A Reflection shared by Ray Anglesea at St Andrew's Dawson Street LEP, Crook
The
first official Armistice Day was held in the Grounds of Buckingham Palace on
the morning of November 11th 1919. That day was to set the trend for a day of
Remembrance for decades to come. Today, for many of us, the world will briefly
stand still. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th
month, as for generations past, we will celebrate the armistice, when the most
terrible war yet seen by history finally drew to a close. We will remember quietly
and with reverence the British men and women who fought and died in that war
and in other more recent conflicts. In those moments of silence as we remember
our war dead we may wish to reflect on how fortunate we are to live in a
country that is relatively prosperous and at peace – and how unlikely it is
that we, our children or our children’s children shall ever be asked to make a
similar sacrifice. And in the silence as flags are lowered, bugles play and
autumn leaves swirl around town and village cenotaphs there may be a moment too
to remember the civilian war dead of recent decades.
Remembrance
Day is a profoundly British occasion, steeped not in jingoism but in solemn
patriotism, when a nation given to pageantry and tradition honours its military
dead. More subtly, it is tinged with nostalgia. The last living veteran of the
Great War was Florence Green who died last year on the4 February 2012, aged
110; the last veteran who served in the trenches was Harry Patch who died on 25
July 2009, aged 111. These
veterans together with their comrades of Flanders and the Somme have now gone
to their eternal rest, their bravery, patriotism and that nostalgia of a sepia
age have survived. Britain will still celebrate Remembrance Day. We will
remember them.
War
has however changed. Men still fight each other. Indeed, by the calculation of
the International Institute for Strategic Studies, more than 100,000 people
have died in armed conflicts over the last 12 months. But while the Great War
may have been the first of World Wars it was also in a sense the last of the
wars – the last major conflict in which the overwhelming majority of casualties
were the soldiers who fought it (approximately 9.8 million military deaths).
The balance had already tilted by the time of the Second World War. Today the
ratios have been reversed.
A report by the non-profit group Action of
Armed Violence, March 2012, suggested that in modern conflicts, 80 per cent of
casualties are likely to be unarmed civilians. Casualties recorded in their
recent report were caused by conventional military explosive weapons such as
mortars, rockets, artillery and such improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as car
and suicide bombs. Alas, most of the civilian dead perished not in wars between
nations, but in dirty and brutal civil wars that are barely comprehensible to
themselves, let alone outsiders. Today’s professional soldiers are more likely
to be peacekeepers than warriors, so highly trained in computerised warfare
that – unlike the cannon fodder of the trenches – they cannot afford to be
lost. In modern warfare, the wrath of science has been turned on civilians, in
the shape cluster bombs and landmines, drones, chemical and ultimately nuclear
weapons, all designed not so much to destroy armies as to terrorise and, if
need be, annihilate the civilian population that supports them.
None
of this is to belittle the hi-tech soldier of today, still less those who went
before him. As every year, we bow our heads to those who gave their lives for
their country. But is does not dishonour their memory to argue that, in a
global age, we should also remember refugees and the civilian dead of wars
around the world, who died without medals, without cause and without honour. In
that way we remember how dreadful war truly is.
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