Jules Jones

80 years on, and the numbers of those who remember first hand are dwindling. I listened to the stories of those who were very young then, and thought of my own parents, born during the war. The effects ripple down the years, in things like the phrase "my parents were war babies" used by many in my age group to explain our dislike of food waste.

Lest we forget; for as the King reminded us in a very pointed speech this evening, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and the evidence of that is all too obvious around us.

 At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

Gone, but not forgotten.

One hundred years since the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps stormed the cliffs of Gallipoli. They weren't the only, or even the largest, group to land. They weren't even all Australians and New Zealanders. But so very many of them were from two small and new nations. And so very many of them didn't come home.

I'm old enough to have watched as some of those who did come home marched on Anzac Days past. Old enough to have seen the days when the Vietnam War veterans didn't march alongside the Great War and the Second World War returned services, because it was still too raw and bitter a memory for them. Old enough to have seen Peter Weir's film on a school outing as part of our history lessons that year, and been in tears on the way out along with my classmates, girls and boys both.

Not old enough to have seen the last of fresh generations to march. But there is also this -- Anzac Day is a symbol of both remembrance and reconciliation. The ones who didn't come home have been looked after all down the years by their former enemies, who lost so many of their own young men. And there are memorials to Ataturk in both Australia and New Zealand. Would that all conflicts could end with such determination to set aside our differences in recognition of our common humanity.

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

I didn't make it to the Sunday service at the village cenotaph this year, for a variety of reasons. My place of work does observe the two minutes silence on the eleventh, as far as it is able. Unfortunately this year the phone started ringing in my particular office just as the signal mortar was fired on the roof of the town hall to mark the start of the silence, and kept on ringing almost until the second signal mortar. I rather wish the nearest person had just picked it up and told whoever it was to phone back at 11:02, but we didn't actually expect someone to persist for two minutes before hanging up.

It was surprisingly disturbing to not be able to observe the silence properly in contemplation. I think I would have been less perturbed if I'd made it to the cenotaph service, but even if I had, it would have felt odd. I've become used to being able to observe the silence on the right day in company.

This year Armistice Day falls on Remembrance Sunday. It must have been a good 400 of us at least who remembered them this morning at the village war memorial. The village has long since been swallowed by the conurbation, but when the memorial was built it would have been truly a village cenotaph. It's still a focal point for community remembrance in a suburb that retains much of its village character.

There is a full multi-denomination Christian service starting about half an hour beforehand, but like many people, I arrived at about 10:55, in time for the silence. People of a variety of races and creeds, coming together to remember the dead, and those who came home but not whole. We had a beautiful day for it -- mild, sunny, and perfectly still. The sun fell on the memorial, lighting up the stone obelisk. The railway station is long gone, but the old station clock tower still stands across the main road from the memorial. Its stone too was lit by the autumn morning sun, as the minute hand inched towards the hour.

Then the lone trumpet, followed by that peculiar not-quite-silence made by several hundred people standing still and saying nothing. The silence where you can hear feet scraping and clothes rustling as people ease position, even above the background noise of traffic on nearby streets.

The trumpet played again, and we continued with the service, before the various children's organisations paraded away. As the crowd dispersed, I was able to make my way to the base of the memorial and lay one of the British Legion's little wooden memorial markers, inscribed with the names of my great-uncles who never came home from the Second World War. Mine was a cross, as were the others already laid, but the Legion also make Muslim, Jewish, Sikh and secular versions.

I didn't have any rosemary from my own garden, but once the crowd had dispersed I met up with kalypso who had brought along some spare from hers. Much muttering ensued as I wrestled with the pin holding my poppy in place, trying to get it to hold the rosemary as well.

I can still smell rosemary on my hands.

Lest we forget.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year. It seems somehow fitting that this is the first Armistice Day with no living link to the trenches of 1918. The last known combat veteran of the Great War died earlier this year, and now there are only our memories of those people who remembered being there.

Time will fade the memories, time will smooth away the scars it left in nations. But the Great War left its mark on all the nations caught up in that maelstrom, and a full lifetime of years later we are still coming to terms with its effects.

Two minutes of utter silence in the office today, the only sound the almost inaudible whisper of computer fans, bookended by the loud crack of the two signal rockets fired from the roof of the town hall. Silence across much of the city centre, as shops and offices observed the two minutes.

Two minutes to reflect on the price paid for war. The very, very high price. Sometimes it may be a price worth paying. It is never a price worth paying without reflecting on the cost, and those who bear it. Who bear it still, in newer wars, though the last of the living of the Great War have gone to join their dead comrades.

Lest we forget.

Book 77

I chose to start re-reading this particular book on November 11 this year, and having finished it the next day, to post my log entry on Remembrance Sunday, for reasons which will be be clear if you know anything about the book at all. This is the fictionalised memoir of the Great War, based on Remarque's own experiences as a German Army conscript stationed on the Western Front.

My own copy is a battered cloth-bound copy from the year of first publication, though from the twentieth print run some six months after its first publication in English translation. I bought it in, I think, 1988, because I had heard a little about it and wanted to read it for myself, and so when I ran across a cheap copy in a second-hand bookshop I picked it up. And was devastated by it. At school I had studied the Great War, and the lead-up to it, starting with the intricate balance-of-power treaty jigsaw created by Bismarck and its later unravelling. I had watched in respectful silence the old men at remembrance parades. But this book took the war out of the realm of history, and made it real in a way I'd never encountered before. It gave voice to the ordinary soldier at the Front, without taking sides. It was all here -- the harsh conditions, the need to dehumanise the enemy simply to be able to cope with the killing, the sense of dislocation felt by soldiers returning from the front line to their homes far from the battlefield, the uncomprehending jingoism by those at home who had never seen battle.

The book was banned by the Nazis, and no wonder. It was a threat to their mythology, and a vivid undermining of their glorification of war for the Fatherland. The relevance of its message has not diminished down the years. War is neither glorious nor romantic, and the comradeship of soldiers is bought at a very high price indeed. And yet bleak as it often is, there are many moments of high humour in the book. Remarque was a skilled writer, and knew very well how to contrast the horror with the moments of emotional peace and even joy that could be found in quiet times in the trenches. This is an emotionally wrenching read, but very much worth the time.

LibraryThing entry

95 years ago today.

But the band plays Waltzing Matilda,
And the old men still answer the call
But as year after year, more old men disappear
Some day no one will march there at all.

They are all gone now, those old men I saw march on a late April day, but they are not forgotten.