When there's trouble in the wind

The Brits do a tremendous job of honoring the sacrifices made in wars of the Twentieth Century. Not—generally—contemporaneously, or as a long-term thing; it wasn’t until the social welfare state emerged from the destruction of the Second World War that Britain’s veterans received help with jobs, housing and healthcare. (This of course shrinks during Tory governments.) But when it comes to putting on a ceremony to acknowledge those who gave their full measure of devotion, there’s nothing like having a Royal Family oversee the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph.

But around the country people also mark what’s known as Remembrance Sunday (which coincided this year, fortuitously, with the actual anniversary of Armistice), with ceremonies at village memorials (which started out listing the names of the dead from 1914-1918, but then had to add on those lost 1939-1945) and local churches. On Remembrance Sunday church bells are half-muffled in mourning, as in this ring from Remembrance Sunday six years ago:

And in some churches, in the minutes before 1100, the tenor is rung up, as in this clip from Exeter Cathedral:

At Holy Trinity Church in Cookham, Berkshire, my friend MLD and her fellow ringers take this on as a solemn duty. MLD tolled the tenor by herself for the fifteen minutes up to 1100, which is exhausting, being not only very heavy but for tolling you have to ring very slowly and hold the bell up—you see at Exeter they need three to do it. But she’s glad to take it on.

This year, being the centenary, Holy Trinity augmented its Remembrance service with some heartrending symbols. 

As in many other parishes and villages, people knitted poppies to be displayed—from John McCrae’s poem that begins, “In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses row on row.” HTC decorated the sanctuary with these:

In addition to the knitted ones, they displayed a poppy that was part of the gut-wrenching Blood-swept Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London from August to November 2014, commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of war. This was one of the nearly 900,000 ceramic poppies that filled the Tower’s moat like a gush of blood.

But the piece that I absolutely cannot view except through tears is the Perspex silhouette soldier “sitting” in the pew. There were five of these, each representing a man from the parish who left for war and never returned.

Had I been in that sanctuary in the presence of those ghosts, I’d have been unable to sing or follow the service.

(Photos taken by one of MLD’s fellow ringers, who I hope will not object to me appropriating them.)

I’ll leave you with one more brilliant evocation from our British brothers—a stellar Twitter thread capturing the universal truth about how we Anglo-Americans view our militaries, as voiced by Rudyard Kipling.