The Cost of War

By Donald Phillipps in All Sorts

reflections on the cost of war

THE COST OF WAR
I've been reading about warfare in ancient times - like, 2500 years ago. Warfare then was planned and fought under a very different set of rules and conditions, and didn't even remotely resemble the all- out, no- quarter-given, affairs to which we have become inured. Often enough they were the result of what we might now think to be trifling offences, and in
any case, they were usually of short duration.
In those distant times the soldiers were part-time, of course. Most of their days were spent, like most of their contemporaries, as farm labourers and farmers. The rhythm of the year decided when battles were to be fought. It was more important to let the seasons run their course, and bring in the harvest, before turning one's thoughts to settling old scores.
In that window of opportunity, as we now call it, after the harvest was over, and before the winter gales set in, was the time to do battle. And the makeshift soldiers would soon be back home again - the lucky ones at least - about a month later. Despite the exaggerations in the re-telling of those ancient deeds of valour, there were rarely big armies on the field - just hundreds, rather than thousands, of lightly armed men, engaging in hand-to-hand mortal combat.
It was the Athenians, so I have learned, who reasoned they could get the advantage over their Spartan enemies if they disregarded the normal timetable. So they went to war before the harvest was over, and that meant that they enjoyed both the surprise factor, and the possibility of greater loot. But to achieve this meant the Athenian leaders had to finance their operations in a different way. The writer of the book I have been reading suggests that this was a major factor in the first development of a money-based economy.
The NZ Budget allows for an expenditure of something like $3.4 million on defence - about 1.2% of our Gross Domestic Product. The United States, with about 75 times our population spends a staggering $700 billion on defence - nearly 5% of its budget. Saudi Arabia, with a 26 million population spends $1 out of every $10 on defence. An estimate of total world spending on defence in
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2010 amounted to $1.6 trillion. A figure like that gives a totally different meaning to the word 'obscene.'
ANZAC Day this week gave us time to reflect, again, on the cost of war. A cost never to be reckoned in dollars and cents. In my mother's family home there was a corner which was a little bit like a shrine. There was the large brass medallion, presented to every family who had lost a member. There was the framed letter from James Allen, the Minister of Defence, officially offering the country's sympathy to my grandparents in the loss of their son. There was his DCM earned at Gallipoli. How many thousand New Zealand homes had some special space like this?
In World War I there were 16,697 deaths of New Zealanders (and 41,000 wounded). In World War II there were 11,625 deaths. And our country has sent personnel to serve overseas from the South African War in 1899 till the present day in Afghanistan. The cost of war is lives lost and maimed. It is outrageous to measure the value of our defences in dollars. It is human life that matters, first and last.
As the records become better understood, and especially as the myths are stripped away, we gain a truer picture of the reality of war. The bungling and the ineptitude and the ignorance are uncovered, and there is less and less justification for glorifying the waste, and the mud and the blood. Gallipoli itself is as good (or terrible) an example of that as can be found in the story of World War I.
But the old men and women who still survive remember those days for other reasons, and if they are sometimes unwilling to speak about their memories, we can now better understand their reasons for not doing so. And we simply honour them for their high sense of duty, their indomitable comradeship, and their valour.
The ones who have yet, it seems, to learn that hard lesson are those who can still think of war as a means to achieve peace. How can that possibly be! Surely the lessons of the 20th century should have exposed that lie! Tragically, it seems not.
Honour the dream for which our nation bled, Held now in trust to justify the dead, Honour their vision on this solemn day: peace known in freedom, peace the only way.