Remembrance

Remembrance is a serious word and it should involve serious thought.  It’s more of an undertaking than the rosy-hued reminiscence and feels more formal than remembering.  The clue is in the Latin memor, which means mindful. Remembrance should be mindful remembering.  We don’t value mindfulness much these days (apart from practising Buddhists, who value it a great deal) – we’re too busy doing.

Remembrance Day, always the nearest Sunday to the 11th of November,  is a day for ceremony and ritual. At the Cenotaph in Whitehall, royals and politicians gather to lay wreaths of poppies.  The royals are attired in sometimes incongruous uniforms, all except the Queen, who must have more outfits of pure black than any woman alive. The politicians opt for dark suits and overcoats.  Michael Foot, one time leader of the Labour Party, was roasted by all the newspapers in the 1980s for appearing at the service in a tan-coloured jacket but perhaps today’s sleekly spun politicos are simply more mindful of their image than he was.

Massed bands play traditional arrangements of noble music and massed ranks of serving military personnel parade execute a flawlessly drilled parade. The crowds, it seems to me, comprise as many tourists as members of the British public and that wasn’t always so.

Until I was eighteen I attended the local Remembrance Day parade and service.  My father was a police officer and was often in charge of the parade – in fact, it’s almost my first vivid memory of him, striding out ahead of the Territorial Army, the Boys’ Brigade and the Girl Guides. I remember respectful crowds lining the streets and the deep silence as a lone piper played The Flowers of the Forest in front of the War Memorial.

Now I watch the Remembrance Day service live from the Cenotaph on TV and my mind tends to stray a little, a tendency not helped by the slideshow images in intense colour that the BBC feels it has to include. Viewers nowadays, it’s assumed, need something stimulating to look at even when the whole point of the occasion is to be in a quiet, thoughtful place. This year I noted trivia such as glove-wearing bandsmen, including a clarinetist with cut-off mittens.  I thought, that’s new, surely and what a bunch of sissies they are to need gloves. But the modern armed services are, I suppose, only being practical. I thought that Her Majesty looked suddenly older – or hadn’t I been paying close enough attention lately?  I noticed, and I was not alone, for the media leapt on it later that day, that the Prime Minister did not nod to the Cenotaph in the accepted manner. Myself, I thought that he looked dour and grey and tortured enough anyway for it not to matter.

There was a list of soldiers killed in Afghanistan in 2009 which scrolled across our screens.  The sadness as I read those names was, for me, tempered by a realisation that there were more young men in their 20s and 30s than there were teenagers. That’s a change.  And there was a film of the wife and mother of a young Welsh soldier which I found the most moving part of the whole programme. The wife had, one day, looked at the summit of a Welsh hill and determined to erect a Welsh flag there to memorialise her husband.  The mother stood by the flag and said that when she saw people climb the hill and read the inscription, she thought of it as someone thinking of ‘her boy’.

In the two minutes silence, which I always observe, both on Remembrance Sunday and at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, I do my best to mindfully remember.  I think of the only member of my family who was killed in war – my grandfather’s brother George, buried in France where he died from wounds inflicted during the last big push of 1918. Granddad served but survived and my father, as a policeman, was a reserved occupation in World War II and so exempt from service. I remember people I danced with at naval balls who were on ships that were lost in the Falklands War. I remember a friend who to this day is traumatised by the death of his fellow Para in a horrific incident in Northern Ireland. And I think of the people who died in recent wars, who are still dying.

There’s a curious fact about war – it is beneficial in advancing surgical methods, for battlefield surgeons must be resourceful and creative when faced with appalling wounds. And it can bring out the best, as well as the worst, in people.  Someone sent me a link to the story of the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department which, in World War I, used talented sculptors to give men back their faces, albeit in sliver-thin metal.  Plastic surgery too learns a great deal from war.

The inscription on the Cenotaph reads The Glorious Dead and it raises my pacifist hackles.  For what is glorious about death? And what is glorious about war? As a species, we seem to be irredeemably agressive and will no doubt go on making war on each other for many centuries to come.  But it’s a shame – literally a crying shame. Wilfred Owen’s searing poem Dulce et Decorum Est and Benjamin Britten’s savagely raw War Requiem are both in my mind even as I endeavour to remember, with quiet solemnity, not the wars that killed and continue to kill so many, but the human beings behind those lists of casualties. For even if I do not fully respect or agree with the conflicts in which they lost their lives, I can respect them. And I can be mindful and remember.

Photo by theboybg