Remembrance and respect

Remembrance and respect

Remembrance Day, though usually marked on a Sunday, was originally a two-minute pause at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, marking the end of World War One. So it’s fitting to think about what it is and what it means today, 102 years after the end of ‘the war to end all wars’ – a great pity that it didn’t, and actually laid foundations for the Second World War 25 years later.

So it’s a time to honour those who have died for their country, and also those who fought for it. I want to encourage you to think of people in other countries who also fought and died, and for families who lost sons and daughters. Often, victory is seen as a British achievement, and we forget, for instance, the millions of Russians who died defeating Hitler. And war is, I understand, never glorious when you’re there.

How can we show our respect in pictures? My friend Moira (mrswoollybill) records the ceremonies and people in her home town, quietly and carefully. Many people construct careful images around poppies: poppies flourish in soil disturbed by artillery shells and manured with blood, and have become a symbol of remembrance.



I offer you some images from the National Memorial Arboretum, and from one local road where the residents decorated their houses, and marked the places where soldiers had come from. Few houses in the street had no figure, no sheet of paper marking where a serviceman had lived.

I want to extend the thought a little further. We can respect survivors and current servicepeople by the way that we treat them. There will be grief on show, tears for friends and relatives lost, and we should not trespass on this with intrusive pictures. A record, though, is important: those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. And there must also be compassion: a photojournalist I know took the shot of a man attending the first Remembrance ceremony since his service (I think, in the Falklands): and then stepped forward to hug him.

One other thing: the next time someone suggests to you that a country should send in the troops, pause. A feature of senior politicians who have served in the military is that they do not, on the whole, resort to military action lightly.