Monday, November 10, 2003

LEST WE FORGET...     Still on the subject of Remembrance Day, this is a very English poem written after watching a Battle of Britain commemoration flypast of a Spitfire, a Hurricane & a Lancaster at Old Warden Aerodrome a few miles north of Letchworth. FLYPAST AT OLD WARDEN   Even now, here, this past before my past leaks down the long conduits, the time- channels, weed-locked with   my own memories.  Back then, on corner bombsite, in the air-raid shelter under the apple trees, that past before our past   bellied up, breathed in our faces. Churchill, Hitler, Uncle Joe bowled down cinema aisles and into our infant dreams.  Parents' stories,   shed headlines from old newspapers feeding the living-room fire, comics swapped in playground corners, Belsen photoes, shifted sideways through   a conspiracy of desks - war-echoes blew like late rumours from a world still turning out of darkness. Our legacy was smoke from fires still burning.    And now, trailing tails of smoke, red, white and blue, the parachutists turn and turn in a blank sky.  The last Lancaster, Spitfire, Hurricane tug their trinity   of shadows over the aerodrome, over the lifted faces of the crowd, across the eyes of old saluting men, remembering.  Their past before   my past speaks in the beating engines, the ghost-passage of three black crosses over September fields, heading east to the world's edge. 11:38:05 PM    Mmm? []       REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY     Remembrance Sunday.  Armistice Day.  The wearing of poppies: ëIn Flanders fields, the poppies blow/Among the crosses, row on rowí.  The two-minute silence.  The hushed voice of the radio narrator describing the annual ceremony by the Cenotaph in Whitehall ñ the ceremony that was instigated in the wake of the First World War during that brief rush of years within which another war was unthinkable.    At that time, for believer & unbeliever alike, the ceremony had a point & a purpose.  In the immediate aftermath of war, the shock & awe, the incredulity, the attempt somehow to accommodate the unspeakable, to deal with the shame of what had been unleashed, had an overwhelming significance.  It afforded at the least a sense of communion amongst those who had returned & it provided an opportunity for witness to those who had remained behind.  Together the survivors & the onlookers could attempt some sort of expiation & pledge themselves, whether before their God or simply in their own hearts, never to permit the might & hubris of nation states to prey on their own millions again.   Today, in search of its relevance, value or purpose in 2003, I listened to part of the ceremony.  The shuffling of feet, the barking of sergeant-majors, the tinny rattling of snare drums, the martial flare of trumpets, all wrapped in that eerie, distancing echo that marks such occasions.   Everywhere one could sense a pride being taken in the military precision of it all ñ men & women drilled to perfection, driven along, rank by rank, by the old tunes that once had accompanied their regiments into battle.  And then the unctuous tones of a clergyman filling Whitehall: ìTo give & not to count the cost; to fight & not to feel the woundsÖî, the very words that so many times in recent history had importuned farm, factory & office workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers to take up arms & go wherever, in its wisdom, their nation chose to send them.    I switched off.  I knew that waiting in line were the veterans of what are now the wars of two centuries & that when the stamping, shouting & brass band blaring had declared the tone, the long lines of them would file past the Cenotaph with their memories.  Old men with brilliantined hair & neatly razored moustaches, British Legion berets at the regulation angle, would march as best they could, the square bashing of the Second World War & the Korean War remembered every bit as vividly as the faces of their fallen friends.  And young soldiers, currently serving, fresh from the unresolved battlefields of Iraq, their future theatres of war already being prepared in small offices in Downing Street & Washington, would march briskly, their training concealing what must have been in the hearts & minds of so many of them.   The Armistice Day parade has been held annually since 1921.  How acutely those first veterans marching past the Cenotaph must have willed an end to the madness that took so many of their comrades.  And yet within 18 years their sons were following the same ëlong, long trailí that they themselves had taken in 1914.  And now, in 2003, 82 years on, with two World Wars, the Korean War, our prolonged & bloody rearguard actions during the break-up of the British Empire, Suez, the Falklands War, the Gulf War & the invasion of Iraq, still we wrap our mourning & our solemn dedication to the elimination of warfare in the trappings of militarism, the hypocrisy of the Church & the cant of the politicians.    There is nothing more moving than the account given by the private soldier who remembers the insanity of the Battle of the Somme or the bloody farce of the Dardanelles as if they had happened yesterday.  And there are still surviving 27 veterans of the First World War.  They are aged between 103 & 107 & they have carried those memories with them through the greater part of the 20th century.  Whatever sense of ëdulce et decorum est pro patria morií might have gathered them up so long ago, now all they remember is their fallen comrades & the waste, the awful waste of it all.   In 80 years time will there still be the march past the Cenotaph & the unctuous voice of the priest exhorting us ëto give & not count the costí while the trumpets blast & the boots stamp in unison?  If so, then presumably the last few survivors of the Iraq War ñ that conflict now just a spark in the long conflagration of wars during the intervening years ñ will, as ever, remember only their fallen comrades & the awful waste of it all.      12:11:20 AM    Mmm? []

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