The air is bright with spring sunshine in central London. We’re here for a midterm break holiday. We take a cab across Waterloo Bridge to the Imperial War Museum. We’ve been traversing the city on tubes and buses, loving that feeling of living like the locals, swiping our bank cards on public transport – no fiddly tickets or Leap card-equivalents needed here – wishing we could do the same at home. The pricier cab is a treat. Buses and tubes are brilliant, but in a glass-roofed black cab, you can cross the Thames, Big Ben visible above your head, the Houses of Parliament majestic through the windows.
Women helped build Waterloo Bridge, I tell my teenage daughters as we cross the river. The London cab driver is dubious when I attempt to confirm this with him. I start to doubt myself. Consulting my phone, I’m delighted to discover that I am right. It took decades to prove it but, in 2015, a series of photographs of women welders at work on the “Ladies Bridge” in the 1930s were found by historian Christine Wall. More than 25,000 women were at work in the British construction industry by the 1940s, when the second World War raged, and with the men gone to fight, the work of many British women was in munitions, not just in the kitchen.
And when the war was over? Having proven their abilities across a wide range of disciplines, they were expected to go back to traditional home-making roles. “So annoying,” one of my daughters says, rolling her eyes.
In the museum on Lambeth Road, we go up to the third floor to visit an exhibition called War and the Mind. The purpose of the exhibition is to explore why wars are started, to make sense of the conflicts that have shaped and continue to shape our world. There’s more eye-rolling at the entrance because of a piece of writing called Why War?
“War causes misery, suffering and huge loss of life. Why are leaders willing to commit their people and resources to fighting? Why are humans so seemingly ready to kill?”
“Humans,” is the word my daughter has an issue with. She’s been studying world wars and revolutions for her mock Junior Cert exams which are now thankfully over. The relief. “Humans? Men, more like,” she says. She takes issue with another sentence. “The human capacity for war remains the subject of intense scrutiny.” She wants to get a Sharpie out, she says. She wants to change the sentence to “the capacity of male humans for war remains the subject of intense scrutiny”.
I think about how, a few years ago, tech-sis Sheryl Sandberg made the point that women were less likely to engage in military conflict. “No two countries run by women would ever go to war,” she proclaimed. Her theory has never been tested and there are those who disagree that women, with our psychological tendency towards collaboration and empathy, would prevent wars. And as if to mock this notion, when we turn a corner, I hear the unmistakable voice of Margaret Thatcher. It’s 1982 and she is responding to Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands by making the decision to go to war. Plenty of men tried to dissuade her at the time, members of her parliament and the then US president Ronald Reagan, but Thatcher wasn’t for turning.
Even so, you’d have to have sympathy with my eye-rolling daughter. Moving through the fascinating exhibition, we mostly see stories of men in the military, men’s decisions to start or end wars, men buried under white crosses in foreign grave sites, men’s inventions of weapons, men’s life-changing and horrific experiences of shell shock and PTSD.
There is one moment of light relief. A military training video from 1964, shows a group of royal marines being given LSD to see how they would react in combat if the enemy slipped them mind-altering drugs. Within half an hour, the troops are collapsed in helpless laughter, unable to read maps or use their radios and wandering aimlessly through the forest combat zone. One soldier is up a tree trying to feed the birds. It’s a rare moment of humour in a sombre, unsettling exhibition.
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The question of the male-dominated military world has clearly not escaped the curators who have included a lot of women in the displays. Many of the war researchers and historians speaking in the engrossing videos are women. A woman explains the psychological effects of drone warfare. Another woman outlines how colonial troops were trained all over the world in “the British military way”. Dr Matilda Greig and Prof Holly Furneaux talk about their project Enemy Encounters 1800 to 2020, which explores prisoners of war and their captors, how “it takes work to maintain hatred towards the other” and how the enemy becomes more human when in close contact, “more a brother than a monster”.
But even with all those expert women talking heads, this remains a place where man’s inhumanity to man, man’s not woman’s, is writ large. There is no escape. After wandering through War and the Mind and then through the museum’s dark and devastating Holocaust gallery, we emerge blinking into the London sunshine pondering the fragility of everything and the lessons never learned.
