That Black Foulness

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Yesterday was Remembrance Day.

I paused for a minute or two in the middle of helping my son to move house to consider its meaning. I reflected on the fact that he is the first of three generations of my family not to be exposed to the black foulness of war.

And yet, the old orthodoxies glorifying the absurdity of making war persist, and these institutional commemorations often overwhelm the real significance of the day. 

All that is really required is a minute's silence. That silence speaks much more eloquently for those who died than brass bands, flag waving and bugle solos. Those we remember are, after all, forever silent.

Given that Remembrance Day commemorates casualties of over 40 million (twenty million deaths and twenty-one million wounded, including 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians), it is indeed a solemn occasion.

When you recall that grievances resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (signed on On 28 June 1919, not November 11th as is the common misperception) were a large component of what led to the Second World War, it becomes even more tragically significant.

Consider the waste of so many young lives (and many of them were boys, not yet men, who could have had no idea of what they were fighting for) and the deaths of so many innocent civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you begin to understand the depth of the catastrophe.

This was especially true in a  country with such a small population as Australia had at the time, where the impact of so many lost of one special generation was enormously significant.

And to acknowledge that twenty-one years later, Europe was once again tearing itself apart in another deadly conflict, is more cause for deep sadness. 

Wilfred Owen put the old lie starkly, a few short months before he was killed in France at age twenty-five, a week before the armistice.  

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