Remembrance

War graves at Tyne Cot cemetery (Flanders)

The thing about evil is that it twists the knife.  As if it were not enough that nearly a million men and women of a single generation, in Britain alone, should have perished in the Great War, they had to die as they did, in mechanised massacre, or en masse at sea.  As if it were not enough that they should die in such indiscriminate, inhuman swathes, their bodies were never laid to rest: they had to be grieved for without a grave.  Or else the cruel converse is true: we have graves with no name to match to them.  And as if it were not enough for a woman to lose her brother or husband in one war, she might lose her sons in the next.

Catastrophe on a scale beyond computation can be apprehended only by piecemeal, inadequate measurements of the other, smaller catastrophes that it begets.  One mind can meditate on individual engraved names, but not many: barely a dozen at a time before it burns out.   Or there are particular kinds of memorials by which a particular category of soldier can be imagined: often passing the memorial for fallen students of my college, I could not miss, with their understated grief, the words ‘These Sons of This House Fell in War’.  And there are the miscellaneous narratives and vignettes that dispel the exhausting monotony of the names of the dead.  For instance, the dismantling for ever of the poets’ colony at Dymock as the war began, and the deaths of two of those poets in that war, is a tiny disaster compared to the sinking of the Lusitania or the Battle of the Somme.  But it is still a disaster in its own right, and by its scale in proportion to the whole we can glimpse, briefly, how far short we fall of understanding the whole cataclysm to which it is a miniscule footnote.  The disastrous ripples of war go on and on and on, resounding deep in the intangible things; we could hardly expect otherwise.  Has the world ever recovered from the demoralisation of the Great War?  Is this why we are so cynical, so cold-shouldered, so half-heartedly callous in our own day?  Are we still paying the price?  Philip Larkin, a man who could be cynical enough himself, thought so:

  Never such innocence,
  Never before or since,
  As changed itself to past
  Without a word — the men
  Leaving the gardens tidy,
  The thousands of marriages,
  Lasting a little while longer:
  Never such innocence again.

Most of those men hated war as much as I do.  I am in my mid-twenties: if I had been born a hundred years before I was, would I have reached my current age?

Now that the hundredth anniversary of the Great War’s end has arrived, the test of our remembrance really begins.  The grainy and stilted films of the conflict, the careful and restrained language of the time compared to our own, any actual living links with that era, are all receding into the past, and are given the occasional extra shove backwards, into deeper and deeper remoteness from the present day, by ever-crisper liquid crystal screens and taller, sleeker buildings.  If we are so concerned with relevance, and so tempted to assume that what is past is irrelevant, how shall we keep in mind, lest we forget, that we may need to learn from events and people not confined to our own age and era?  If it is so nearly impossible to meditate on the catastrophe, how will we make sure of keeping at it?  Will we maintain our remembrance even when most of us think no-one is watching?  We have forgotten much else about that time; will we, at least, remember that this old lesson must be learnt anew in every age?  And that the thing about goodness is that it radiates?

Names of missing British and Commonwealth soldiers at the Menin Gate, Ypres.  (Two panels of sixty-four in total)