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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
There are many reasons why Remembrance Day has to be taken seriously, especially by those among us who are wholly opposed to war. If we feel that we cannot join in the play as it is staged, we need to appreciate why others do, and why departures from the script—white poppies, public figures wearing duffel-coats—may seem to them like a desecration.
One reason is that Remembrance Day is not simply an occasion for private grief. It is a ritual enactment of our national story about peace—how it was won at immense cost by a whole generation of young men in 1914-18; how it was snatched from the jaws of defeat in 1940 by the bravery of the few. It recalls the sacrifice of two generations of youth who gave their lives so that we could live in safety, especially the women and children. It is meant to recall the story of our salvation as a people, in the sense of our national liberation from tyranny and fear. It is meant to acknowledge the sacrifices that ensured it. It gives meaning to the bloodshed. Remembrance makes private grief tolerable by connecting it with national salvation.
If war itself usually creates strong feelings of solidarity, the aftermath of wars is always a time of doubt and division. The Remembrance ceremony has been part of the apparatus for coping with this. After the Great War the nation was seriously divided, especially as between those who had experienced life in the trenches and those who had not.
1 Even so, not all ex‐soldiers found the annual ceremonies acceptable, and on Armistice Day 1921, thousands of unemployed marched towards the Cenotaph with pawn tickets instead of medals. Wilkinson, Alan, The Church of England and the First World War, SPCK 1978, p 305Google Scholar.
2 Fussell, Paul, The Great War in Modern Memory, OUP 1975, p. 9Google Scholar.
3 Middlebrook, Martin, The Battle of Hamburg, Penguin 1980, p. 328Google Scholar.
4 See Fussell on the ‘Whizzbang’, Great War, p. 184.
5 Fussell, Great War, p. 174.
6 Fussell, Paul, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, OUP 1989Google Scholar.
7 Levi, Primo, If This Is a Man, Abacus 1986Google Scholar, first published in Italy in 1958. For his final reflections on the Holocaust, see The Drowned and the Saved, Abacus 1988Google Scholar. Wiesel, Elie, Night, Fontana 1972Google Scholar, first published in France in 1958.
8 Wilkinson, Alan, Dissent or Conform? War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–1945, SCM 1986, p. 33Google ScholarPubMed.
9 Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform?, p. 43.
10 Wilkinson The Church of England and the First World War, p. 188.
11 Edwards, Ruth Dudley, Patrick Pearse, The Triumph of Failure, Faber and Faber 1977, p. 217Google Scholar.
12 Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform?, p. 43.
13 Cf Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform?, pp. 55–58.
14 Owen, Harold and Bell, John (Eds.), Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters, OUP 1967, p. 461 (Owen's italics)Google Scholar.
15 Letters, p. 483.
16 Letters, p. 562.
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