What Happened to Remembrance Day?

Natalie Burles asks if Remembrance Day has strayed from its original purpose


Living in this country I sometimes feel like I occupy a position pretty much on my own. I know it sounds unlikely, but if you’re English you’ll know how strong the prevailing feeling is in this country.

You see, the thing is… (deep breath). I hate November in this country. And I hate it because of Remembrance Day.

The Queen observing Remembrance Day this year

I know, just slap me now. I am an awful person who hates dead people, and even worse, people who died for me. You should hate me now, by rights.

The thing is though, it isn’t as easy as that. If you’ve met me, you’ve probably heard me, at one time or another, drunkenly going on about my AS level English course. It was a whole year on literature from the first world war, and it was horrible. It was so, so sad; so heartbreaking and harrowing and terrible. The dark spots were awful and the light spots were almost worse, because they were made by people who just wanted to send more lads out there.

A year of that gets under your skin. All the poets and authors you fall in love with die. Their families die. They write about the agony. You look at the people around you. At our school on Remembrance Day they used to post brass players around the school to play the Last Post during the two minute silence, and it was always unbearably poignant. So I get drunk sometimes and tell people loudly about how sad it made me.

So, it isn’t like I don’t care. Respect the conscripts who served and died, all that stuff. Stand in the two minutes silence and think, and feel. Wear a poppy. I do all that.

However, Remembrance Day has been hijacked. It’s happened slowly perhaps, but it’s happened. I can say that I respect the people who it was set up to remember and that I hate it, and the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Because it isn’t about ‘Lest We Forget’ any more.

‘Shoulder to Shoulder With All Who Serve’

The slogan this year is ‘Shoulder to Shoulder With All Who Serve’. I hope that gives you some idea of what my problem is. It isn’t about remembrance any more, it’s about warmongering. It’s about ideologically putting the whole country into the army. Shoulder to shoulder. Once, wearing a poppy protested the horror, but now it’s a call for more. Let’s sell the army as a career choice for kids who education served badly (so long as they aren’t gay or women or anything else similarly fucked up), and then pretend that we hate it when they lose half their limbs. Let’s guilt trip the people who really, really hate war when it happens, as if picking them up and supporting them is for us to do. It’s good to support kids into the military, into suicide. It’s good for them to be hurt, it’s glorious. And it’s bad for me not to want a part of it.

How did this happen?

I probably won’t wear a poppy this year, because it’s reading week this week and I’m going to spend the majority of it under my duvet, speeding through Middlemarch and Moby Dick, not in the shops. I didn’t buy one in Liverpool because the people selling them were at a stall under that dreadful slogan, and it finally drove it home for me how far against my views the whole thing runs.

Don’t forget them. Please, please, don’t forget them. But remember how disrespectful it is to their memory to doom generations and generations to their fate, to change dying at war back to glory instead of horror. Standing shoulder to shoulder with an army of aggression is no memorial to those men.

What would they think of you?