The Ministry of Defence’s plan to switch from bearing the coffins of soldiers repatriated from Afghanistan through the heart of the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett to shuffling them instead, unseen and unmourned, out of the back gate of an Oxfordshire military base is mystifying.
So mystifying that a cynic might wonder if this tawdry trade of discretion for dignity reflects a fear among Britain’s military chiefs of the public noticing that soldiers are dying in war. If that is so, they insult both those who have given their lives for their country as well as those who have lined Wootton Bassett’s streets to honour those fallen soldiers and to express gratitude for their sacrifice.
These are occasions that are certainly sad and poignantly sombre. How could they not be? But they are also both remarkable and precious, evolving into a makeshift, no-invitation-necessary ceremony of relatives, wellwishers and fellow soldiers that has become as powerfully evocative a moment of national reflection as Remembrance Day.
With the closure of RAF Lyneham, the repatriation of fallen troops is moving to RAF Brize Norton, near the garrison town of Carterton. But instead of the cortèges leaving through the airbase’s main gate and through the heart of Carterton to allow the protocols of Wootton Bassett to be replicated, they will leave through a rear gate and follow the Carterton ring road to avoid the town centre.
It is one of the many paradoxes of war so tartly articulated by Joseph Heller in Catch-22 that anything worth living for is worth dying for, and that anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for. That soldiers have thought it worth dying so that the lives of others might be worth living is a sacrifice that should be marked, not masked.