Pride, sorrow and dignity come to the fore in poignant performances
Festival of Remembrance Royal Albert Hall, London
AT A time when the shallowness, vanity and sheer indignity of public life is enough to make one fear for the nation’s future, we need a collective ceremony to remind us that this country is more than its politicians and its hucksters, and that out there beyond the media glare the quiet but essential virtues of service and loyalty are still alive and well.
Every year the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance does exactly that. The tradition of honouring the fallen of the First World War in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall combining splendid Armed Forces ceremonial, music played by military bands and choirs and a CofE service of Remembrance began in 1923.
It’s taken place every year since, though of course the scope of the remembrance has expanded to include British losses in the Second World War, and all the more recent wars in which British forces have been involved, up to and including the fighting in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2021. The poignant symbol that was visible everywhere and which united all these individual acts of remembrance was the red poppy of the Flanders battlefield.
This year’s festival was bound to be especially poignant, as, in the presence of our new King, it paid homage to someone for whom service was second nature: the late Queen. Elizabeth II attended every Festival of Remembrance during her reign bar three. It was moving to hear recordings of her voice during the ceremony, speaking about her duties as Commander-in-Chief.
As always, the festival began with a procession into the huge circular space of the hundreds of standards of the Royal British Legion, the organisation that supports ex-servicemen and women. Accompanying them musically from the platform beneath the organ were the combined musical forces of the Household Division Orchestra, the Countess of Wessex’s String Orchestra, the String Ensemble of Royal Marines Band Service and the Royal Air Force Salon Orchestra.
They summoned a wealth of musical styles, from rumbustious military marches to the softest string accompaniment for the Bach Choir, when they sang the Requiem Aeternam to the music of “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
They also proved an excellent band for the various invited star singers, including Luke Evans, Marisha Wallace and no less than three members of the musical Bocelli clan: Andrea, his son Matteo and 10-year-old daughter Virginia. In the one moment of light relief – when a group of dancers suddenly whirled into the central space to carry us back to 1940s jitterbugging – the RAF Squadronaires treated us to a superb big-band sound.
But that was only a moment. For the most part, the mood was one of quiet celebration of the Forces’ tradition of selfless service, brought to life by personal stories told through filmed interludes projected on screens.
Most moving of all were the simple ancient ceremonials such as the heaping of drums large and small into a “drum altar”, to symbolise the fallen.
As two officers stood by the altar and lowered the Union flag and British Legion standards, a bugler high up by the organ played Last Post. It captured the pride and sorrow and dignity of the occasion in one perfect moment.
What societies remember, and how they remember, is a fundamental part of what they are. The French philosopher Ernest Renan (an inescapable reference on this subject) thought that memory was the very substance of a national community.
In a celebrated lecture, “What is a nation?”, given at the Sorbonne in 1882, he reflected on what held people together in modern democratic nations – still a fairly new form of social organisation and not, he thought, eternal.
They were based not on the dictates of race, language, religion or geography, nor merely on material interests, but on “the desire to live together”, which fed on “a rich legacy of memories” of shared disaster and suffering as well as of shared triumph. Memories created the “social capital” that was “essential to being a people”, for on them was based the “solidarity” that made democracy meaningful.
Memories of war are not of course the only memories that nations retain, but they are the most dramatic and often the most powerful.
This weekend is when our own national community celebrates with particular solemnity one of its greatest shared memories in a formal act of “Remembrance”. The monarch leads the nation in a symbolic gesture: the laying of a wreath on a cenotaph. This gesture has become almost universal. Whenever there is some painful event that a community wishes to share in – “solidarity”, in Renan’s word – we lay flowers, whether on the sites of natural bereavement, accidents or even crimes.
On Remembrance Sunday, we collectively lay flowers, through our representatives, on a stone symbol of death in war – the greatest shared bereavement of modern times.
This is far from being the only way to remember, or even a widely shared one. Our French allies, and our former Russian allies, celebrate the end of the World Wars with triumphal military parades. Even though their human losses were greater than ours, they celebrate victory, rather than mourn loss: France’s Unknown Warrior rests beneath Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe.
I have often wondered why there is this difference. Perhaps because both France and Russia seemed to be facing national extinction, with the enemy on their soil: so victory meant survival. Our danger was less, and so the lives lost in “some corner of a foreign field” outweighed the eventual triumph.
Whatever the reason, our greatest national act of memory has always been one of deep and shared grief.
Rudyard Kipling, whose son had been killed, expressed it movingly in his poem “London Stone”:
When you come to London Town, (Grieving—grieving!)
Bring your flowers and lay them down
At the place of grieving!
For the poem’s narrator, the only thing that helped was that “our neighbour’s standing there, grieving as we’re grieving”.
When the Cenotaph was unveiled, the line of mourners stretched for seven miles. That a ceremony that began more than a century ago still has the power to move us is remarkable. We are now further from the First World War than the people of that time were from Waterloo, and as far as I know, there were no ceremonies of remembrance for the Napoleonic Wars.
Thomas Hardy, in his novel The Trumpet Major, recalled only a few “casual relics”, such as bullet holes in a barn door, as visible testament to that deadly struggle. In pre-democratic days, ordinary soldiers were not remembered outside their families. Their names were not carved on memorials. That had changed by 1914-18. But official records and monuments would not on their own guarantee a common memory unless people responded.
Yet, there may no longer be anyone living who can recall any who died in the First World War, and few with personal memories of the Second. Of course, poignant memories can long linger in families. I remember being told as a child that my beloved aunt had learned of the death of her only son at Salerno when a neighbour brought her the official telegram as she was standing in a queue for her ration. Though this still brings tears to my eyes, what keeps Remembrance Day alive is not fading individual memory. Indeed, the ceremony did seem to be losing significance a generation ago.
But since then, collectively, we have renewed it with memories of more recent conflicts and losses still painfully felt: in the Falklands, Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
No longer simply remembrance of the men of the trenches who did not live to see the Armistice, it has become a time to remember and mourn all whose lives were lost in war. The red poppy has taken on a significance far beyond Flanders Fields, most recently being used to pay tribute to a former British soldier killed fighting for Ukraine.
Recent events show that many people in this country – I would like to think most people – feel a deep need to share the common memory that Renan and Kipling in different ways evoked.
The late Queen’s funeral showed the desire felt by so many to be part of that sharing, and channelling it is a fundamental function of monarchy. It creates a unity transcending the social, political, economic and cultural differences natural to all societies.
For some people – a minority, I hope, but certainly not a negligible one – it is the differences that are real, and the unity that is factitious. Hence, the nation is an illusion, and the monarchy a fraud.
The sources of this view are several. They include the old Marxist emphasis on class conflict as the fundamental reality; the recent emergence of “identity politics” based on combining and mobilising minority grievances; and the gentler sentiments of those happy to imagine themselves “citizens of everywhere”.
These views conflict deeply with each other, but all contribute to the feeling famously described by George Orwell as being less ashamed to be caught stealing from a poor-box than standing up for the national anthem.
Those who reject a nation necessarily reject, and try to dissolve, its shared memories. They quite often succeed to some degree, as memory is fragile.
The 1960s musical Oh What a Lovely War aimed, no doubt sincerely, to commemorate those whose lives were lost through a satirical caricature of the waste and futility of the First World War. But, at the same time, it inevitably trivialised what had been at stake, and made those who fought and died into deluded victims.
That view has never entirely faded. The Second World War is less easy to debunk, but Britain’s indispensable part in it has often been understated both by Left and Right. Today’s attempt to undermine national memory is more comprehensive. It claims that our history is overwhelmingly one of exploitation, slavery, violence and racism. It wants us to pay “reparations”. There is little or nothing positive in the picture to balance the negative. Even the struggle against fascism is dismissed – because, some assert, the British Empire was worse than the Nazis.
So absurd is this version of the past that it might seem tempting simply to laugh it off. But, whether in its full version or to some extent diluted, it has secured a foothold in many of our national institutions. Schools, museums, universities and parts of the mass media are propagating it to some degree.
Many of its proponents are doubtless convinced that they are doing a public service in trying to destroy relics of “colonialism” – a term now applied to every aspect of mainstream culture, from music to mathematics, from gardening to philosophy. History is the front line of this “culture war”: if the idea can be sufficiently spread that our past is fundamentally evil, then every aspect of our culture, society and political system becomes vulnerable, and our solidarity a fake.
Fortunately, this divisive version of the past has many weaknesses. As well as factual inaccuracy, these include self-righteousness, for it is based on a claim to moral superiority; ungenerosity, for it systematically ascribes the worst motives to those it disapproves of; and lack of humanity in refusing to understand or empathise with people in the past.
Thus, it dehumanises past generations and seeks to separate us from them.
Most people, however, do not share these depressing ambitions. The stream of humanity who queued to pay respects to the Queen, and the long line marching past the Cenotaph, embody a wish to live as part of a community that includes both the dead and the living. “We will remember them” is a deeply human instinct.
The late Queen’s funeral showed the desire felt by so many to share a common memory