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2019 Remembrance

Today is 11.11.19 – and exactly 100 years since the very first Remembrance Sunday in 1919. At the weekend, the great and the good (in particular the surviving veterans – very few now from The Great War, The War To End All Wars) laid wreaths at the Cenotaph in London and remembered “The Glorious Dead.” In addition to the current (imo unworthy) office holder, five former prime ministers attended – Sir John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May – and, overlooking the ceremony from a balcony the one queen who has presided over 15 prime ministers (and grown up under a further six.)

No brainer

For me, I respect the concept of Remembrance. Apart from anything else, I believe the Royal British Legion to be a fantastically effective charity. Its campaigning and support – practical, financial, and emotional – are all essential, especially given the way successive governments have treated and continue to treat veterans and their families. All wars produce great art, and the poetry of the First World War is rightly lauded. In 2009, to commemorate the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, two of the last few combatants surviving, Carol Ann Duffy used an extract from Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est to produce a poignant and cinematic rewinding riff on remembrance – if we could only wind back time and the dead could “lean against a wall.”

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by Carol Ann Duffy

'In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.'

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin

that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…

but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood

run upwards from the slime into its wounds;

see lines and lines of British boys rewind

back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home –

mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers

not entering the story now

to die and die and die.

Dulce – No – Decorum – No – Pro patria mori.

You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)

like all your mates do too –

Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert –

and light a cigarette.

There's coffee in the square,

warm French bread

and all those thousands dead

are shaking dried mud from their hair

and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,

a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released

from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,

your several million lives still possible

and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.

You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

If poetry could truly tell it backwards,

then it would.