When I was young, attending the Remembrance Sunday parade as an Air Cadet was mandatory. I remember the cold November mornings, but it wasn’t emotional for me, aside from seeing people who had lived through it.
As an adult, the ceremony has more meaning. Over time, I’ve built a connection to the past, and watching war films often leaves me wondering why others don’t seem to feel the same impact. Whilst film is usually fiction, these events were real. These were real people, young men with families, whose sacrifices gave us the freedoms we enjoy today. Many from my generation and younger seem disconnected from that understanding. They don’t seem to have any more meaning that a character from a Marvel movie or a drawing of a Roman soldier in a book.
Whether films are accurate or not, it can leave you with something to think about and try to imagine the situation these people found themselves in. A powerful reminder for me comes from the final scene of Blackadder Goes Forth. Set in 1917, the series follows British soldiers in the trenches. We get to know them, their characters and realise they are individuals, each with complex lives – they are not just a number or a name on a cenotaph. In the end, they are sent over the top, and the scene fades from the chaos an incessant noise of gunfire and bombs on no-mans-land to a peaceful field of red poppies and birdsong. To me this means that whilst memories fade, this beautiful land we take for granted came at great cost. While not historically accurate, this scene makes the human cost of war painfully real.
Whilst many films were made about ww2 and to a lesser extent ww1, we’d do well to remember that terrible war atrocities are not the thing of the past we might like to think they are. In 2002, I visited Bosnia as part of the ICMP, working to repatriate the missing from mass graves. Seeing bodies wearing Nike trainers and and wearing watches that are still ticking made it clear these tragedies are not distant. All this made the film ‘Behind enemy lines’ set in the same region at the same time, very much more personal. Because no matter how the film may portray the human cost it actually doesn’t come even remotely close. This, along with recent conflicts in the Middle East, resonates even more deeply now that I have my own children.
It really is crucially important to try remember the fallen and also that peace is a fragile thing. We are fortunate to have lived here in the UK in a relatively peaceful time, but war still rages.