To the poppy, the Last Post, and the two-minutes silence, recent years have added new Remembrance Day traditions: the iconoclastic columnist decrying the fetishisation of an anachronistic holiday, news stories about young people anxious about the message that wearing a poppy sends—and, of course, indignant responses to these stories from poppy red-cheeked conservative columnists.
What both the broadsheet critics and tabloid defenders of Remembrance Day get wrong is that the act of remembering is more complicated than either side thinks. Remembrance Day is not, as Simon Jenkins wrote this week in the Guardian, “a synthetic festival whose time has passed” and his alternative suggestion—that “We really ought to get over it. Next year we should draw down the curtain and have a Forgetting Day, a Move On Day, a Fresh Start Day”—is not just wrong, it’s nonsense.
For countries, as in life, there is no such thing as a fresh start. We are the children of our parents and the parents of our children; we and our societies exist briefly in a line that extends farther than we can see in both directions. Looking back is not inconsistent with moving on. That’s not how time works. Remembrance Day offers us a chance to recognise the contingency of the present and our dependence on the past.
There is a poignant scene at the beginning of the movie Chariots of Fire, when the students of Caius College, Cambridge, are gathered for formal dinner at the start of Michaelmas Term, 1919. The shot opens on the faded photograph of an earlier matriculating class and then runs up a freshly painted list of the war dead before panning across the equally fresh faces of the students of the new class.
The master of the college addresses the room of boys who, by chance of birth, only barely escaped the trenches themselves:
I take the war list and I run down it. Name after name which I cannot read, and which we who are older than you cannot hear without emotion.
Names which will be only names to you, the new college, but which to us summon up face after face, full of honesty and goodness, zeal and vigour, and intellectual promise.
The flower of a generation, the glory of England, and they died for England and all that England stands for. And now, through tragic necessity, their dreams have become yours.”
I used to think of that scene during the annual reading of the Roll of Honour at my own school in Victoria. I would close my eyes and try to give faces to each name as it was read, but it was futile until the reader came to the repeated surname “Bell-Irving.” Imagining a pair of brothers somehow made it easier to relate to them than to the rest of the 134 disconnected and disembodied names. The multiplication of loss in a single family strikes with special force because it brings the otherwise incomprehensible devastation of the war down to a scale we can feel.
Other examples can also drive home the magnitude of the loss. I defy you to read the official account of the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel and not feel it like a gut punch: “Of the some 800 Newfoundlanders who went into battle that morning, only 68 were able to answer the roll call the next day.” Now imagine the news of those losses crossing the Atlantic and washing over the towns and outports of Newfoundland throughout July 1916.
In Oxford, I have been confronted for the first time with another dimension of the Great War. If you scan right down to the bottom of some of the college Rolls of Honour, you find that the English names are followed by German names. Those boys who were sitting across from each other at dinner in the spring of 1914, laughing, probably making fun of each other’s accents, were shooting at each other across no-man’s land in the fall.
Remembering the two sides of the Great War is particularly troubling. It is so easy with the benefit of distance and hindsight to think of all the ways that useless conflict between crumbling empires could have been avoided. The Second World War is much easier to justify, but even there the industrial slaughter and the moral choices forced on our leaders can still unsettle us.
The sceptics are right that Remembrance Day is complicated, but that is why it is important. Remembering stirs up the uncomfortable contradictions of war: heroism and brutality, necessity and futility, confidence and doubt, sacrifice and waste. It forces us to remember that the choices the dead made in 1914 and 1939 were once vital and urgent decisions, and that we are the heirs to the consequences.
Even if we wanted to forget the two World Wars, as Jenkins proposes, we would still feel them. They would be there in the gaps in family trees that expand down the generations; in the family farms unworked, businesses sold off, and bereft families that had to move to survive; in all the inventions unrealised, the novels unwritten, and art unimagined and uncreated. A loss that great reverberates through time, whether we acknowledge it or not.
On Remembrance Day we rightly remember the dead in the past. But because the chain of our lives is joined at both ends, it should also cause us to take stock of our own lives in the present. Have we kept faith with the dead and built the kind of society they thought they were dying for? Have we used the time they bought us wisely? Have we made the most of their sacrifice? And, most importantly, what can we do better?
If the dead could rise for the day and walk the streets of our cities, observe us at work and leisure, visit our legislatures and civic institutions, look closely at what we’ve built and who we have become, what would they see? Once they got over the novelty of our technology, what would impress or disappoint them?
We need days of Remembrance and not of Forgetting because a society needs times when it pauses and asks itself honestly: what more can we do to make our future worthy of our past?
Howard Anglin is a doctoral student at Oxford University. He was previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, and a lawyer in New York, London, and Washington, DC.
