Blood-swept remembrance

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK, and although the occasion honors all those who’ve served in Britain’s military branches, it’s inextricably tied to the trauma of the First World War. It’s the nearest Sunday to 11 November, on which day in 1918 an armistice went into effect between the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, mostly) and the Allied Powers (France, Britain, America and Italy, sort of).

(By this time Russia had been out of the war for a year.)

On Tuesday, the 96^th anniversary of the Armistice, there will be two minutes of silence at 1100, and muffled bells will toll from church towers across the country, before pre-holiday normal life resumes. This is known as Remembrance Day.

This being the centenary of the beginning of that war, the connections are perhaps more clearly defined than in past years. You can see this in the poppy theme.

Poppies have been associated with remembering the dead of World War I since Canadian John McCrae wrote the poem “In Flanders Fields”, about the blood-red wildflowers that bloomed in the blasted landscapes of Northern France, where the dead and dismembered lay in their tens of thousands. It begins:

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row”

McCrea, a field surgeon with life-long respiratory problems, wrote it in 1915. He died of pneumonia in January 1918 in Boulogne, age 46. But his imagery of the flowing poppies covering the naked dead captured something that enabled those left behind to visibly honor their loss. The Royal British Legion has used their Poppy Appeal to raise funds since 1921 (a year after the National American Legion adopted it as their commemoration).

This year, the symbolism grew exponentially with the art installation of “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red”: 888,246 ceramic red ceramic poppies falling from a bastion window in the Tower of London and spreading around the dry moat. Each poppy represents a single death of British and Commonwealth soldiers. Collectively they are waves of blood that almost overflow the moat.

Since its installation on 4 August (the centenary of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany), more than four million people have visited the memorial, very often in stunned silence. Because it’s so hard to envision numbers like 900,000, to understand the magnitude of the loss they define. But seeing that number of individual ceramic flowers merge into the seemingly endless flow of crimson—that can stop you in your tracks.

(On the night of 4 August, homes and business around the country replaced the brilliance of electric lights with the flickering and tenuous glow of candles, representing the observation that with those declarations, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” The photographs of the commemoration catch you somewhere between the throat and the heart.)

When viewed from the air, you can see how much the dry moat truly looks like a sea of blood.

Today there will be a ceremony at Whitehall, with two minutes of silence as Big Ben strikes eleven times and a field gun on Horse Guards Parade fires. “The Last Post” will sound, and the Queen and politicians from the former empire will lay wreaths of poppies on the Cenotaph, the empty tomb erected in 1920.

Bands will play “Heart of Oak”, “Flowers of the Forest”, “Men of Harlech”, “The Minstrel Boy” and other such. This music list was set in 1930, and they’ve played it ever since.

Then there will be a march-past of veterans from the wars of the 20^th and 21^st centuries—none left now from World War I, and not so many from World War II. (Well, when I say “march”, many of them will be in wheelchairs, but they wouldn’t miss it for anything.) This year I hope their ranks will be swelled by the troops who recently departed Camp Bastion, ending Britain's 13-year combat mission in Afghanistan.

There’s more music for this, and I especially like them including “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, the marching song of the Connaught Rangers, one of the many Irish regiments that served the Empire (in their case, from 1793 to 1922, when the Irish Free State rendered that service illogical).

Meanwhile, over in Cookham, my friend Marcia will be tolling the tenor bell (muffled) at Holy Trinity in the 15 minutes leading up to 1100—“It has to be done slowly,” she said, “practically setting the bell at both handstroke and backstroke.” She does it every year. As do hundreds more around Britain.

Poppies, muffled bells, the creaking of joints unaccustomed to walking to a cadence; the Windsors out in force (and protective services out in force); private visits to village monuments with the names of boys whose lives ended on the brink of manhood, at the edge of a trench. They didn’t realize when they erected those monuments that there would be another 95 years’ worth of names of those killed on beaches, deserts, mountains and jungles to be accommodated.

Much as they didn’t realize world wars would need to be numbered.

They’ll dismantle the installation at the Tower later this month; some of it will eventually be on display at the Imperial War Museum, which was created to document Britain’s wars of the 20^th Century. But next November the Remembrance ceremonies will be held again. And the next and the next after that.