Remembrance

Today is Armistice Day.

Today is the 93rd anniversary of the end of the first World War, the Great War, the war that we must never forget, for reasons other than History. The war that happened in living memory. Not my living memory, but the memory of some who live.

I don’t know if, before WWI, people mourned those who fell in previous times of war. I don’t mean individually, because of course they grieved for those they loved and lost. I mean collectively, nationally, globally, grieved for the lost who they had never known, those whose families might never know the end of them, those who might not have had anyone to tell even if the end was known.

I don’t know if, before WWI, a woman would sit at her kitchen table and cry for the ancestors she had lost, ancestors she was never destined to meet regardless of what age they lived to see, ancestors who fell in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, or the American War of Independence, or the Napoleonic Wars. I don’t know if, before WWI, remembrance was personal or tribal or national or imperial.

I don’t mean to say that before Armistice Day people were unsympathetic or uncaring, although perhaps in times of war and places of war people become hardened to it, or at least, whilst feeling the loss, felt the purpose behind it, recognised the sacrifice made in the context in which it was made, appreciated the improvement that the sacrifice helped to bring about. Assuming that there was an improvement. Assuming that the sacrifice was made knowingly. Assuming that the lost went willingly.

Perhaps, in past times of war, so many were lost that grief could have brought the nation to its knees, were we to succumb to it. Perhaps this is why Armistice Day exists. To give us one day on which to feel the loss, all the loss, the vast, black hole of loss, so that the rest of the year we can just remember it. Remember it without always, always having to feel it.

Neither of my grandfathers fought in the Second World War, one was in Ireland and the other, I believe, had a weak heart. The First World War, however, decimated my ancestors. Those I know of include my great grandfather, the husband of the great grandmother I remember visiting on her 100th birthday, the woman who died at 103 waiting for a whisky having sent back a cup of tea with the words “I asked for a drink”, this woman’s husband lost his brother in France in 1918. A gravestone has been erected for him, my great uncle, Private John Martin 350600, at Vauxbuin, marked with the disclaimer that he is “believed to be buried in this cemetery.” His is one of three gravestones, dedicated to three of the 300 men buried there, only half of whom are identified.

For this I am grateful. A man I never knew, who I only ever would’ve known had he outlasted his natural life expectancy, a man who I might never have known anyway, because how many people actually know their grandparents’ siblings? I am grateful that there is a place for him, a marker for him, a remembrance of him, cold, hard, carved in rock by hand evidence that he was there, he lived, he fought, he died, he existed.

At this point I must confess my situation might be unusual. I only ever knew my maternal grandparents. My paternal grandfather died while my father was a child. My paternal grandmother died after my siblings and I were born, but before I was able to form any memories of her. My only memories of her are two-dimensional, pictures of her with a baby that I am told is me, a baby I am told is my sister, a toddler I can see is my brother. I don’t know whether my brother remembers her, I never asked. We never really talked about my father’s parents, when I was growing up. I can’t imagine what it must be like, he was orphaned by the time he was the age I am now.

I’ve never thought of it that way before.

Another great grandmother, my mother’s mother’s mother, lost three brothers at Passchendaele, although there is no record or knowledge in the family of precisely where, or when, or how. My maternal grandparents were just my grandparents. There was granny, and there was grandad. I have no idea, had I had two of each, what they would be called. I never understood why people had grannies and grandads and nannies and popses and nanas and papas and why do they need such odd names for their granny and grandad? I geniunely don’t believe I ever thought anything of it, the fact that I only had one of each, I genuinely don’t think I realised my family wasn’t the same as everyone else’s.

Not that I’m calling for sympathy, some people have four grandparents, some people have eight, some have none, I just had two.

But more and more as I got older, I think about those I never knew. I know my dad moved around a lot growing up, I have no idea where his father died, where he’s buried, whether he’s buried. By the time his mother died he was living in the house I grew up, but I have no idea where she was, where she died, where she’s buried, whether she’s buried. I know where my great uncle, who died in 1918, is buried. I’m not even sure what year my grandmother died in.

On Armistice Day, I cry. I observe the two minute silence, whether or not those around me observe it, I sit or stand, in silence, I think, and I cry. I think about the people who never came home, my great grandmother who never knew what came of her brothers, only that they never came home from a place, not even which day was their last, whether any of them felt the loss of his brothers before he was sent to them, whether they even knew. I don’t even know whether they were together, whether what ranks they held, I don’t even know their names.

I cry for my great grandfather, whose brother never came home. I cry for my great grandmother, whose brothers never came home, whose brothers are forgotten in all but the fact of their existence and their sacrifice, whose brothers’ names I don’t know, and I should know, I should know and I should remember and I should never forget. I don’t want to ever forget.

I think about my grandfathers who never went to war and I am selfishly, astoundingly grateful for the nationality of one and the fragility of the other. Had they gone to war, my parents might not exist. Or they might exist, the scarred children of traumatised soldiers, or the relatively well-balanced children of soldiers who never talked about it, or the perfectly average children of soldiers with amazing coping mechanisms.

But I don’t just cry for me and my family. I think about me, and I think about my family, and I imagine what it must be like to feel these things at a distance of less than 93 years and three generations. I imagine how it might be to lose your brother, your dad, your uncle. I imagine how it might feel to have a brother, dad or uncle at war and not to know whether he was going to come home. Not to know whether that was already settled and you just hadn’t been notified yet. Most of all, not to know. I imagine how it would feel not to know. To know enough to know that what you don’t know is awful, but fundamentally not to know.

I don’t think about the futility of war, or the politics, or the right or the wrong or the outcome or the consequences. I think about the people, the individuals, the ones who never came home, the ones whose families never knew why, the ones who were never buried, never identified, perhaps lie still where nobody has ever looked. The ones who knew what faced them, who laid bleeding in a muddy field full of their friends and their foes and prayed that their families would receive word that they didn’t suffer, prayed someone would lie for them. The ones who went to war voluntarily not realising what they were volunteering for, the ones who regretted it on arrival, after time, or never at all, believing to the end that their sacrifice was right and proper.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori?

The survivors, those who saw their comrades killed or injured, their neighbours, their friends, their brothers, their twins, their fathers and sons. They saw this but they survived. They survived untouched or they barely survived at all, but they made it home and their family, because this must be how they saw each other, didn’t. Not only to suffer the loss that we all felt and feel, but to watch it happen, to see them bleed, to see them die, perhaps even to feel their last breath in their arms, on their faces, under the hands of their would-be rescuers.

I realise this is all very morbid, but this is what I think about, and this is why I cry.
Because it’s not about the concept of war, it’s about the people. What the people went through, and what they lived through. And what didn’t kill them, did it make them stronger? Or did it break them, are they broken? How can they get through the day? What does it take?

It takes something I can’t even conceive of. A strength I can’t even imagine.

How much better is the world for their sacrifice? Obviously in the short term the outcome was the necessary one, the one that the world needed, it worked out well in the end. But evaluating life, even trying to imagine whether the loss of life was ‘worth it’, is ever worth it, I think this requires the ability to think about it without imaging the individuals, without thinking about your great uncle John, without thinking about your great grandmother’s nameless brothers.

I don’t want to minimise the work of soldiers, or say what they do is unimportant or unnecessary. The world can be a better place, and at the moment we don’t know how to make that happen, so we go to war to try to extinguish evil, insofar as we are able, and we lose men and we lose women and men and women come home blind or missing limbs or scarred mentally but those damaged to whatever degree made the choice to put themselves out there, possibly thinking of their own loved ones and what they want to save them from, and thanks to them the world is a better place, one way or another. What they do is clearly of vital importance to them, the soldiers, and whatever you need to do needs to be done, whatever you are willing to sacrifice is your willing sacrifice.

Whatever is important to you is important.

Wear a poppy, don’t wear a poppy, I don’t care. Sometimes I don’t buy a poppy, it’s not a statement, it just means I haven’t happened upon anywhere selling them, or noticed it at least. If I realise, I buy a poppy, and I wear it. But the poppy is not what’s important to me.

What is important to me is people.

Giles Coren posted this youtube link on Twitter earlier today, to a song I had never heard. I listened to it when I got to work, at my desk, and I wept. I don’t think it’s that well sung, or that musically brilliant, but the sentiment and the emotion made me cry until my eyes stung. If you want to remember, if you want to think, about the people and about the loss and about the memories, listen to this song, and think about someone, and weep if you must.

Rest In Peace, John Martin and all the others, be they remembered by name or without or in nothing but the imagination of the living.