WAR – the nadir of human civilization

Sheel

A soldier – a poet – sees fellow-soldiers being killed by enemy guns in front of his eyes each day, and asks “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” He then answers his own question:
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

The poet was Wilfred Owen, who was himself killed in action towards the end of World War I.

At a time when we have a war raging in the world which is being talked about every day on various media, how can we as teachers help our students understand the concept of war, its causes and its consequences? This project offers some ideas and activities in this direction, which could be taken up by different subject teachers over the space of five days. Ideally, two successive periods can be devoted each day to the project, and a presentation made at the end of the week. While some activities can be taken up by children of grades 3-5, there are others that will work only at the middle school (grades 6-8) or higher. You could also simplify or complicate some activities appropriately.

Day 1: A divided world
(Geography/Civics)
Begin by asking the children what we mean when we speak of countries being at war. War is generally understood as armed conflict between two or more countries. “Armed” means having weapons of some kind, which are meant to kill or maim others. “Conflict” implies that there is serious disagreement about something. “Country” refers to an area of land demarcated geographically and politically. War is a situation when the disagreement has become grave and caused the governments of the countries involved to pit their people against each other with weapons that cause damage, destruction and death.

Activity 1: Get your students to look carefully at a political map of the world: how many countries are there in the world today? Discuss with them how a country’s borders are created. Which boundaries are natural, and which are man-made? Do countries change shape? Show the children maps of India printed by India, America and China: identify the differences in the borders. Engage them in a discussion by asking them why such differences exist.

A border, in the context of political divisions, is a line that demarcates the boundaries or edges of a political unit such as a country or a state or a district or village. It is an imaginary line, fixed only for administrative purposes. It can therefore be changed. War is one way in which the borders of countries change: some of the lands that India claims for itself have been lost in war to either Pakistan or China, and this explains the difference in the maps. These territories are known in India as “occupied” by those countries.

Activity 2: History is full of examples of war. Divide the children into five groups and get each group to focus on one continent and find out which of the countries on that continent have been at war at one time or other. In Europe, for example, there was “The Hundred Years War,” and in South America, there was the “Conquest of the Desert.” Make sure to have the resources available in class for them to look up such wars. What were the causes of these wars? Discuss how war could be a result of conflict based on race or ideology or economic interest.

Activity 3: In the higher grades, you could extend the discussion by getting the children to think about the two World Wars, when many countries around the world were engaged in war either directly or indirectly. How did these wars end? Were any pacts made and treaties signed? How did these wars change the map of the world? Were any new countries formed as a result of these wars? If so, on what basis? Use the opportunity to get the children to understand the difference between country and nation. Get them to think about whether any real solution was found to the conflicts that caused these wars, or whether one war actually led to another.

The world has seen many different kinds of wars. Powerful countries may sometimes choose to create war in different regions of the world, destabilizing the governments in power in those regions, or in specific countries, to meet their own ends. Such countries may end up fighting their neighbours unnecessarily, or a warring faction may emerge within the country, causing a ‘civil war.’ Of course, a civil war can also arise due to other reasons, such as political dissension, lack of rights, or one part of a country wanting to become independent, or even because people are extremely unhappy with the government in power.

Sometimes, countries may even deviously instigate less powerful countries who have good relations with them to get into a war with a common enemy, providing them the weapons to fight the war. Such a war is called a ‘proxy war.’

Day 2: Of destruction and glory
(Literature/Language/History)
Our history textbooks are often full of stories of kings (and some queens) who have been “great conquerors,” from Alexander the Great to Ashoka the Great or those who have resisted the expansionist policies of others. There are many stories of courage, of valour and intelligence, often against the military might of formidable enemies, which can evoke our admiration and support and even arouse our emotions depending on how they are told. There are also stories of duplicity and treachery: the story of the Trojan horse is one of the most famous.

The glorification of those who have fought valiantly in war is a common occurrence. The stories are told in many different literary forms. Historically, they have been narrated in epics like the Mahabharata or the Ramayana, or the Odyssey or the Iliad. The children might already be familiar with the heroes of the first two. You could task them with finding out about the other two as homework.

Activity 4: In the primary classroom, share the story of one well-known warring figure, for example, the Rani of Jhansi, in class. You could even read out Subhadra Kumari Chouhan’s poem “Jhansi ki Rani” or show them clips from the film Manikarnika.

Activity 5: Middle school children can be asked (in groups) to find out about war figures from different countries, such as Attila the Hun, Chengiz Khan, Joan of Arc and Zenobia of Palmyra. Can they identify common threads in these stories? How are those from the West referred to, as against those from the East? Some could also look for stories of bravery by common people during wars, for example, people hiding Jews and saving them from the soldiers of the Third Reich.

Activity 6: What are the ways in which we speak about wars? What words do we use, and what do they imply? Are there any specific words or phrases that are used largely in the context of battles and wars? Try and elicit such words and phrases from the children, listing them on the board. For example:

battle lines	munitions	conquest
battle	war machine	surrender
war	combat	pact
enmity	fighting	treaty
hostility	violence	accord
weapons	bloodshed	truce
armaments	carnage	armistice
reconciliation	peace	prisoners of war

The list above is just an indication; there are many more words, obviously. Use the opportunity not just to expand the vocabulary but to help the children understand the finer differences between words like ‘war’ and ‘battle’, or ‘peace’ and ‘truce.’

Activity 7: There are many stories of the horrors of war. We learn from history that the carnage of the Kalinga war caused Emperor Ashoka to renounce war and become an agent of peace instead. What did he see that brought such a change in him? Get the children to imagine the scene and write a piece of dialogue or couple of paragraphs that highlights the transformation.

Day 3: The weapons of war
(Social Studies/Science)

Early humans used various tools and implements to hunt animals as well as to help grow food and to protect themselves. Many of these may have doubled up as weapons and been developed further for the purpose of war. The range of weapons invented and refined to hurt, maim and kill are numerous. The purpose of weapons was to perpetrate violence against the enemy – to pierce, cut or crush. Weapons were sometimes pointed, or had sharp-edged blades, or were blunt and heavy. Sometimes, all three could be found in the same weapon, such as the Egyptian khopesh.

Activity 8: Get the children to look up strange weapons used by ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, China, Japan, and India. You could give them a list of weapons to start them off on this journey: for example, caltrop, bagh nakh, chu-ko-nu, khopesh, etc. How have they been designed and what is the purpose of each? What materials were used to make these weapons? What kind of paraphernalia did soldiers use to protect themselves from the weapons of their enemies? If possible, take the children on a tour of a museum where various types of weaponry is displayed.

Gunpowder changed the way wars were fought. Ironically, gunpowder was created while Chinese alchemists were trying to make a drug to increase longevity. It was used to treat skin diseases and to fumigate insects initially. The Chinese discovered that gunpowder could explode when set on fire, and they began to use it in warfare by making fire arrows, bombs and fire lances. Its formula was kept a secret for several centuries and it came to be known in Arab and European countries only during the 13^th century.

Unconventional weapons From the times when battles were usually face to face, conventional weapons such as swords and guns, maces and bows and arrows have traditionally been used by warring sides. However, these were not the only weapons that could be used: other unconventional weapons such as poisonous gases, toxins from plants and chemicals, venom, germs and more have sometimes been used to overcome enemies. Biological warfare or germ warfare refers to the deliberate use of toxins of biological origin or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses and fungi as part of a war effort. For example, when several British forts had been destroyed in North America in the Pontiac Rebellion of the 1760s, the British sent blankets and handkerchiefs infected with smallpox to the Native Indians. This led to the spread of the disease among them, and many were killed. Chemical weapons were first used during the First World War. Poisonous gases killed over 90,000 people. During the Second World War, many Jews and other groups of people were killed by the Nazis by gassing them in special gas chambers. Nuclear weapons were used to reduce two whole cities in Japan to rubble in the 1940s. The radioactivity from these attacks continued to kill people for years after the war ended. We also talk of cyber warfare today, as cyber attacks can be used to paralyze various functions within a state.

Activity 9: What is gunpowder made of? Get the children to find out how wars were fought before gunpowder was invented and after. What difference has gunpowder made to the history of the world? What happened to people without guns? Show the children pictures of forts and fortifications, as well as castles and moats, perhaps even the Great Wall of China. What role did such structures play during peacetime and during wars? Get the children to discuss why they were built in earlier times but are not built anymore.

Activity 10: What other inventions or discoveries have had a tremendous impact on how wars are fought? Tell the children about various kinds of warfare – biological, chemical, and atomic (see above box). How are these different from conventional weapons?

Activity 11: Get middle school children to find out more about the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. They could read from The Diary of Anne Frank or watch clips from the film “Schindler’s List.”Also tell them about the “Napalm girl” from Vietnam, and the story of Sadako and the Peace Cranes from Japan.

Day 4: The costs of war
(Maths/Economics/Environment Sciences)
Most countries maintain various kinds of armed forces for their own protection, commonly including an army, a navy and an air force. They try to build up stocks of armaments of all kinds, both conventional and non-conventional. Many large countries also engage in research to develop new, “better” weapons to enhance their capability to protect themselves and others. But the training and maintenance of soldiers and amassing of weapons comes at a cost.

Activity 12: In their groups, get the children to look up the defence budgets of three countries on the continent they have researched earlier. They could make a bar graph comparing what the countries spend. They could also combine all their work and compare the amounts spent by each of the countries to discover the highest as well as the lowest spenders. What does the world as a whole spend on defence? And how much money is spent on food, clothing, shelter and education? Discuss.

As is evident, war is costly to prepare for. But it is even more expensive to actually fight a war. War is clearly destructive: peace and human values are wrecked and damaged by war. People are killed and maimed, and there is much destruction of property. Resources begin to become scarce, and therefore more expensive. There is much cruelty too, as people often forget their own humanity; it is humankind as a whole that loses. Witness the devastation that the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine has caused and continues to cause. Witness the immeasurable loss of life, of culture, of our very humanity, as families are dismembered and people dislocated from their homes and all they called their own!

Activity 13: Imagine a city being bombed. In just a matter of hours, it may be completely destroyed. What happens to the people who live there? The other living beings there? The land and water, the environment? What is the cost, in economic terms? In human terms? What has the ongoing war cost the world? The children could also look at the fallout of the Second World War, focussing on the human costs as well as the damage to the environment in the lands where the war was actually fought. What happened to the Germans who lived in Britain from before the war, and to the Japanese who lived in the US?

Activity 14: Although war causes a lot of death and destruction, it is common to ignore this and speak instead of the “successes” that have been achieved, or the territory that has been won. We choose to glorify war and erect monuments to war instead. We build monuments even for nameless soldiers who have died fighting. Get the children to look up war monuments round the world. What is the “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?” Children of the higher classes can also look up the monuments that have been torn down in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

War monuments As a species, humans attempt to commemorate events of all kinds – even wars. We have erected monuments to mark bloody victories over other human beings in battles fought long ago, or to pay tribute to fallen soldiers. Cenotaphs exist in many places around the world. The Rashtriya Samar Smarak is the latest of Indian memorials built to honour and remember the soldiers who have fought in armed conflicts in Independent India. In many countries, these may be identified as The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Among the earliest of such memorials in the modern world is a shrine in Jinju, Korea, which marks those who died in the Imjin War of 1592. Similar markers of war may have existed in the ancient world too: archaeologists believe that the more than 4300-year-old White Monument in the Banat-Bazi complex, Syria, is one such monument, in which human bones from 30 individuals were discovered with arms laid out alongside them. Such memorials tell us that we have glorified war to the point where human lives acquire a high value if they are “killed in action.”

Day 5: Of war and peace
(Language/Moral Science)
Although armed conflict has been a part of human life for millennia, we are still left with questions: Why do human beings fight each other, and so mercilessly? To what end the destruction? The fact is that war is not sustainable in the long term, both for economic reasons and for the reason that people get tired of the fighting and the constant pressures that war creates. Wars end when one side either destroys or submits to the other, or when a truce is declared.

Activity 15: How has war contributed to peace initiatives? What was the Cold War? Help the children learn about various peace initiatives and about disarmament, especially in relation to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

War has also led to many innovations: as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. The entire convenience food industry originates from the development of canned foods for military use. So does the packaging of small, individual sized portions of food, as also frozen foods. Similarly, the flu vaccine and even penicillin came to be used for civilians after successful use on soldiers. Uniforms and shoes of standard sizes too were first developed for use by soldiers.

Activity 16: Get the children to find out about other inventions and innovations that were developed and first used in war but have transformed the way we live today. While it is easy to understand that machines like the jet propulsion engine and radars may have first been used for purposes of war, there are many things that may appear very strange now. Pique the interest of children with curious facts such as that sanitary products including pads were first made to be used by men in war! Get them to research the truth or falsity of this statement.

War has also contributed much to sports and games: since soldiers needed to be able not only to attack enemies but also to protect themselves, the development of martial arts was inevitable. A number of sports such as fencing, wrestling, gymnastics, riding, archery, shooting and many others also have links with war. Today’s children are also familiar with structured combat games played physically in an artificially created environment, as also online “war games.”Reverse your role and learn from them about these latter games!

Activity 17: In groups, children could research some of the traditional martial arts, like malkhamb and karate. Some could look up sports like chariot racing, and the various sports that the Roman gladiators engaged in. One group could also look up how Pilates (called ‘contrology’ by its inventor) was developed.

In conclusion
War is a strange thing: on the one hand, it represents the lowest point of our humanity, when we cease to think of people as individuals and see them only as an enemy to be decimated. On the other hand, times of war also bring home the fact that death can come any moment, and can, quixotically, bring out the inherent strength and resilience in people as they go through danger. But do we or our world really need war? Can we not choose peace?

The author is a writer, editor and researcher. She can be reached at sheel.sheel@gmail.com.