It’s 105 years since the Western Front guns stopped and the Western Front ceasefire on the First World War began.
And afterwards, people remembered.
Some of the declarations on behalf of the dead have seemed dubiously warlike:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
John McCrae, typed in by https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Read in the wrong mood, it seems terribly like Mr McCrae wouldn’t mind terribly if the UK marked Remembrance Day by carpet-nuking the Germans.
At the other extreme, it represents the “Never Again” version. Yet the German rematch 21 years later shows that there are people who are unresponsive to suggestions that they should live in peace and harmony with their neighbours, and it is tricky to shut such people up without beating them to death with a rifle butt.
And yet…
The silent cut-outs scattered around the country suggest a better use of Remembrance of the war dead. War may be beneficial, or it may be lousy, or it may be unjustified, or it may depose tyrants. Those all depend on individual wars, and indeed individual perspectives on those wars (the Falklands Conflict, for example, remains the subject of conflicting interpretations for personal, patriotic and political reasons).
But the cut out figures, the Unknown Warrior in his tomb and the lists of names on memorials around the country silently speak a truth that some seem to promptly forget upon rising to power – that war has a most terrible human cost.
I’m not going to stand looking at Reading’s cut-out and proclaim the greatness of our part in the Great War, but I am going to remember that some people died in wars, and some people still die in wars, and it is very sad, and it would be better if the people who run these things could find a better way forward where not so many people sadly die and are remembered (especially not so many people sadly die and are remembered in Mr McCrae’s faintly vindictive tones).
Which sounds trite somehow.
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