Star turn for 80,000 tons of death

IN OCTOBER 1922 the Blasket Island writer Tomas O'Crohan noted in his diary a day when the people of the island ate no dinner because they were so engrossed in watching big ships "ploughing the ocean through a storm" in the Blasket Sound, "the smoke from every funnel rising to the clouds."

One, "so vast you would think a mountain had collapsed into the sea every time she dipped her nose downwards", struck awe into the heart of a middle aged woman standing in her doorway cradling her child in her arms.

"Holy Mary! she cried out that's the class off vessel, I dare say, that carried Maire to America."

"`She is big', says a strapping Yank, who travelled over there and returned, but the ship that carried Maire could tow this one behind."

In the end, the big ships that carried Blasket Islanders to America destroyed the community that couldn't take its eyes off them. The big ship that lies a mile and a half off Dun Laoghaire harbour, the American aircraft carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, is also, more directly, in the business of destruction.

But even knowing this, we can't take our eyes off it. And this is one of the reasons the war machine survives its products, however satanic, are sublime. Even in the week when, for the last time, a handful of survivors are alive to attend the last big commemoration of the Battle of the Somme, during which modern war revealed the sheer immensity of its evil, the big ship evokes an almost hysterical devotion.

AND so, on the 80th anniversary of the moment when mankind realised, once and for all, the obscenity of war, we queue for hours for a chance to pay homage to a mighty killing machine. We shell out for T-shirts saying, "Peace on earth through strength at sea.

We gaze dumb struck at the beautiful mechanical birds bristling on the deck of the JFK. We devour the pre digested statistics three times longer than a football pitch, taller than Liberty Hall, 15,666 meals served every day, propellers weighing 34.5 tons each, rudders weighing 24.4 tons without noticing that we are being told nothing at all about what the machine really does for a living.

How many missiles, how many bombs, how many civilian casualties? We are not authorised to divulge this information.

The coincidence of the visit of the JFK and the commemoration of the Battle of the Somme is not quite as irrational as it seems. For it was during the Somme, supposedly the great turning point after which militarism could never again be seen as glamorous, that the masters of war made an unexpected discovery.

The abominable mixture of awesome destructive technology and even more awesome idiocy that wiped out so many lives to so little purpose had begun to trigger some stirring of doubt. Then, 80 years ago next September, 36 tanks were sent into action by the British army. To the soldiers at the front, they were at best risible and at worst appalling. But, as the secrecy surrounding them was gradually lifted, they began to provoke something like hysteria in the British public.

EVENTUALLY, to satisfy public curiosity, a tank was put on display in Trafalgar Square. According to the historian Patrick Wright, writing in a recent issue of Granta, "the tank, attended by military bands, comedians and chorus girls, sat in Trafalgar Square for two weeks and its appeal so far outstripped expectations that rather than be sent to, its originally intended destination, the Western Front, it was dispatched to Sheffield for more, fund raising.

The propaganda value became so immediately apparent in the purchase of war bonds that soon the National War Savings Committee was describing tanks as "vacuum cleaners" for gathering the pennies of the poor.

Throughout the rest of the war, tank fever raged" unabated and, as Wright puts it, "by the end of the war, the tank had become many things other than a problematic weapon it was a behemoth, a bank, a song, a theatrical act, a symbol of uncompromising patriotism, and advertisement, a vacuum cleaner and (not least) a soapbox."

Something truly modern the idea that the technological killing machine could also serve ash an immensely effective advertisement for war it self had been born.

The aesthetic appeal of modern weapons, their sublime symmetry of form and function, did much to help Europe overcome the disgust it felt for war after the Somme.

The Italian fascist and aesthete Giacomo Marinetti insisted that the idea that war was ugly was wrong, and that war was really a form of art. "War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the ceasefire, the scents and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation, flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages Marinetti was a madman, but who can deny the truth of what he had to say?

THE JFK, tricked out with the contemporary equivalents of military bands, comedians and chorus girls, has the same mesmerising effect today as the first tanks had in 1917. Out there in Dublin Bay it creates a new architecture all its own, presenting to the eye a shape and a scale previously unimagined.

It is so immensely alluring as an advertisement that it is easy to forget what it is selling death from a distance, the hard rain of shells and bombs fired by men who will never see them fall.

At the front in 1917 Siegfried Sassoon heard about the music hall hoopla that was being played out around the tanks back home and wrote, in bitter rage

I'd like to see a tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag time tunes, or Home Sweet Home

And there'd be no more jokes in music halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

But he was wrong. The tank coming down the stalls, like the aircraft carrier as an end of the pier show, wouldn't silence the ragtime tunes. It would be applauded as the ultimate star turn.

Eighty years ago yesterday, on American Independence Day, the fourth day of the Battle of the Somme, Sassoon wrote in his diary. "These dead are terrible and undignified carcases, stiff and contorted. There were thirty of our own laid in two ranks by the Mametz Carnoy road, some side by side on their backs with clotted fingers mingled as if they were handshaking in the companionship of death. And the stench undefinable. And rags and shreds of blood stained cloth, bloody boots riddled and torn."

Those images, locked now in the heads of the remaining few unsteady survivors of the Somme, were supposed to be awesome enough to last mankind a few centuries. But what chance, in the companionship of 80,000 tons worth of beautiful death, have the memories of those mere contorted carcasses and bloody boots?