This year there seemed more made of the event than previously - Jeremy Paxman presented a documentary on the poetry of Wilfrid Owen; Radio 3 broadcast (live) a war requiem not performed since 1929; all the serious Sunday newspapers allocated articles to the significance of the day.
I watched most of the BBC coverage of the ceremonies at the Cenotaph. You would think that participation would begin to dwindle as veterans died off, but a commentator said that if anything the procession was growing year by year. There have been sixteen thousand casualties in the years since 1948, commemorated in the new totenburg opened in Staffordshire (with acres of empty wall space, indicating that war is to be an active instrument of foreign policy for years to come).
Above: there are thousands of war memorials across the country. Not just in churches (as this elegant example) but also in places of work, and at strategic points in the landscape (crossroads, hilltops, railway stations). After the First World War military commemoration became a national institution.
Above: I was in a forgotten military chapel and noticed this memorial. I say it was “forgotten” but actually the memorials had once been in a chapel attached to a barracks which had closed. They had then been moved to an aisle of this nearby church which had been re-designated the regimental chapel. The memorial interested me since it referred to Poona (a town near Bombay) during the 1920s - a time and place that had been comparatively peaceful. I thought possibly they might have died in some kind of epidemic but a churchwarden told me they had died on service on the North West Frontier with Afghanistan. “I think that period of our history was terrible” she said several times, undermining any “sacrifice” the memorial commemorated (in fact it might have been better for the men not to have had a memorial at all as then they would not have been the object of her obloquy).
Above: the war on the North West Frontier was the subject of Zoltan Korda’s 1938 feature film The Drum (later parodied in Carry On Up The Khyber). In a sub-plot that could have been scripted by Russell T Davies (author of the recent Dr Who series plus other dramas) the film portrays a (presumably subliminal) homo-erotic inter-racial relationship between the regimental drummer boy and the son of a tribal chieftain. Even I, who am usually the last to spot these things, noticed this.
Seventy years after the making of The Drum and the British Army is once again policing the North West Frontier, and making incursions with relative impunity throughout southern Afghanistan. The public has been criticised for not supporting the armed forces more, especially when they return to the United Kingdom, but actually there are hardly any areas of public life where the civilian and military worlds overlap. The only place you are likely to come across soldiers is on a train on a Friday evening.
In the picture above (please excuse the wonky angle, it was taken with my mobile phone) you can see a soldier just back from Afghanistan. I knew this as he was talking at the top of his voice into his mobile phone, one call after another to friends and family, all saying exactly the same thing (“…just got back two hours ago… it was a fucking shit-hole - six contacts a day… I’m in the infantry not the SAS…”). I had seen on a Newsnight special report a frightening picture of what the war in Afghanistan is like, but it was only by hearing that squaddie talking on the train that the reality of close combat came alive.
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