Even the most decisive military victories can have, in a long-term perspective, an ephemeral quality about them, writes Martin Mansergh.
Apsley House, No. 1, London - home of the Duke of Wellington, close to the Irish Embassy in Grosvenor Place - although now refurbished, is a monument to faded glories. It contains the dinner services and other gold and silver trophies presented by grateful European royalty to the victor of Waterloo.
On the other side of the Channel, in the domed Hôtel des Invalides, is a bombastic mausoleum citing the achievements and conquests of his infinitely more charismatic enemy, the emperor Napoleon.
The French writer and republican, Victor Hugo, nearly half a century later devotes a book within his epic novel, Les Misérables, to the battle of Waterloo.
He found many of the contours of the battlefield altered and landmarks erased, requiring a considerable effort of the imagination to reconstruct the scene.
His reflections are worth quoting: "Civilised peoples are not raised or lowered by the good or bad fortune of a general. Their specific weight in humanity depends on something more than a battle. Their honour, thank God, their dignity, their intelligence, their genius are not numbers which heroes and conquerors, those gamblers, can enter into the lottery of battles. Often, battle lost, progress conquered. Less glory, more liberty."
A massive blackened tower rising high above the city of Leipzig commemorates "the battle of the nations", an almost equally important defeat of Napoleon by the allied armies of Prussia, Russia, Austria and Sweden in 1813. The German name Völkerschlacht conveys better than either French or English what was involved, viz. human butchery and slaughter. Opened by Kaiser Willhelm II in 1913 as another bombastic statement of imperial might, by Christmas 1944 the monument served as a rallying point for a population urged by its military governor to one last desperate effort of defence against the advancing allies.
Damaged by US army shelling, then handed over to the Soviets, their commander, visiting it in the autumn of 1945, decided to give its restoration immediate priority, as a symbol of Soviet-German friendship! That too has passed into history.
Victor Hugo did not believe that all wars or revolutions, the drama of which excited his imagination, were futile, despite his consciousness of the human cost. He strongly believed in progress and evolution. His point was the ability of fundamental forces to reassert or regenerate themselves, often in a more benign and less threatening form.
After devastating defeat in the second World War, Japan and Germany reasserted themselves miraculously quickly as political and economic powers, shorn of militarism. The quasi-royal characteristics of French and Russian presidents testify to de Tocqueville's point about continuity between régimes as much as change.
No significant victory of recent centuries is as incessantly commemorated, for months on end, as the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. While it established the Protestant Ascendancy for over a century, most of its after-effects have long since been swept away outside the North. Defeated Catholic Ireland reasserted itself, in a chaotic way in 1798, in a more organised way from the times of Daniel O'Connell. Most of Ireland, including the Boyne, is long since independent of the crown, and is a successful European country, having separated from "the British family of nations", to use a David Trimble expression.
The State has mixed political ancestry. More than one strand, both constitutional and revolutionary, has a parentage that goes back to the "Glorious Revolution", via Grattan on the one hand and the United Irishmen on the other. Another more pronounced part of the lineage goes back through the hidden Ireland to Jacobite Ireland and to what Pearse called "the historic Irish nation", prior to the Flight of the Earls.
Portraits in the Irish embassy in London have a strong Jacobite flavour. A unionist politician with a sense of history delightedly pointed out to me in the conference room in Lancaster House following the recent talks hosted by Prime Minister Blair and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern that the Irish delegation was seated under the portrait of James II.
A quiet marching season is an important confidence-building measure for intensive talks in September. The appetite for confrontation has abated somewhat on both sides. With the DUP engaging through proximity talks with Sinn Féin, the Orange Order could soon be the only organisation left that does not engage, either with residents or their republican spokesmen, or with the British-appointed Parades Commission.
Most problems would be quickly resolved, if the Orange Order would accept, as the Apprentice Boys have done in Derry, that controversial marches proceed with the agreement of the communities they propose to pass beside. It would be good to look forward to the day, when Orange marches are a tourist attraction at the height of the season, rather than a time for residents to leave and for visitors to give Northern Ireland a wide berth.
How far a still largely unreformed Orangeism actually serves the interests of the Northern Protestant community today is a moot point. There is no affinity recognised in modern Britain. The casting of Catholics back into their 17th-century role of a defeated and dispossessed people is not so productive, now that they have recovered the power not to have to put up with insults.
William Drennan, constitutional founder of the United Irishmen, was a warm admirer of King William, "one of the best of men", but believed his memory should not be disgraced by serving as an instigation of bigotry. He also felt Ireland was mature enough to move beyond the framework of the 17th-century revolution, and to enjoy independence on the model of their American cousins and of the French constituent assembly.
Douglas Gageby, of Ulster Protestant stock, belonged very much to that tradition, and played an inestimable role in broadening out Irish journalism.
He fervently believed that his people, and by extension all the people, deserved a better politics.