The MoD is about people dying. Did Br’er Fox forget?

BR’ER FOX has got his leg caught in the snare. The more he struggles the tighter it gets. But in all the excitement about the oddly-named Mr Werritty, we've forgotten what it's all about. Maybe Br'er Fox had forgotten, too.

Even now, clutching the tar-baby of his party colleagues (not realising he's stuck fast), he may not remember what it's all about. Which is, of course, people dying.

That's the brief. 'Defence' simply means: one step further and people will die. A Ministry of Defence is prepared to kill. That is its ultimate sanction.

But we're all Br'er Foxes. Some of us may speak of "heroes" and "battles", and others of contracts and sweeteners and discreet têtes-à-tête, but we all forget the dead at the end of the line. The blood drains into the sand and the circus moves on.

Writers have trouble with this. The temptation is to glamourise war, to take sides, to choose heroes, to valorise toughness. We've always done it. And the further back we go into history, the more unreal it becomes.

The Somme mud, the whirl of hacking swords at Cullodden, the air thick with arrows at Agincourt, the Spartans at Thermopylae... by the time we reach Homer, almost 3,000 years ago, war has become a fairy-tale and death of no account.

His Odyssey has become the blueprint for some of the biggest movies of Hollywood. But his first, the Iliad – the story of the semi-mythic Trojan Wars – can seem simply irrelevant now: a core of heroic stars, committing derring-do for reasons we can't quite grasp, in the company of walk-ons who appear for a moment to die irrelevantly before the camera pans away.

Yet the more disaffected modern life becomes, the more we turn back to the ancient world for a hint of understanding. And now here comes one of the great poets of our time, Alice Oswald, retelling – or rather reappraising – the Iliad in her new book, Memorial.  

It is, she writes in her introduction, "a translation of the Iliad's atmosphere, not its story," as you "might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you're worshipping". She treats it as an oral ritual, the professional poet with his similes being answered by individual women describing individual dead men:

AXYLUS son of TeuthresLived all his life in the lovely harbour of ArisbeLooking down at the HellespontEveryone knew that plump manSitting on the step with his door wide openHe who so loved his friendsDied side by side with CALESIUSIn a daze of lonelinessTheir conversation unfinished.

Her title is apt. The book opens with an eight-page list of names of the dead in the Iliad. The effect is as powerful as the Vietnam Memorial. We don't know these Greeks - Phylakos, Oresbius, Deipuros, Thoön - and nor do we know the 58,175 men whose names are carved on the gabbro stone walls in Washington, DC.  But in both cases, the long litany of the fallen reduces the reader to an attentive silence.

The heroes have been excised. The reasons are unspoken. Strategies go unremarked. The beginning is brutally direct. The first to die was Protesilaus, she writes;

He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashoreThere was his house half-builtHis wife rushed out clawing her face

A masterpiece of memorial-making, it re-shapes the reader's landscape. It exists in another galaxy than the carpeted corridors of Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, the meeting-rooms (fresh notepads, branded pencils, iced Perrier) in Singapore, Florida and Sri Lanka, the Shangri-La Hotel in Abu Dhabi.

I'll send a copy to Br'er Fox. Whether or not he chews his way out of the noose and unsticks himself from the Tory tar-baby, he'll be a better man for reading it. And, who knows, he may soon have time.

• Memorial by Alice Oswald, Faber. ISBN 978-0-57-127416-1 ·