I’ve just come from the BBC in Belfast, where I took part in a discussion of Remembrance Sunday. (Yes, Virginia, it has been rather a long time.) My discussion partner/opponent was Doug Beattie of the UUP, who as you probably know is or was a military man himself. The question being discussed was, should the present form of remembering those who perished in battle (while dressed in British army uniform) continue?
Doug, by and large, was content enough with things, as far as I could gather. My points were two: the when and the how of it.
Grief is not a biddable emotion: it comes and goes, or it comes and stays. It certainly won’t submit to being confined to one day. So talk of ‘Remembrance Sunday’ suggests that we are the master of grief and mourning. And we’re not.
As to the how, in the case of people who died in wars, there is a choice. We can mourn their deaths as soldiers or we can mourn their deaths as human beings. Remembrance Sunday makes it clear that the option taken is as soldiers. Hence all the parading and shouted commands, salutes, volleys, Last Post, etc. These ceremonies are usually full of discipline and precision. The one thing you won’t see displayed is contrition.
The human race has a long way to evolve. A hundred years ago, Wilfred Owen denounced ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ – it is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country – as ‘the Great Lie.” Read Thomas Hardy in ‘The Man He Killed’ , where he sees the common humanity that binds soldiers on opposite sides. Listen to the songs – ‘Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire’ or ‘The Green Fields of France’.
These young men – sometimes little more than boys – didn’t go out, as Remembrance services suggest, to make the ultimate sacrifice. They didn’t want to sacrifice their lives. They went there because, well, it was a bit of an adventure and besides, they paid you. When they got there, they found that war was something viler, more devilish than an adventure.
Noel Thompson asked me how I would like these people to be remembered – and of course they should be remembered. My suggestion was to strip out the military element – the marching men, the salutes, the volley of shots. Remember instead the poor deluded human beings who we – or others like us – trained and armed and sent out to kill others or, in many cases, to be killed. It is shameful that we should misrepresent the butcher’s arena that these young men died in. They didn’t want to die – they wanted to live.
Only when Remembrance Sunday includes a reading of ‘The Man He Killed’, only when the sole music is the singing of ‘The Green Fields of France’, only when the presence of soldiers at the ceremony would be seen as disgusting, will we have paid proper tribute to the poor, deluded dead.
Oh, and ditch “We will remember them” and replace it with “Never again”. Scrap the Remembrance Sunday and call it Contrition Sunday. Then we’d kick out misguided pride and replace it with resolve to evolve.
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