At the going down of the sun, and in the morning

[julesjones]

Remembrance Sunday, one hundred years after the start of the Great War. More wars since, so very many of them. This morning I went to the silence at the village cenotaph, and afterwards laid my little wooden cross with the names of my family's dead from the Second World War.

The crowd grows bigger each year. This year we were spilled out so far across the road that even the lane normally held open during the service for traffic to get through other than during the silence itself was blocked. There were many more of the little wooden crosses than I have seen before, perhaps because people are aware of them now. Some were in general thanks for sacrifices made, but most were like mine, with the names of family members who came home maimed, or in a box, or never at all. The ritual responses to the exhortation to work for peace were ritual, but not rote.

Time marches on, and changes how we remember. As usual, there weren't enough printed hymn sheets to go round. The man in front of me got out his smartphone and looked up the words online. But still we remember, that war has a terribly high price.

Lest we forget. Because the price of forgetting is so terribly high, and we have forgotten so many times in the hundred years since.

And I can't help but wonder now Willie McBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you 'The Cause'?
Did you really believe them that this war would end war?
Well the suffering, the sorrow,  the glory, the shame -
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.
-- The Green Fields of France

Comments

[watervole]

Beautiful song.