Military precision meets raw emotion
The Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance was a solemn yet stirring procession of pride
ACROSS Britain there have been cascades of poppies from “weeping windows”. At Folkestone a huge drawing of war poet Wilfred Owen in the sand was slowly washed away by the sea, like a departing memory.
These things and others like them were beautiful and suggestive, but their very artfulness betrayed a distance from the realities of war.
This was different. Here, at the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance, at the Royal Albert Hall, it wasn’t thought-provoking artistic responses we were offered by way of honouring the one million dead and the million-and-a-half maimed or wounded. We were offered traditional ceremonies, done by soldiers for sol- diers, in the time-honoured and oldfashioned way. And just as the performers of the ceremony “knew of what they spoke”, so too did the audience. As one surveyed the packed rows, one could see many chests bearing medals and regimental ties.
As for the ceremony it unfolded like a majestic pageant, steeped in proud memory and enacted from start to finish with – one can’t avoid the phrase – military precision. It began with the wonderful parade of standards from old soldiers processing down the aisles and then taking up formation in the huge floor space. They were accompanied by the massed bands of the Guards Division, The Countess of Wessex’s String Orchestra (whoever knew there was such a thing?), the string ensemble of the Royal Marines Band Service and (even more sweetly improbable) the Royal Air Force Salon Orchestra, playing stirring marches.
On and on came the coloured standards, from the Royal British Legion Standards, Sea Cadet Corps Standards, and the innumerable ex-service associ- ations. The heart of the festival was the “muster” where servicemen and women from the Armed Forces, the merchant navy and the “supporting services” simply marched on in formation, to the favourite marches of each service, and assembled in rows with perfect precision.
Why all this should be moving is a mystery, but moving it was.
In between these traditional elements were numerous filmed interpolations, projected on to screens all round the hall, which told stories of courage and loss from the First World War to Afghanistan. And there were musical interludes. Tom Jones lifted the mood with one of the few songs from the Great American Songbook that was inspired by the war, Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer.
Young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason played an arrangement of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, while First World War poems from Wilfred Owen and Sarojini Naidu, the “Nightingale of India” were recited (troops from the old Empire were specially acknowledged in this festival). We heard the Agnus Dei from Karl Jenkins’ Mass for Peace, sung with lovely sotto voce intensity by the Festival Chorus while we listened to and watched the story of one army soldier, killed in action in Afghanistan. We heard many such stories, which helped to give a human reality to the numbing statistics of the dead and wounded recounted by the presenter Huw Edwards.
Finally, after the Service of Remembrance, conducted by the National Chaplain to the Royal British Legion, Last Post sounded as the three service standards were symbolically lowered, to the hushed accompaniment of the Kingdom Choir.
Last Post always makes one’s eyes prick, but even more moving to me was the assembling and then dismantling of a “drum altar”, apparently an old army tradition. None of the artistic creations I’ve seen in this centenary year has seemed so modest and unpretentious, and yet so full of mystery.
The Ceremony of Remembrance is on the BBC iPlayer for the next 30 days.