Lest We Forget

I’ve been watching the Remembrance Sunday service from the Cenotaph for decades, and rarely miss the broadcast. It seems to come round quicker every year, and it’s hard to shake off the spectre of one’s own mortality when two of the Queen’s grandsons, both serving in the military, now regularly take part in the ceremony. It’s not that long ago that the Queen Mother was an ever-present, or Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, or even King Olaf of Norway. 2011 is the first year in which there are no (known) surviving veterans of the Great War, and the majority of combatants of World War II are in their late 80s and 90s. I have not watched the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance for such a long time, but I remember, year after year, being moved by the sight of the Chelsea Pensioners marching down the steps into the Royal Albert Hall, and knowing that they had served in the 1914-18 conflict (and possibly even the Boer War, if you consider that I started watching it as a child). My father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers missed both World Wars by accident; too old or too young, and I have yet to find evidence of any significant losses in the their immediate families, avoided more by luck than design.

The relatively recent innovation of the veterans’ march-past shows the decrease in ex-serviceman from the 40s and 50s able to attend such an event and an increase in those from conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Falklands, as well as both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. A number of organisations associated with those who served in WWII have disbanded due to lack of members and funds, and it is only a matter of a few years before the 1939-45 conflict ceases to be living history in these islands. The wars of conquest and colonialism are rarely, if ever, celebrated or commemorated (what was all that nonsense about Trafalgar Day?), so when will Britain stop marking the Armistice or VE Day, and when will this ceremony be rendered as redundant as the troops this Government is soon going to throw on the scrapheap? Sadly, Britain has been involved in a number of military incursions and adventures since 1945 (most of them under Tony Blair’s term, or am I just being bitter?), and a new tradition has developed in the House of Commons; prior to Prime Minister’s Question Time, the names of the military dead of the previous seven days are read out to Parliament. Why? To remember them? To honour them? To assuage the guilt of people who should never have sent them there in the first place?

Even before I started school, I was aware of a very interesting point. When I used to walk with my gran to shops around a mile away, I would do what every child did; try to avoid walking on the cracks in the pavement, balance on the edge of the pavement like a tightrope walker, step off and on raised sections of the footpath, pretend I was playing hopscotch, etc. There was one area I could not comfortably walk on; some nearby tenements has flagstones arranged in a border below their ground floor window (some dwellings had a little patch of grass, some had concrete slabs), and these were dimpled at intervals along their length. Every time I saw them, I asked my gran why they were like that, and she would tell me that there used to be fencing there, and it was cut down during the war. I didn’t understand until many years later that the metal had been taken away for melting down to make weapons. Britain was unready for war in 1939, and I believe that it may also have been unprepared in 1914, yet we are scaling down our armed forces at a dangerous time.

Greece and Italy are in financial meltdown. Spain and Portugal may be the next to go. All of these countries have a bloody past, and the people have not been shy to take up arms. Imagine a Civil War in Greece, with the danger of it spreading to Turkey or Cyprus. Add to the mix Albania, and the possibility of renewed ethnic tensions in Kosovo, leading to conflict with Serbia or even FYR Macedonia, and the whole tinderbox of the Balkans coming into play. The poorest EU nations, Bulgaria and Romania, lie to the east, and Turkey’s neighbours? Syria, Lebanon, Armenia, Georgia and Iraq with its Kurds in the north? Bloody hell. You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Apart from in Turkey, can you see the (equally financially-strapped) Yanks getting involved in this (for the right reasons, not for oil or to attack Iran), especially with the Russian bear on permanent standby, and China (and North Korea) unlikely to be on our side? Everyone has a grudge against us, and what have we got to defend ourselves? A threadbare, demoralised military, no aircraft carriers and the Eurofighter! All that money for a Public School education and not one of them appears to have studied the history of Europe.

Back to the Cenotaph: the part played by the military bands, and their influence on me, cannot be ignored or even underestimated. I was inspired to take up the clarinet as a result of my annual exposure to this traditional event (sadly, I have let not only myself down, but all those musicians of the RAF and Royal Marines by being too lazy to learn to play it properly, and was never able to fulfil my ambition of joining the RAF to play in its bands). I may have made the wrong choice, as usual; I still can’t understand why I never took up a brass instrument, as they play the most prominent roles in military music. One of the pieces most associated with the ceremony is ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations by Sir Edward Elgar, and I was privileged to be in the orchestra for the summer concert in June when this was part of our programme. We will not be playing anything so heartrending in our next concert in four weeks time, which is just as well. I don’t like to have tears welling up in my eyes when I’m trying to read the music.