later depictions – as if to emphasise the courage which it took to subdue her – she’s typically shown with a trident and a helmet.

          And this is the image which was of course taken up by jingoists and patriots from the 16th century to the present day, on coins and banknotes, innumerable paintings and pub signs. Britannia ruling the waves – fierce, belligerent, domineering; she never seems to have the almost voluptuous femininity of France’s Marianne. (Well, what would one expect of the French?)
          Britain vs. Europe: it’s at its deepest the difference between a nation which still defines itself through war and a yet-to-emerge one which seeks to define itself through overcoming the conflicts which lead to war.

           Perhaps it’s just too soon for this to happen – considering where the myth of Europa originates, the fate of Greece in the hands of the EU is a distinctly bad omen. And the Common Agricultural Policy has much less to do with Demeter-esque  fertility and abundance than with craven servility towards a handful of overweening food multinationals.
          Perhaps in the end we can only echo Mahatma Gandhi, and say that European civilisation would be a good thing – if and when it happens.

REMEMBRANCE

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 
Only the monstrous anger of the guns ...
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells,
And bugles calling from sad shires. (Wilfred Owen)

What or who is it that we remember on Remembrance Day – those 95% of us who have no personal experience of being at war; those of us for whom ‘total war’ belongs to the lives of dimly remembered grandparents or great-grandparents, as remote from our own lives as the narrow, black-and-white, stiffly dressed world in which they grew up?

It’s not the wars of my own lifetime that I think about – Afghanistan, Iraq, or the Falklands – nor even the Second World War which shaped my own childhood and created the world I grew up in. The war which haunts my imagination – and of so many other people – is WWI: the war to whose remembrance this day was first consecrated, in 1919.

My only personal link is a tiny photo of a grandfather who died when I was a small child; he's seated on a camel in Egypt, only his uniform dating and locating the event. Those who had fought in the war (my friends’ grandparents) were already elderly by the time I was old enough to ask them about it – and I never wanted to. Yet what they experienced has passed into my imagination, has changed me, has changed us all. We can't forget, even what we never directly knew:

- Passchandaele: July-November 1917. 850,000 men died. It rained for a month without stopping and thousands  drowned in the mud.
- Verdun: February-December 1916. Almost 1,000,000 died. The battle started with a terrifying ten-hour artillery bombardment which could be heard 150 km away.
- The Somme: July-November 1916. Over 1,200,000 died. On the British side alone average losses were 2,930 a day.

In the end, numbers numb – a good reason to call them by that name. It’s above all the words of those who were there that still echo in our hearts and in our minds:

They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud.
O Jesus, make it stop! (Siegfried Sassoon)

No one really ‘won’ the First World War. Among the Allies, supposedly victors, the survivors went home, many of them physically or mentally broken, to a world with not enough jobs for them (even in Britain, unemployment never fell below 10% throughout the 1920s) – despite the war’s scything through the ranks of working-age men.

In other countries the devastation was even worse. Travel around rural France and count the names on the war memorials in every small town and tiny village: a generation of men wiped out, a generation of women left to mourn their lost loves or never to know love at all for the rest of their lives in those rigid and closed communities. Meanwhile in Germany the revenge inflicted by the victors at Versailles was leading to the triumph of Nazism, and less than 15 years after the end of the war Hitler was elected Chancellor.

I believe that some collective experiences are so intensely traumatic that they come to rest in the consciousness of all humanity or at least a whole nation: the Holocaust is just such a case, and for China the Cultural Revolution. So was the First World War; something important remains behind, and it’s right that we should remember – not because they died to save our freedom, but for a much simpler reason.

As Wilfred Owen wrote shortly before he died, in the preface to a planned collection of his poems:
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do today is warn.

We who were never there and who can scarcely begin to imagine what it was like can still feel the pity he spoke about. When all else has gone, that remains.