Why?

[poliphilo]

Why so solemn around the war dead?

I'm sure most of them liked a laugh when they were alive. I'll bet most of them said, "Fuck". I'll bet most of them said it a lot. I'll bet most of them hated being soldiers. I'll bet most of them liked singing "Mam'selle from Armentieres" better than they liked singing hymns.

Why transubstantiate them from cheeky chappies and working stiffs and aspiring poets and good husbands and bad husbands and all the other things they were into these gloomy ancestral ghosts?

I know the answer. And it's not a whole lot to do with them.

It's to do with a combination of grief (fair enough) and survivor's guilt (which doesn't do anyone any good)- and the desire to keep on polishing the War Machine.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Funny that those of us from military families (and that's both of us) are the least likely to pay attention to this stuff.

His father was a frontline infantryman in two world wars and came back without a scratch (at least physically- there were things he'd never talk about like the Somme or Belsen and we know he was at both)

Mine fought all those grisly little wars of decolonialisation- Egypt, Suez, Cyprus- that no one wants to talk about any more.

[poliphilo]

Almost everyone from our generation had parents who went through the Second World War...

My father was with a Royal Navy bomb disposal unit and my mother was an army driver.

[lauradi7dw]

My father did have survivor's guilt (got shot on the first day of fighting so he had been evacuated by the time his friends were killed). Until I mentioned it by name in the 1980s, he and my mother had never heard of it as a thing, and he had assumed his feelings were rare. Those guys didn't talk about stuff much.

[poliphilo]

No, they didn't. Just about the only thing I know about my father's war service is that he was once stationed on Romney Marsh- and rather liked it there...

[lauradi7dw]

That was meant to say first day of fighting on Iwo Jima. They'd been slogging around the Pacific together for a couple of years at that point, so some of them were good friends.
There was a TV documentary when I was a kid. He said "there we were." I said "Which one was you?" at which point he gave up for years, until someone tracked him down and invited him to reunions.

[qatsi]

Remembrance is a festival that always makes me uncomfortable, which I think is probably the best reaction to it. I agree with both your conclusions - on the subject of grief it's fair enough as you say, but I think a lot of the enforced ceremonial is as if two minutes' slience and some wreaths is all it takes to assuage some sort of societal guilt. I'm not a pacifist but if we took the message seriously we'd do rather more to avoid conflict.