Lest We Forget

Of all the loss of our liberties during Lockdown2, the most ironic is the ban on being able publicly to acknowledge the debt of gratitude we owe to those who fought and died for our freedom.

Wednesday is exactly 102 years since Armistice Day 1918 when at 11 o’clock the guns of the Great War fell silent.

Remembrance Sunday, which has just passed, is the most solemn day in the national calendar. For the past century, there has been act of collective homage at the Cenotaph led by the Sovereign to commemorate the war dead who helped to forge today’s United Kingdom.

Up and down the land, members of the public usually gather at their local war memorials for short services and the Two Minutes Silence at 11am to honour those Servicemen and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in the two World Wars and in other conflicts.

Lest we forget, there are fewer than 20 villages in England and Wales that can claim to be ‘doubly thankful’, where all those men who went off to fight in the First and Second World Wars came home.

In 1920, the ceremony of Remembrance centred not only on the Cenotaph, but on tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. He who was one of the 338,000 unidentified soldiers who had fallen in France. In the first week, more than 1 million people filed past the Tomb, described by the Illustrated London News as ‘a nameless grave in Britain’s Valhalla, symbol of the supreme sacrifice.’

Over the next few years the ritual evolved at the Cenotaph around the commemoration of the Great War, its loss and sacrifice. Since 1927 when it was first broadcast by the BBC and brought to a mass audience, the ceremony, with its combination of the religious and the military, has been more or less unchanged: prayers, a Gun-Salute, the Last Post and the National Anthem.

The Royal British Legion’s annual Poppy Appeal has been integral to Remembrance. In any normal year, by early November there is usually a media-manufactured row about wearing a poppy, invariably involving on Jon Snow of Channel 4 News who is taken to task for denouncing ‘poppy fascism’. This is alongside an unseemly scramble among MPs to be the first to be seen to be wearing one.

The Royal Hospital in Chelsea, home to the venerated scarlet-coated Chelsea Pensioners, symbolises the duty of care that the nation owes to those who have served in its Armed Forces. Any volunteer poppy-seller in the neighbourhood of Christopher Wren’s Grade I-listed building knows that people cross the street and queue to contribute to the collection tin. Donating to the Legion and to other Forces’ charities is tangible evidence of the civilian nation’s support and gratitude to its Service personnel, present and past.

Stealing valour is a criminal offence in the United States. In 2016, a private member’s Bill attempted to criminalise Britain’s own medal-wearing military imposters. It gave many of those MPs taking part in the debate an opportunity to grandstand about the heroism of Forces’ personnel. Many politicians are content to bask in reflected military glory one day, while voting for defence cuts the next.

Last week, more than 500 MPs voted for Lockdown 2, the government’s latest egregious assault on our liberties. Before the vote, Sir Charles Walker, MP for Broxbourne, warned against ‘the drift towards an authoritarian, coercive state.’

Since March, the government has tried, and failed, to appease Covid-19. Despite the lockdowns, firebreaks and circuit breakers – euphemisms for attempting to put the people under house arrest and destroy the economy – nothing has worked so far. This particular coronavirus is still with us. In mid 1915, Britain’s new Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd-George grasped that the Great War was going to be won by ‘chemists and manufacturers’: similarly, the threat of Covid-19 will be vanquished by the chemists and drug companies who produce a vaccine.

On Remembrance Sunday this year, local councils urged the public to stay away from war memorials and observe the Two Minute Silence at home. On government instruction, places of worship have been closed.

Instead of publicly saluting the courage of men and women, both uniformed and civilian, who twice last century endured total war on our behalf, even the youngest and healthiest have been expected to cower indoors this Remembrance-tide.

The Two Minute Silence at 11am this Armistice Day gives MPs the chance to reflect. They might want to consider the sort of Britain they have been happy to create since the start of the first Lockdown in March. They might wonder whether those who made the ultimate sacrifice to defend our freedoms and liberties would think that sacrifice worthwhile in the context of the country we are allowing Britain to become.

Sarah Ingham

Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant (Routledge)