REMEMBRANCE

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 
Only the monstrous anger of the guns ...
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells,
And bugles calling from sad shires. (Wilfred Owen)

What or who is it that we remember on Remembrance Day – those 95% of us who have no personal experience of being at war; those of us for whom ‘total war’ belongs to the lives of dimly remembered grandparents or great-grandparents, as remote from our own lives as the narrow, black-and-white, stiffly dressed world in which they grew up?

It’s not the wars of my own lifetime that I think about – Afghanistan, Iraq, or the Falklands – nor even the Second World War which shaped my own childhood and created the world I grew up in. The war which haunts my imagination – and of so many other people – is WWI: the war to whose remembrance this day was first consecrated, in 1919.

My only personal link is a tiny photo of a grandfather who died when I was a small child; he's seated on a camel in Egypt, only his uniform dating and locating the event. Those who had fought in the war (my friends’ grandparents) were already elderly by the time I was old enough to ask them about it – and I never wanted to. Yet what they experienced has passed into my imagination, has changed me, has changed us all. We can't forget, even what we never directly knew:

- Passchandaele: July-November 1917. 850,000 men died. It rained for a month without stopping and thousands  drowned in the mud.
- Verdun: February-December 1916. Almost 1,000,000 died. The battle started with a terrifying ten-hour artillery bombardment which could be heard 150 km away.
- The Somme: July-November 1916. Over 1,200,000 died. On the British side alone average losses were 2,930 a day.

In the end, numbers numb – a good reason to call them by that name. It’s above all the words of those who were there that still echo in our hearts and in our minds:

They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud.
O Jesus, make it stop! (Siegfried Sassoon)

No one really ‘won’ the First World War. Among the Allies, supposedly victors, the survivors went home, many of them physically or mentally broken, to a world with not enough jobs for them (even in Britain, unemployment never fell below 10% throughout the 1920s) – despite the war’s scything through the ranks of working-age men.

In other countries the devastation was even worse. Travel around rural France and count the names on the war memorials in every small town and tiny village: a generation of men wiped out, a generation of women left to mourn their lost loves or never to know love at all for the rest of their lives in those rigid and closed communities. Meanwhile in Germany the revenge inflicted by the victors at Versailles was leading to the triumph of Nazism, and less than 15 years after the end of the war Hitler was elected Chancellor.

I believe that some collective experiences are so intensely traumatic that they come to rest in the consciousness of all humanity or at least a whole nation: the Holocaust is just such a case, and for China the Cultural Revolution. So was the First World War; something important remains behind, and it’s right that we should remember – not because they died to save our freedom, but for a much simpler reason.

As Wilfred Owen wrote shortly before he died, in the preface to a planned collection of his poems:
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do today is warn.

We who were never there and who can scarcely begin to imagine what it was like can still feel the pity he spoke about. When all else has gone, that remains.