OPINION: Remembrance Day 2011

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

So what is it all about, this Remembrance Day malarkey?

I asked my granddad who fought on the Somme with the Cheshire Regiment. He didn’t know and didn’t really want to talk about it.

I asked my mum and dad, one of whom served on Arctic convoys, the other on various anti-aircraft gun-sites throughout England. They also didn’t want to talk about it although Mum said that it was the best time of her life. (Well, she did when my dad wasn’t around to hear!)

She did take me to see the parade once or twice but only because I loved to hear the sound of marching bands and the sight of soldiers with real guns.

She wore a poppy but never her medals. Neither did my dad who usually used the day to sneak off a bit early for his Sunday lunchtime pint.

In fact, if I remember correctly, granddad, mum and dad gave me their medals to play with when I was a snot-nosed kid in the 1950’s. To my shame and eternal regret, I think I probably swapped them for bubble-gum cards.

If any of them minded, they said nothing and ours was not usually the sort of house where bad behaviour went unpunished.

So what was it all for then? I thought at first that it was to do with something called patriotism but even this didn’t suffice for Edith Cavell, the WWI nurse who said that “patriotism is not enough” shortly before being executed by a German firing squad.

Later on I learned that, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” according to Samuel Johnson who seemed to know a lot about… well, everything really.

Mark Twain expressed even more cynicism: “Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”

Horace, the Roman poet wrote, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” which translates as "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

Grand as that sounded, it didn’t seem to fit in with the expressions on the grey, solemn faces of the old men and of the war widows in sombre black who stood there beside Rochdale Cenotaph on those cold November mornings as they listened sadly to the final strains of ‘The Last Post’ dying away in the crisp, chilly air.

Neither did it explain why mum and dad seemed so reluctant to talk about it all.

So why did they all go off to fight and what was it that they were fighting for? Many never really had the opportunity to avoid it as they were conscripted. Mum signed up to escape the sheer drudgery of the cotton mill and from a tyrannical mother. Dad was too young at the outbreak of war but served in the Royton Home Guard for a time until his papers came through and he was sent off to a naval base somewhere or other, given a uniform, put on board a ship and sent out into the North Atlantic to hunt submarines.

The most sense I’ve ever made of it all came only a few years ago after watching Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed ‘Band of Brothers’. The point came across quite strongly that they weren’t fighting for love of president or of king or even of country. They were formed into tightly-knit units which meant that your best chance of staying alive and getting out of whatever particular hell you were in at the time meant to look after your comrades-in-arms in the fervent hope or certain knowledge that by doing so they in their turn would look after you.

They were fighting both for themselves and for each other. They clung onto every scrap of precious life with all the tenacity of youth.

And so, on the faces of our veterans, I have come to see less a fierce and enduring pride for a job well done but rather a poignant mixture of regret and sadness at the memory of fallen colleagues tempered with just a touch of God-awful guilt that they were the ones who somehow survived it all.

I’d give anything to have those medals back though.