Today is Remembrance Day. On this day, I do stop to think about the lives lost in the two World Wars, though with the passage of time and an increasingly critical eye, I do question what it is, exactly, that I’m remembering and what it is that my daughter (aged 20 months) will “remember” — especially as neither of us was around at the time, and with each generation, the nexus to those events becomes slightly more tenuous. I’m no historian so am not really qualified to assess the merit of the sacrifice made by so many during the two World Wars. I have no doubt that the “cause” furthered by these wars was not the great one we learned about in school; the recent interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq (and the absence of necessary intervention in many other places such as Darfur and Rwanda) have probably forced many of us, myself included, to re-examine with our 21st century glasses the “facts” we were taught about the World Wars and the lead-ups to them. I do find it difficult to tie the gargantuan loss of life to a veritable cause that isn’t in some way tainted by political games played almost a hundred years ago which were probably very similar to our modern day WMD/Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda games. So what is it, exactly, that we’re remembering? After all, does any of us observe two minutes’ silence for Harold’s men at Hastings, the estimated 92,000 casualties of the Second Punic War, or the estimated 45,000 casualties at the Battle of Waterloo?
Well, I think what we’re remembering is our collective stupidity and reminding ourselves to avoid repeating the same mistakes or at the very least mistakes on the same scale as the two World Wars. As I walked among row after row of white Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones this weekend in Ypres, Passchendaele, Vimy, Mount Sorrel, Beaumont-Hamel, and other places too small to be dots on my Michelin map, I could not help being moved by the tremendous loss of life in muddy foreign fields. This weekend’s grey, cold, rainy weather in Flanders and the pock-marked landscape at Vimy (still fenced in parts due to undetonated explosives left over from World War I) reinforced for me the horrendous conditions in which so many young people died.
I was pleased to see so many young people from English schools visiting the war graves and memorials in Flanders and the Somme and demonstrating a respect that one does not typically see from that age group on London buses. If I didn’t know better, I would say that the number of headstones (bearing ages not more than a few years older than many of them) had driven home a point that no GCSE or A Level reading could hope to achieve. If more schools allocated resources to sending the younger generation to Flanders and the Somme (and spent less on “educational” school trips to Disneyland Paris, which seem to be the height of enrichment for GCSE geography and A Level business studies, among others), perhaps future generations will avoid repeating the mistakes of just under a hundred years ago. And that is something worth remembering.
Snowdon on Schools 