Do you remember them?

Who will remember them?

Today is the 90th anniversary of the ‘War to end all Wars’; it didn’t, as we all know, but memorials sprang up (just the same) all over the countryside to honour those who fell to prove that you could lose tens of thousands of men just to gain a couple of yards of mud and make everyone feel involved (few villages lost no one in the course of the war). Today there will be just four veterans of the Great War commemorating their fallen comrades at The Cenotaph in Whitehall: there are few others left alive anywhere else. But they are worried – will the fallen of WWI be remembered by the next generation?

We are relatively lucky in Britain: we have wiped out most diseases which would previously have killed off over half your classmates before they’d finished their schooling; we haven’t had many huge accidental losses of life (even in the thirties it was almost expected that there would be a railway accident killing off over one hundred people once a season, on average); we haven’t had a war involving mass loss of life (of course this is relative – the first Gulf War did cause great loss of life, but they were the enemy so that was alright…) for over 50 years.

To put it bluntly: we have no reason to remember.

Who now remembers the Crimean War or the Boer War? They were only 150 and a little over 100 years ago, but they are only remembered by the regiments that received honours during their service – or due to the history behind a certain medal, or a certain poem, or a certain war correspondent. In reality no one remembers them.

When these old boys have buffed their medals for the last time, will it be right to let them go? Will your children want to remember something that happened before satellite TV, before colour images? But not just your children – what about the kids of people who, what with one thing and another, can’t be bothered to be bothered to remember other, more recent conflicts?

Thankfully, hopefully, war is going out of fashion (despite some polititians using it in the hope of re-election – and why not? It worked for Thatcher) but is it time to let the remembrance of mass slaughter form so long ago rest in peace?

I will remember them, despite.

Flood.™