‘There is a danger that each generation makes the same mistakes’
COMING from a post-war generation born in the mid-1960s with grandparents and parents who had lived through either World War One, World War Two or both, I didn’t grow up knowing much about either of those conflicts. It was raw for those close to it and my school curriculum barely touched on either conflict apart from the Blitz.
A yellowing picture of two great uncles – one aged 17, one in his 20s in World War One uniform sat in a photo album at home and I knew an uncle who had barely survived a Japanese PoW camp, but no-one seemed keen to give details of their stories.
Then, aged 10, I discovered Anne Frank’s diary and a World War One veteran came to talk to my class. It made me wonder why no-one had told me the things they revealed.
To me and my class of 10 year-olds the old soldier who came to speak to us seemed very, very old and his experiences of horror in the trenches too far away to comprehend or compute to our daily lives. It was 1975 so I guess he would have been in his 80s.
Very quietly this old soldier told us that war was a mug’s game, he’d seen things he’d rather not repeat and then pulled a small tin of chocolate from his pocket. What entranced us 10 year-olds was that he hadn’t eaten a single bite of it stuck in the trenches of France with unimaginable horrors all around.
Troops serving in France during the first Christmas of World War One were given Colonies Gift Tins. He’d decided not to eat the contents of his tin, aiming to return alive with it intact as a sort of talisman.
As children full of the hope of youth that didn’t seem so remarkable. As an adult it seems almost insanely optimistic.
It may well have been the same for the millions of young men sent off to the “war to end all wars” who signed up, presumably full of trepidation but also hope that they would return, against the odds.
Hope was fulfilled for the veteran who survived, with his chocolate, and came to speak to us, but it is a miracle that he did.
I can’t remember the details of what he told us but I do remember the way he spoke. Very quietly, very seriously, he said he had gone to a terrible place, believing and hoping to come back and how many others didn’t.
Some people say we should move on, forget past conflicts and not wear poppies to remember them. There is an argument that Remembrance Day events glorify war.
Interestingly, it seems that some of those involved in the conflicts did indeed not want to remember or pass on those stories to the immediate next generation.
Remembering may have been too painful at least, perpetuated what we now know of as PTSD at worse.
As older relatives perhaps they wanted to protect the young people around them from the grim things they had witnessed and experienced.
And maybe they were deflated by the fact that remembering the lessons of history doesn’t seem to make war and conflict any less likely.
But as time passes we seem more interested in remembering and knowing their stories. A massive national exercise in remembering and marking the centenary of World War One has been going on for four years now.
At the start of this back in 2014 I took my teenagers to see the sea of memorial poppies at the Tower of London.
This dramatic art installation had the power to shock and made us more interested in finding out what happened in the war that led to World War Two, and changes that shaped our lives from jobs for women, to the founding of the NHS, NATO, the EU and now Brexit.
The 20th century was a time marked by violence which has rippled into the Middle East conflict and terrorism that affects us today.
It is right we remember those who fought and were killed for the freedom we have now. But we should also remember what caused them to fight and how futile it was.
There is a danger that each generation makes the same mistakes, believing itself to be invincible.
In 2018 the world seems as divided as it ever was. We may not have war close to home in Europe but there is war and conflict elsewhere that can and does affect us from Syria to Ukraine. The far right is on the rise again in many places close to home and the apparent European unity that followed World War Two is fragmenting.
We should remember those who lost their lives in conflicts from WW1 to Afghanistan but that doesn’t mean the world has learned from them or that we are invincible.