A brush with death — and life
Photo credit should read: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
It seems that the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, came close to death while in intensive care at St Thomas’s Hospital. If he had succumbed, it would have resembled a battlefield death in that the famously vigorous politician would have gone from operating at the height of his powers to oblivion in a very short period. Not the instantaneous exit facilitated by bomb or bullet, but neither the long slow decline of age and infirmity or debilitating disease. So what insights does a military career give into the metaphysics of mortality?
The first insight is hardly metaphysical; in fact, it’s almost trite — it’s the way he might have wished to go. Exaggerated egos and loud, vivid personalities are not unknown in the military and some soldiers have the studied insouciance that is the true mark of vanity: sound familiar? This same breed would always favour the quickest exit from life, perhaps with a touch of drama, and sharing the fate of those they lead. There is no illusion in this that death in battle might be anything more than utterly squalid, but that’s a chance most are willing to take — as perfectly illustrated in the writing of the young Churchill, with which the Prime Minister will be intimately familiar.
A second insight enters more spiritual territory and is captured by the observation that there are no atheists at the bottom of a foxhole. Confronting the possibility of violent death concentrates the mind wonderfully, and sometimes the soul. Soldiers from Ignatius Loyola to Richard Dannatt (former head of the British army) have given public testimony that facing death in or as a result of battle revealed a spiritual vocation of which they had been previously unaware. Indeed, Loyola went on to found the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits — and devote the rest of his life to the Christian message. He was canonised 70 years after his death in 1556. Others of us are made of less stern stuff, and, no matter the sincerity of the mumbled prayer when the bullets are flying, we take consolation in Mammon rather than God when the moment passes — but the memory remains.
A third insight is that a career of professional violence can give reassurance about the nature of death. To observe that there is nothing so lifeless as a battlefield corpse is clearly, at one level, a statement of the obvious. But at another there is something in the instantaneous transition from life, energy and purpose to a sack of inanimate matter that speaks to a finality that can be strangely reassuring. Battlefield corpses are neither necessarily scary nor sad; when everything that is human is extinguished, perhaps in an instant, death can appear not only final but also a condition so remote from life that it provokes curiosity rather than fear. It is this accommodation with the nature of death, combined with the assault on the senses by the sights and smells of military violence that the gives the battlefield its particular sensory and emotional quality.
Finally, ritual matters. Funeral rites are as old as war and every military generation from Homer’s Odyssey to Wootton Bassett has felt it necessary to formalise death in battle. There is something in the counterpoint between the complete chaos of battle and the ordered ritual of a military funeral that leaves a sense of an account balanced. It would take a hard heart to attend a military funeral, well done, and not feel some measure of emotional catharsis.
At a personal level, for part of my career as a soldier I felt immortal, and, for so long as I felt that way, I was. Special forces selection courses, alpine mountaineering and military operations offered their challenges and there were occasional glimpses of mortality, but that never tested a blithe certainty that a premature death was for others and not me.
Perversely, that certainty was brought to an end not by any intimation of death but by the creation of new life. It was only when I became a father that I began to feel mortal. Whether that was the result of a new level of responsibility or a sense of generational succession need not detain us, the problem was that the moment I felt mortal, I was. The climbing routes that had previously thrilled were now approached with caution and routine operational risks treated with a little more circumspection. What enriched me as a human being made me less singular as a soldier.
And now Boris Johnson faces the same juxtaposition. He has been characterised as a liar, a buffoon and a serial cheat, but he is still human and what could be more profoundly human than a brush with death followed almost immediately by the creation of new life? As he contemplates both his own mortality and his new son we can only guess at the range of his emotions, but we can take some comfort in the likelihood that a greater depth of humanity can only produce a better man.
