I went to bed on Tuesday night, pointlessly sickened by the news that American deaths in Iraq had exceeded 1,000. Why do I say pointlessly? Well, in the first place because one knew this figure was coming, and in the second place because if it had stayed at 999 one could hardly have taken any comfort from the fact. I woke up, as one sometimes does, remembering that there was a book of poems I had to consult. It's a tattered thing on my shelf: an old anthology called Poetry of the Thirties that took a while to hunt down. The poem I was seeking is titled "A Thousand Killed," and it reads like this:

I read of a thousand killed.
And am glad because the scrounging imperial paw
Was there so bitten:
As a man at elections is thrilled
When the results pour in, and the North goes with him
And the West breaks in the thaw.

(That fighting was a long way off.)

Forgetting therefore an election
Being fought with votes and lies and catch-cries
And orator's frowns and flowers and posters' noise
Is paid for with cheques and toys:
Wars the most glorious
Victory-winged and steeple-uproarious
... With the lives, burned-off,
Of young men and boys.

[...]

Spencer's ambivalence is a reminder that there's no reason to mock other people who are divided in mind and soul about casualties and the morality of war. I remember exhaling with relief when Saddam Hussein's regime was taken down without the death toll on "our" side having much exceeded 100. Antiwar people had predicted many multiples of that. But I also thought it was a just war, which means that if I am honest I have to admit that I would not, or should not, have balked at a higher figure. And those who think it is an unjust or mistaken war should say that it isn't worth a single life, and not hope that any "body bag" calculus will do their moral work for them. The greatest war poet and antiwar poet of them all, Wilfred Owen, spoke of the pity of war, and the poetry of war, and added simply that the poetry was in the pity. He threw away his own life in the last days of the First World War (his mother received the telegram just as the church bells were tolling for the armistice), but he had volunteered and then re-volunteered to do so. One just has to doff one's cap at this point.

[...]