The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk Page A

signal from the camp guards to our departing Toyota. But it hung there for many minutes and I began to realise that it was burning above the mountains and carried a faintly incandescent trail. The men in the vehicle were watching it too. “It is Halley’s comet,” one of them said. He was wrong. It was a newly discovered comet, noticed for the first time only two years earlier by Americans Alan Hale and Tom Bopp, but I could see how Hale–Bopp had become Halley to these Arab men in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was soaring above us now, trailing a golden tail, a sublime power moving at 70,000 kilometres an hour through the heavens.
    So we stopped the Toyota and climbed out to watch the fireball as it blazed through the darkness above us, the al-Qaeda men and the Englishman, all filled with awe at this spectacular, wondrous apparition of cosmic energy, unseen for more than 4,000 years. “Mr. Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?” It was the Algerian, standing next to me now, both of us craning our necks up towards the sky. “It means that there is going to be a great war.” And so we watched the fire blaze through the pageant of stars and illuminate the firmament above us.

CHAPTER TWO
    â€œThey Shoot Russians”
    When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
    â€”Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier”
    LESS THAN SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War. “Presented to Willie By his Mother” is written in thick pencil inside the front cover. “Date Sat. 24th January 1914, for another.” “Willie” would have been almost fifteen years old. Only after my father’s death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross—“For Valour,” it says on the medal—and, on the spine, a soldier in red coat and peaked white tropical hat with a rifle in his hands. I never found out the meaning of the cryptic reference “for another.” But years later, I read the book. An adventure by William Johnston and published in 1900 by Thomas Nelson and Sons, it tells the story of the son of a mine-owner who grows up in the northern English port of Seaton and, forced to leave school and become an apprentice clerk because of his father’s sudden impoverishment, joins the British Army under-age. Tom Graham is posted to a British unit at Buttevant in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland—he even kisses the Blarney Stone, conferring upon himself the supposed powers of persuasive eloquence contained in that much blessed rock—and then travels to India and to the Second Afghan War, where he is gazetted a second lieutenant in a Highland regiment. As he stands at his late father’s grave in the local churchyard before leaving for the army, Tom vows that he will lead “a pure, clean, and upright life.”
    The story is typical of my father’s generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. But reading it, I was struck by some remarkable parallels. My own father, Bill Fisk—the “Willie” of the dedication almost a century ago—was also taken from school in a northern English port because his father, Edward, was no longer able to support him. He too became an apprentice clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he wrote before his death, Bill recalled that he had tried to join the British Army under-age; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, eleven days after the start of Britain’s involvement in the First World War.