Saturday 12th November
When I was a little girl, shortly after landing back in England and moving to Putney I joined the Brownies. Well, in reality, Grandma enrolled me in the Brownies – she thought it would do me good “It will buck you up Catherine, and you will meet lots of girls of your own age.” I really did not like the Brownies that much, I couldn’t understand what all the stuff about Uniforms and being in a Pack meant, to me it was just another part of this enforced culture being shoved down my throat. I was a very reluctant Brownie, I didn’t mix with the other girls and used to miss it quite a few weeks, skulking in my bedroom and hoping Grandma didn’t remember it was Brownies night. But I can remember twice taking part in Remembrance Sunday marches, I was only eight or nine and though the war was fresh in all our collective memories I had been born just after it ended, so I couldn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. How strange to be celebrating all those who had fallen, (died of course, but fallen sounded more poetic) as if War itself was something heroic. We were formed into rows about six wide and had to wait in the cold and drizzle until it was our turn to join in, behind the cubs and before the Boys Brigade, then we had to walk along the High Street, lined with onlookers in dark coats and umbrellas, and to the Memorial gates where we were again sorted into groups, us brownies quite near the front. There was a ceremony with laying of wreaths and a trumpet solo, and then slowly everyone left. I don’t suppose that at that age I thought about it that much, the horror of war and dying for ones’ country were not things that a nine year old girl normally dwells upon.
At school I always quite liked poetry but was more interested In the mechanics of metre and rhyme than the sense of the thing, but at about fourteen I started reading Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and the other War Poets and it suddenly hit me, what all the fuss was about. The suffering of the troops, especially in the First World War in the trenches, and the horrendous casualty rates, had been so traumatic that society had more or less renounced War forever. And one just cannot imagine the true horror of that war, as poorly educated farm boys were shipped off to tramp in fields of mud and sulphurous gases and knowing they were just waiting their turn to go over the top and face a hail of bullets. Incredible then, that we managed to stumble into the Second War in a generation, and so soon after too. And I see the observance of Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday parades as a sort of collective shame that we have failed those who fell in former Wars, by not ensuring there will never be any more War. And yet we still continue, here In the twenty-first Century to send young men, hardly more than boys off to War; and though we might hide behind UN resolutions, (or in the case of Iraq, the lack of one) we simply do not learn the lessons of history, that War solves nothing that could not have been sorted out by talking instead of shooting. So, as Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Milliband will be laying their wreaths tomorrow at the Cenotaph with heads bowed and serious faces, they will happily commit even more young men and women to die in maybe Syria or Iran, or wherever they might decide in the near future. Because for all the bowed heads and wreaths the simple truth is that the dead cannot speak.