Dominick Chilcott

Remembrance and reconciliation

Many of us are used to taking part in remembrance services, commemorating those who have died for our countries in past wars and present conflicts. The words, music and hymns are familiar and comforting. We can take a quiet pride in the achievements of those we are honouring. Watching the veterans march past is always moving.

This year, in Washington, a conference or 'conversation' on the theme of the universality of remembrance is being held in the week that Veterans' day is celebrated. As I understand it, the aim is to find a way to commemorate the dead of past wars collectively. This would not be a substitute for the national commemorations that are now a well established tradition - our British tradition of Remembrance Sunday will continue to be the best means of acknowledging the debt we owe our forebears. But it would be a way of acknowledging that many, perhaps most, combatants who died, whether they were on the right or wrong side of the argument, were ordinary people, doing their duty as best they could. In the end, we are all human beings. In death, we all dissolve into the same earth.

Many of the great poets of the First World War, soldiers who captured the experience of warfare most eloquently, felt a degree of empathy towards their enemies. Wilfred Owen's poem, Strange Meeting, contains the shocking line, directed at the poet: 'I am the enemy you killed, my friend'. It concludes with the words 'Let us sleep now'.

Charles Sorley, killed aged 20, at the battle of Loos in 1915, in his poem 'To Germany' looked forward to peace, 'then we may view again with new-won eyes each other's truer form and wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm we'll grasp firm hands an laugh at the old pain, when it is peace'. Incidentally, Robert Graves reckoned that Sorley was one of the three truly great poets killed in the war (the others being Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg). 

Siegfried Sassoon, who despite his name was not partly German, also wrote about this theme. In his poem, 'Reconciliation' he appeals to Britons to remember 'the German soldiers who were loyal and brave'. 

No-one, I trust, is arguing that Britain should despense with the annual ceremony at the Cenotaph. But after we have honoured our Commonwealth dead, perhaps the time has come for us to pause and consider the young men and women who died fighting against us. It was, after all, only an accident of birth that meant we and they ended up on one or other side of these historic conflicts.  

It is no bad thing in today's more interconnected world where no nation can solve global problems on its own to remind ourselves that, as human beings, what we have in common is greater that that which divides us. And in doing so, we should be fulfilling the wishes of many of our own troops who gave their lives in the hopes that peoples and countries at war would later be reconciled one to another and become friends.

Posted at 09:20 14 November 2008 by Dominick Chilcott  |  Comments[2]