Remembrance Day 2017
Have we forgotten the message of the Great War to end all wars?
Expanded version of column published in the Jersey Evening Post on the 8 November 2017
On the 9th of September 1916 my second great uncle, Arthur Male, was last seen running up the high street in Ginchy, France, on the day of one of the bloodiest battles of the Somme. Like other Jerseymen at the time he volunteered to fight, joining up with the 7th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles. He never returned home from the battlefield or saw his 28th birthday.
My great grandfather, Jack Curwood, was an artilleryman during the First World War. Injured by shelling, he spent a year recovering in hospital, surviving with the loss of the full use of his hands. He was one of the lucky ones, and because he lived you’re able to read these words today.
A hundred years have passed since the ‘Great War’. Those who survived the horrors of the battlefield came away with a strong message of ‘never again’ but they have now all passed on and with each subsequent year their message has become a little more diluted.
Today the Royal British Legion and its symbol of remembrance, the red poppy, adorns tanks and fighter bombers to help it raise funds. Children hold up giant plastic poppies wearing t-shirts that bear the words ‘future soldier’. Arms dealers BAE, Thales and Lockheed Martin, the very companies that profit from the death and destruction of war, have sponsored the Poppy Appeal and funded Remembrance events.
We have a government that drags British soldiers into illegal wars and then discards the broken ones after, reneging on its obligations to care for them, leaving kindness and charity to fill the gap. Endless threats are manufactured, while greater ones are downplayed and ignored, all the while oil and arms companies rack up greater profits.
As the post-war marvel that is the NHS collapses and food banks proliferate across Britain, money is thrown at ‘defence’ budgets to purchase military equipment that will be used for offensive purposes. £3bn has been spent on a new aircraft carrier, said by the head of the Navy to symbolise our ‘military power and authority in the world for decades to come’.
Though the day is for remembrance we seem to have forgotten the 1.4 million Indian soldiers that fought in WWI and the 2 million in WWII, they too were there, at the Somme and Dunkirk. Many today aren’t aware of the half a million Polish that also fought during WWII, or the Muslim, Sikh and Hindus who flew during the Battle of Britain. As former RAF squadron leader Mohinder Singh Pujji put it: ‘they [British] don’t even know we Indians were there…officially I don’t receive any invitation to Remembrance Day services’.
After a hundred years of permanent war we’re asked today to remember a new generation of serving soldiers along with the ‘fallen’. For this year’s Jersey Poppy Appeal special packages have been sent to our primary schools asking them to thank our military forces, maybe a better way to thank them would be to teach children that endless war isn’t the solution to today’s problems.
In 2014, for the Centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, 888,246 ceramic poppies were placed at the Tower of London in an art installation called ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’. Shortly after the poppies were cleared away, arms manufacturers held a £3,000 per table dinner there to make ‘business connections’. No doubt, following this Sunday, it will also be business as usual.
