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 eterans Day, November
11, got a little extra respect this year. Not much mystery about
why; and there is the coincidence of that now-ominous number 11
to drive home the significance of this day. (How odd, and what a
gift to newspaper cartoonists and the makers of memorabilia, is
the resemblance of that number to the outline of the Twin Towers!)
For me, Veterans
Day in the U.S. has always had something anticlimactic about it.
In this country, most of the sentiments associated with remembrance
of wars are concentrated on Memorial Day, so that Veterans Day is
a secondary event. In England we have no Memorial Day, so November
11, which we call "Remembrance Day," is the whole deal.
Another difference is that for English people, Remembrance Day is
indelibly connected with the appalling slaughters of WWI, which
people of my grandparents' generation still referred to as "the
Great War." America came late to that war, so while your losses
were heavy, they were over a shorter period, and made less impression.
I think every
country reserves a special place in the collective memory for her
bloodiest war. For the U.S., that was the Civil War, which killed
more Americans — from a smaller population — than all
other wars since, combined. For us English, the Great War was WW1,
and to this day we wear poppies in our lapels on Remembrance Day.
The Flanders poppy was a symbol of all those who died on the western
front in 1914-18, immortalized in the poem by John McCrae (who was
actually a Canadian):
In Flanders
fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place...
I think there
was no family in England that was left unscarred by that first war.
Certainly there was no place so small it did not take losses. My
father, who was large and fearless, was a repo man for a furniture
store in the small English country town where we lived, and one
of his secondary responsibilities was the checking of references.
People who wanted to buy furniture on the installment plan had to
give references, usually of local trades people near their homes.
Dad used to drive round the little country villages of our district,
checking these references. Sometimes he would take me with him,
and I got to know all those villages — tiny places, most of
them, registered in the Domesday Book of 900 years before, with
unfathomable Saxon or Norman-French names: Nobottle, Shutlanger,
Bugbrooke, Yardley Gobion, Stony Stratford, Easton Maudit, Hanging
Houghton, Grafton Regis, Castle Ashby. Every one of them, even the
tiniest and most inconsequential, had its own little war memorial
on the village green, with a list of names under the heading "1914-18,"
and sometimes, tacked on as an afterthought, one or two more names
under "1939-45".*
The secondary
school I went to — that is, under the English system, from
age 11 to 18 — had a
cadet force with all three major services represented. On Remembrance
Day we held a full-dress ceremony in front of the school's own honor
roll, with us cadets all in uniform and the entire school —
about 1,000 and 50 masters, many of them veterans — standing
at attention in the main hall. The bugler played "Last Post"
(which you call "Taps"), and we all sang John Stanhope
Arkwright's hymn "O Valiant Hearts." I can't resist giving
the full words of that hymn here. Even just read off the page, it
is exceptionally beautiful, though to get the full force of the
thing, you need to hear it sung as we sang it, to the tune by Gustav
Holst. (If your computer can pick up a MIDI file, you can play a
tinny version of
Holst's tune direct from the Web.)
O valiant
hearts who to your glory came
through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
your memory hallowed in the land you loved.
Proudly you
gathered, rank on rank, to war
as who had heard God's message from afar;
all you had hoped for, all you had, you gave,
to save mankind — yourselves you scorned to save.
Splendid
you passed, the great surrender made;
into the light that nevermore shall fade;
deep your contentment in that blest abode,
who wait the last clear trumpet-call of God.
Long years
ago, as earth lay dark and still,
rose a loud cry upon a lonely hill,
while in the frailty of our human clay,
Christ, our Redeemer, passed the self-same way.
Still stands
his Cross from that dread hour to this,
like some bright star above the dark abyss;
still, through the veil, the Victor's pitying eyes
look down to bless our lesser Calvaries.
These were
his servants, in his steps they trod,
following through death the martyred Son of God:
Victor, he rose; victorious too shall rise
they who have drunk his cup of sacrifice.
O risen Lord,
O Shepherd of our dead,
whose cross has bought them and whose staff has led,
in glorious hope their proud and sorrowing land
commits her children to thy gracious hand.
Now we are
at war again. We lost 5,000 people on the first day of this war.
As grisly as WWI was, it was a bad day on the western front when
5,000 died in a single morning. (At Antietam, the worst one-day
battle of the American Civil War, the "butcher's bill"
was 3,650, though of course many more later died of wounds received.)
The husbands, wives, children, parents, friends, colleagues, and
lovers of our 5,000 are now enduring their own Calvaries. Undoubtedly,
more of us will be visited by death, or grief, before this war is
over; and it is in the nature of modern war, and of the bestial
amoral ruthlessness of our enemies in this particular war, that
anybody — you, me, the richest or poorest of us, the oldest
or youngest, the grandest or least of us — might be numbered
among the victims. I was talking last week to a journalist colleague,
a man who knows far more than you or I do about these things, on
the topic of nuclear terrorism. Quite matter-of-factly, he said:
"We're probably going to lose a couple of cities before it's
finished." God help us all.
Which, of course,
He will. It is the oldest of atheist clichés that in a war,
all participants believe they have God on their side. Our current
enemy certainly believes that, with a fervor few of us can match.
For myself, I take the old-fashioned and no doubt absurdly naïve
point of view that since God went to the trouble of creating the
human race, and equipping us with the power to improve ourselves
in a way no lesser creature can, He wants us to use that power.
Parable of the talents: If we slam the door on the modern world
and revert to the habits of thought, law codes, and political arrangements
of the seventh century, as the Muslim fanatics want us to, we stand
in defiance of His will. I believe humanity was made to struggle
onward and upward, not to vegetate content in the security of familiar
ways and of "truth" fixed once and for all by infallible
sages. I also believe the things John Stanhope Arkwright plainly
believed: that the process of improving ourselves — either
individually or as a species — is not designed to be easy,
that from time to time it will get very grueling indeed, that to
keep the banner of progress and civilization aloft will need sacrifice,
sometimes terrible, heart-breaking sacrifice, and that an especially
pure, especially inspiring example of sacrifice was provided for
us all twenty centuries ago in Palestine, "as earth lay dark
and still."
That, of course,
is a Christian point of view, and I don't expect every reader to
share it. I think that some such argument can be "mapped"
(as mathematicians say) into any serious religion, though. If you
are not an utter atheist — and if you are, I probably lost
you several paragraphs ago — you know that there are higher
purposes to life than mere feeding and breeding, and you surely
feel that those purposes are not likely to be fulfilled by a human
race that has shut down its critical faculties and imprisoned its
spirit in a jail of ignorance and despotism. Every war is a call
to sacrifice; but every war is about something, and the sacrifices
are not in vain. I think we all know what this war is about. This
week of Veterans Day — Remembrance Day — let's brace ourselves
for whatever sacrifice any one of us might be called on to make
in the months and years ahead, in the remembrance of, and in the
spirit of, those who went before us "into the light that nevermore
shall fade" — those who, to save mankind, scorned to save
themselves.
*
Yes, yes, I know: WWI did not officially end until the peace treaty
of 1919. This is reflected on the medals of that war. There is one
in my possession, the Victory Medal issued to No. 35103 Pte. J.R.
Derbyshire of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, inscribed The
Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919. Unless my memory is playing
tricks on me, though, those village war memorials all dated the
war to 1918. Ordinary people did the same in speech, sometimes calling
it "the 14-18 war."
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