That is not a pacifist statement: I cannot affirm that fighting a war is in all imaginable circumstances preferable to not fighting one, and from that it follows that I support in principle the existence of armed forces. In practice I think everything to do with them stinks: they guzzle up human and material resources, show off in their planes by flying low over the countryside and frightening the cows into miscarriages, mis-manage their budgets something atrocious and are never held to account… and then they expect us to admire them, defer to them, address their commanders by their rank like it confers some kind of virtue on them. Sorry, Colonel, you’re just a posher-talking variety of killer. Of course, Hitler had to be defeated. Which raises many questions about how he might have been stopped before 1939, but come that year few denied that war was the only way. That doesn’t justify all the tactics we then used, in particular the fire-bombing of German cities in revenge for the Blitz. Those bombers were taking risks, of course, but they weren’t laying down their lives for anyone: they were trying to take as many lives as they could, without surrendering their own. That’s sheer wickedness and the brave people I honour are those who not only saw this at the time but dared to speak their minds.
The question that demands attention through all this is: who decides what should be remembered and controls how we should do our remembering? I don’t actually object to Remembrance Sunday as such, and find it intriguing that many people much younger than me see it as a meaningful day: clearly not because they grew up under the shadow of WWII. There were Brownies and children from the primary school laying their wreaths at the Coxhoe war memorial. I hope they come to reflect on the stupidity of war and pledge to make a better job of running the world than their parents’ generation did. But I do object to the assumption that we have to use the same sort of language now that was appropriate in 1919 and maybe 1946, when the sheer relief of a by no means certain victory and the trauma of so much loss and hardship entitled people to take a few liberties with language and even maybe to bend Holy Scripture to their purposes of mourning and finding comfort and meaning in the midst of the destruction. We should know better now.
Dad never made a big deal of Remembrance Sunday, I guess because he had memories he wanted to well and truly bury rather than summon to consciousness. He wore his poppy but didn’t attend any do’s at the local cenotaph that I can recall. Good old Dennis. No-one was going to tell him how to do his remembering.
He’d been called up in 1942, when he was 18. The following year they sent him to Burma and it was a grim time. However his most remarkable story is of a freaky escape (and I am studiously avoiding the word “miraculous” here) on Christmas Day 1944, when his entire regiment walked into a Japanese ambush and were, let’s say, Daleked. (In the hackneyed mythology of war that I grew up with, the Japanese were more like soulless killing machines than other human beings who just happened to be fighting on the opposite site.) I’m told the incident gets a mention in the footnotes of the history books of the war in the Far East, but I’ve never looked it up. Anyway Dad missed all the Christmas carnage: he’d contracted something like dysentery and had flown back to India to recuperate; but for that illness he’d have been one more for the Japs to exterminate and I wouldn’t be here. Other than that, and some strained admissions that he’d done a spot of exterminating of his own, he never talked about the Burma years. After VJ day he was transferred to India to, what, help maintain law and order during the time to transition to independence? Splendid job we made of that then, but anyway, those were exciting years for my dad and he’s talked about them increasingly since Mum died in 2003.
But then there was the curious incident of the Second Photograph Album. Dad, I have to say, was never particularly good at or interested in photography, but he had cameras and took snaps as many do. Gave it up long before increased affluence allowed him and Mum to travel abroad, on trips where he would have seen many sights worth shooting: the prospect of being camera-less in the Alps would mortify me, but not my Dad. Anyway, the regular family album, with its collection of wedding photos, followed by a sequence of me as a baby/toddler/precocious little horror was brought out regularly. But on the same high wardrobe shelf, out of my reach, there lived another album which was never produced. One day I was in my parents’ bedroom, and noticed that it had gone. Later I would learn that it was Dad’s collection from the war years, and he and Mum had come to an arrangement: once I was old enough to ask what was in it, out it went. Apparently I had asked, though I can’t remember. Oh for heaven’s sake – why couldn’t he have stashed those photos in the roof or somewhere I’d never go? It would be absolutely fascinating to see them now, but here I think is the truth: he wanted a pretext to destroy those memories, and my curiosity would serve the purpose.
They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old, the lucky bastards. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will carry on with our lives as though that blithering war never happened. There are memories we keep; there are memories we deliberately suppress; there are memories we lose; and now, for Dennis, there are memories that he can’t remember he ever had.
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