If you could know, if you could see
Then you would not repeat to yourself the old lie
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
How sweet and honorable it is to die for one’s country
It not only feels right that it isn’t raining, that we’re making our way eastward in the glare of the Caribbean sunshine, that it’s warm and humid and actually somewhat sultry – but it feels wrong in that it’s going almost unacknowledged. I’ve become used to standing in the showroom on this day, pressed and polished in dress blues with a poppy on my collar. But that’s the flagship; here this is very nearly another day.
But it’s not just another day. It’s never ever just another day.
Another year gone and I still don’t understand. I don’t understand why the world continues to tear itself apart. What I do understand is that this belongs to all of us. There is not a single one of us in the world today that has not somehow been touched by the tragic folly that is a world at war, the thing is the world has been at war for so long that we have honestly forgotten what it’s like not to be. Gone are the days of Vera Lynn, of air raids and the home front, now the constant battles are so much a part of daily life that I sometimes think we don’t even know how to have a home front anymore. We go home, we watch the BBC and CNN or whatever other news channel we tune into, we flip through the channels, shake our heads and go on with our life.
We have lost our innocence and we didn’t even notice it was gone. It’s as if it packed a rucksack and snuck quietly out the back door while no one was looking, never to return.
And I’m convinced sometimes that they look down at us in sorrow, those who have gone before, wondering if this is what they died for all those years ago.
I do not believe that they rest, any of them, no matter how old or new. Have we done as they asked? Have we kept faith? I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t think so at all, sometimes I wonder.
No matter where I am in the world on this day, no matter what I am doing, there will always be a part of me that is standing, head bowed, feet cold in patent leather party shoes on the half-frozen mud-slicked ground, clutching my grandmother’s hand and trying to understand. That part of me battles with the part that understands more than she wishes she did.
And no matter whether I’m working, sleeping or in the middle of a busy street, my world will fall silent at 11am, a partner to the silence that echoes down through history, reverberating in the very absence of noise.
And I saw my future, in that moment when the guns fell silent
And also, though I realize that it may sound hypocritical as I yearly ‘honor the institution’:
I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war Mrs Barum. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records to shout what a hell it is. We shall never end war by blaming it on admirals and generals and all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us that make shrines of those battlefields and name boulevards after those generals. We wear our widow’s weaves like nuns Mrs Barum and glorify war by exalting its sacrifice. […] My brother died at Anzio, an ordinary soldier’s death no special heroism involved, they buried what pieces they found of him. But my mother insists that he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud. The result of this? Now my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age…that’ll be in September. What has my mother got for pretending that bravery is admirable? She’s in constant sedation, terrified that one day she’ll wake up to find her last son has run off to be brave…
It may be ministers and generals who blunder us into war, but the least the rest of us can do is resist honoring the institution.
~ The Americanization of Emily