lest we forget

I'm going to be undiplomatically honest for a moment. It's 11 a.m. on Thursday, November 11 and I'm taking a moment of silence. To remember, of course. The problem is, my entire minute is being wasted trying to remember what I'm not supposed to forget . . . and I'm not exactly sure what that is.

I had no family in the war - any war, so I don't need to remember them. I mean, if that's what we're supposed to be thinking about. I wasn't alive myself, so I can't exactly mull about how horrible it was with bombs dropping all around.

I used to wonder, as a Pathfinder participating in the Remembrance Day Service at the Rutland Cenotaph, what the old veterans were thinking about during their minute of silence. Scenes of carnage? The feeling they got while blowing another human being to bits? The vision of their best friend going down beside them as they made the rush on Vimy Ridge? The expression on their mother's face when she learned their brother would not be coming home?

Now they, they have memories.

As for the rest of us, I'm actually kind of disappointed with our ability to remember. We make this big deal, wear the poppies, deliver the speeches, fly the flags at half mast, take the minute of silence, but then send the troops out once more to the breech, dear friends, once more. We forget the destruction, devastation and general unfairness of war and send out more people - fathers, brothers, sons, mothers, daughters, sisters, to be filled with lead or noxious gases or to torture their foreign counterparts in a country on the other side of the world.

These are, as John McCrae so eloquently put it, people who "lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved."

Remember? WWII: It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. But we forget - sporting our patriotic, red poppies, we forget the wrongness of it and we do it again and again. Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf. Bosnia. Afghanistan. Iraq. Have I forgotten any? Probably. Like everyone else, it seems, my memory is just not what it should be.

It's pointless to "remember" the war. Or wars. Our memory is selective and fails the moment another country pisses us off, or has something we need (or even just want). At least during the Second World War the point was to stop a madman. Now, the mad men buy their way into power and rule the world uncontested, attacking whoever they want whenever because they have their very own regiment of toy soldiers and "bang, bang, pow, isn't this fun?"

Now I remember what I wanted to remember: life is precious. Everybody's life is precious, and they count. There should be no pawns, no insignificants, forced to run up a cliff against gun fire knowing even before they start that few - and probably not them - will make it. And for what? So that some country will retain their freedom to go to war and kill more in the future, because they, themselves, forget.

I have another poem. One I discovered a couple of years ago in an old magazine. It's not famous and often quoted like Flanders Fields - which, while beautiful, finishes by rallying the troops and asking them to fight on. This one was written by a young (21-years-old), British soldier named Alec de Candole during the First World War. It's lovely, if whimsical, but holds its real power in the footnote at the end. Read:


When the Last Long Trek is Over
By Alec de Candole

When the last long trek is over,
And the last long trench filled in,
I'll take a boat to Dover,
Away from all the din;
I'll take a trip to Mendip,
I'll see the Wilshire downs,
And all my soul I'll then dip
In peace no trouble drowns.

Away from noise of battle,
Away from bombs and shells,
I'll lie where browse the cattle,
Or pluck the purple bells.
I'll lie among the heather,
And watch the distant plain,
Through all the summer weather,
Nor go to fight again.

Alec de Candole never took that trip to Mendip. Two days after he wrote the poem, on 4 September, 1918, he was killed in a bombing raid on Bonningues, during the Battle of Aubigny in Arras. And, no, he did not fight again.