Lest We Forget
This is my father.
He was 8 years old when World War I began and 12 when it ended.
He didn’t talk about it much but most of his childhood was marred by the great sadness he felt and witnessed as his relatives and neighbours from his village in Dorset were notified that sons and brothers, husbands and uncles were lost in France and Belgium, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine and Northern Russia.
Even during my childhood in the 1950s he would dissolve into tears if ever the song “Roses of Picardy” was played on the radio. Many years later, shortly before his death, he told me that the song was constantly sung to a much-loved uncle to help him regain his speech after he suffered terrible physical and psychological injuries at Hill 60 near Ypres. His uncle did regain some speech but was unable to live with his memories and committed suicide in 1918.
The melancholy never left my father. Nevertheless, he enlisted not long after the beginning of the Second World War and spent 6 years in the uniform of the Corps of Royal Engineers. He served in Africa and Palestine. Although he spoke with great affection of the soldiers from the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) who served under his command, he was absolutely silent, sometimes angrily so, about his own active service.
After the war he was adamant in his refusal to join either the Royal British Legion in the UK or the Returned Servicemen’s League in Australia which became his home in 1951. He never attended or took part in the military parades for ANZAC Day or Remembrance Day. It was on Remembrance Day in particular that his melancholy was at its worst.
He categorically refused to wear a red poppy, arguing that it was inextricably linked to the poem In Flanders Fields which, being written in 1915, was full of the romanticism of war and none of its horrors. He also felt the last verse, Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, was used to perpetuate and glorify war with its tinge of guilt-inflicting blackmail towards those who were disinclined to join the romanticising frenzy.
All those years ago he had a certain antipathy toward people with no real memory or experience of the horror and futility of war, who would don their token poppy on April 25 and November 11. He would be horrified at the poppy fever which is now grips us every year.
Nevertheless, my father remembered, and he taught me to remember. From the time I started secondary school when I was 11, we had a project together. We would, each week, usually early on a Sunday morning, visit Adelaide’s War Memorial, which is just a block away from where we lived, and we would stand in the inner sanctum of the memorial and read aloud the names inscribed on bronze tablets of the 5511 South Australians who died during the First World War.
We would only read about 25 names at each visit because as I read each name, my father would say, “Let us remember him, and his mother and father and all those who loved him. Let us remember what he lost and what they lost”. The project took us just over 4 years, (the same length of time as the war lasted) and it had a long-lasting impact on my life. It made me a life-long committed pacifist working for peace whenever and wherever I can.
Obviously, my father was not a life-long pacifist.
He took up arms during the Second World War, but his enemies were never Germans or Italians. His enemies were ideas.
These were the ideas he hated.
Nationalism: As much as he loved and missed the country of his birth, he did not believe it was better than any other country.
Racism and xenophobia: He rejected with a particular vehemence, the idea that one race or religion was superior to any other. (Actually, he did not have much time for any religion, believing religion to be a primary cause of much conflict between people).
Capitalism: Although he was not averse to commerce, he had a particular hatred for capitalism arguing that it puts power into the hands of a minority through the exploitation of the labour of real working people, prioritising the greed of the few over the good of the many.
He was willing to give his life to oppose these ideas he hated and despised with every ounce of his being.
My father died in 1976. In many ways I am glad he did not see what the world has become under a new wave of reactionary, nationalist, racist, superiority and greed.
He would be utterly dismayed to see the rolling pandemic of flag waving and anthem adulation. He would be appalled to discover that the 21st century, for which he had such high hopes, has so far been a century of perpetual war and that there is a growing dominance of war mentality in the seats of power as well as in the general population. He would also be disgusted to discover that in 2018 only 42 individuals own as much as all of the world’s 3.7 billion poorest people
He would certainly conclude that we have forgotten that so many young people sacrificed their lives in an effort to prevent such a world from existing.
Lest We Forget, indeed.