TODAY WE WILL REMEMBER THEM ... OR WILL WE?

How does a generation urged to discard the past learn the lessons of two cataclysmic World Wars?

TODAY, we w i l l remember them. Or will we? And what exactly will we remember? My poll of young people aged between 15 and 30 showed that out of 232, only 41 knew why we stop what we’re doing to remember at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month.

None could even hazard a guess at how many had died during those four years of the Great War. Nor did they know how many had been killed during World War II.

Perhaps subconsciously they were voicing a philosophical point that in tumult, lives are mere statistics.

Far more likely. I was talking to a generation that has as yet no need of memory or of the twinging conscience it rouses.

They are part of a society that easily discards the past because it has learned to Google it when needed.

But can the monologue of 1914-18 slaughter be reduced to a website? No weapons of mass destruction then, but still ten million or so killed and 21 million wounded.

Six in every ten of those sent to fight became casualties. If you are reading this on your way to work, look around your train or bus. Imagine it two- thirds empty on your return journey.

Tribute

The Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele, the very names mean horror even if we do not remember the numbers. Heroes? We have the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, whose dark verse articulated that horror and its senselessness.

There were numerous acts of individual heroism and sacrifice, but there are no towering figures in that war.

No Marlborough. No Nelson. There’s no one who challenged the gods. There is no immortal memory to toast every year and only a handful of old men left to pay tribute to absent friends.

When World War II was done, there were 55 million more casualties — not many fewer than today’s population of the British Isles.

Yet this morning — the day of remembrance — we are more in awe of an influenza from the sneeze of a Vietnamese hen than the reality of what were two man-made conflicts.

The symbol of remembrance are the poppies, plucked from Flanders’ fields to say we have not forgotten those who have fallen. They are also the means for the Royal British Legion to raise funds — last year, £23.5 million — to care for the 11 million or so who need, or may need, its help.

So we remember, but what the Poppy Appeal also does year after year is present us with the still living casualties of our own society — those that must battle through the true aftermath of war.

British servicemen and women are today deployed in more than 20 countries. Maybe even as you read this, one of them lies wounded and dying in Iraq or Afghanistan. Since 1945, at least one British soldier has been killed in conflict every year (apart from 1968).

So why don’t we remember more than we do and why are the young so ignorant?

I think, perhaps, our society has different values from those we learned in the two decades following World War II.

Then, through social deprivation or wartime austerity and living with the constant fear of death, people were more aware of misfortune and sensitive to its consequences.

Take a simple, but pertinent example. This kingdom is scattered with untended graves. A lonely posy left by a heartbroken lover stands out among the plots of unkempt green gravel.

We have become a society that honours its old by checking out retirement home prices. The days when families looked after their elderly have gone, along with the phrase ‘ ideal granny flat’ which has largely disappeared from estate agent details. We barely honour our living, so why do we think we would honour our dead?

But we must do so, if only to give measure to those casually used words: They died that we might live.

Most had no choice. This begins to explain the successful revival of R. C. Sherriff ’ s 1929 play Journey’s End, which dramatises scenes from the trenches of the Somme in 1918.

It is still running in London two years after it was supposed to have closed.

Eavesdrop on the audience in the interval. No, not a lovely war. Instead, a genuine unease fuelled by pity for our brave boys in the Great War, an unease these people had not felt before. But for most people there is no matinee performance of the past. There is no urging to remember.

Relevance

I sometimes feel the youngest of the generations do not remember because they may not be allowed to. Of those 232 I talked to, only four 15-year- olds were wearing poppies. One of them had a father in Iraq.

Yet this is no rant against the young. I understand why they are not interested in the past if its relevance to the present is unclear.

Our young people have suffered a generation of limited history teaching in shortened curricula with politically correct answers foisted on them. They end up knowing little, except for the Tudors and Nazi fascism. We have let them side- step the casualties of war — wisdom and remembrance — so no wonder they have no understanding of these eternal verities.

So what can we do, if anything? Last week, a special three- day course for teachers and pupils ran in London. It discussed lessons we might have learned from the 60th anniversary of the ending of World War II.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission had the right idea with the question they posed: ‘ So Grandad remembers, but what’s it got to do with me?’

Exploring the life of someone who died in the war and the impact on friends and family appealed to the youngsters present that day and fired their enthusiasm for a period of history which had held no appeal.

Mistakes

And this year, a new order of service for Remembrance Sunday has been written by the Royal British Legion to appeal to younger worshippers.

All well and good, but the real answer to the question of remembrance lies with us. As parents and grandparents, we are the people who should be teaching the new generation why we remember.

Standing there, head bowed, at 10.58am is not just about the millions who have lost their lives. It is more than a body bag counting exercise.

Those who are dead are not responsible for today. We are responsible. It is the living who make the huge mistakes that usurp diplomacy and commit — sometimes on false premises — whole peoples to wars.

So this morning and again on Remembrance Sunday we have the opportunity to reflect in solemn silence on our own frailties as well as the lesson of field after field after field of white crosses, each of which marks a grave of someone whose life was not given, but taken.

That is a powerful image. It contains a message that we should repeat to ourselves and then insist on telling our children and grandchildren.

Yet most parents are frightened off. It’s not cool to tell your children about old values. I think it’s time more of us did. My father taught me to raise my hat as I walked by a war memorial. But today? There’s nothing wrong in tipping a baseball cap — if you know why.