I read the following on twitter, written by a soldier called Harvey Marsden: “I am already older than thousands who have laid down their lives. Growing old is a privilege, denied to so many. #ArmisticeDay #RememberThem” and I find myself close to tears. My generation joined the human race a decade or more after the end of World War Two and even as a child in the 1960s the blitz, the holocaust, the genocide of one of the darkest periods in history might have been a million years ago, maybe more. But really it was yesterday.
My father was a sailor and he signed up at the age of 15 to serve on the Liberty ships, bringing urgent supplies to desperate Brits, dodging the U-boats in the Atlantic and I am more proud of his unbelievable courage than words could ever say. My mother lived in Rotterdam, which was flattened by the Luftwaffe, and she lost three homes between 1939 to 1945 and all her worldly possessions with them. She told me harrowing stories of Dutch marines, heavily outnumbered by the invaders, sacrificing their lives to protect their nation and everything it stood for. She watched from her window as young men died in a blaze of gunfire. Can you just imagine it? Night by night, the family would exist by eating uncooked small birds trapped by mum’s father on the balcony and what small supplies they could blag.
My grandfather who was born in Norway and came to Britain in the early 1900s, served as an air raid warden in World War Two but never spoke about either war. It was only years later I found out why, when I learned how many friends he lost, some killed in action, others killed in bombing raids. I don’t know if he suffered and so didn’t speak about it, or simply wanted to spare us the gruesome details. Either way, he went to the grave with many secrets never to be revealed.
That generation saw handsome young men walk to the front gate, with their back packs, wave goodbye to their loved ones, never to return, the final wave being repeated in the heads of those left behind forever and a day. To the politicians and the elite, they were mere numbers but to families and friends they were special, each and every one.
What if my father had died age 15 on the high seas? What would have happened and how different things might be? My mother would probably have never have come here from the Netherlands, I would never have been born so my partner would have met someone else and my sons would never have been born. I am the lucky one, by a series of coincidences, and I am here to tell the story, such as I can. For so many, families died out as they fell in battle. Destiny changed forever.
When we remember the fallen, I hope we look to the future, too. The wars of the past should have been enough to prevent wars of the future, but now, in the post truth, divided Europe, Trump as president, Putin in Russia and islamic fascism on the rise, maybe we have learned less than we thought.
Whisper it, but in a world largely devoid of women and men of compassion and vision, with the heights of power commanded by loud-mouthed egotists, bigots, xenophobe populists, we teeter on the brink of further conflict. Do we not owe it to the generations who fought to give us freedom to at least pause along the way?
We are not forced to wear the poppy. As the British Legion tells us, those who went before allowed us the freedom to wear it, they were the enablers of the fragile peace most of us have been lucky to enjoy in this generation.
I am much older than many of those who died on the battlefields, in the trenches, in hand to hand combat, on ships and in aircraft. The words ‘hero’, ‘tragedy’, ‘disaster’ and so many more are used in wholly inappropriate circumstances, but the wars that have marred civilisation since we claimed to be civilised just go on today as if we have learned none of the lessons of the past.
So, we must remember and we must, surely, seek to repair the increasing divisions that are poisoning the world at an increasingly rapid rate of knots. I was once young and optimistic and now I am older and more cynical, older and less wise, older and very pessimistic about just what it is we shall hand on to our children.
Those who died in the name of freedom deserve to be honoured and their sacrifices should not be in vain. Learning from history should be an essential part of our growing up. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and in our damaged, divided world, it’s surely about time we at least tried.
