On History and Remembrance

Today is the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, and the lights are once again going out across Europe. The hype has dominated the news cycles and the public consciousness for weeks now. It has been an opportunity for us to remember the unprecedented horror of war, and to remember what those who fought and died did it for, and how their aims have been achieved and failed. It is an increasingly rare display of respect, dignity and unity between many countries across the world, as we attempt to treat the curiously dual nature of remembrance: The private impact on people's lives and families and the conquests of nations. One man dying in the mud, over and over, and an Empire falling. I'm sure there will be those who disagree, but personally I have not experienced anything in the build-up that has struck me as at all off-key. Indeed, almost everything on the TV, on the radio, has seemed to be thoughtful, and to try to offer real insight into life at the time of the outbreak of war.

I'm a big fan of remembrance. Unfortunately, there are those today who view the nature of public remembrance as an outlet for the Good Old Days of Empire, and complain it allows us to look past how Britain is continuing to fail the rest of the world, and ourselves. I reject this wholesale. I think that yearly remembrance is one of the defining features of our relationship to conflict and to the history that made the world what it is. I think the public and yet so private nature of the ritual speaks volumes to how we define ourselves.

So to make such a big deal out of this 100 year anniversary is something I'm all in favour of. I can't think of how we treat the World Wars without thinking of the History Boys, and the scene where they debate how to approach studying the Holocaust. The question revolves around whether you can treat it like any other topic in history. It has causes, facts, outcomes. It can be studied, dismantled and contextualised. And the reply comes:

Posner: But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away

Scripps: You can't explain away the poetry, sir.

Lockwood: No, sir. Art wins in the end.

The response this year, as with other years, has tended in my view more towards art. There are documentaries, there are factually-based dramas and stories, but they seek to depict rather than explain. They make the War vivid, bring it to us so that our remembrance is made deeper by our recognition of kinship with those from that foreign place, the past.

But the thought that keeps coming to my mind is 'How much longer'? How much longer will we think of the apprentices and farmers leaving their villages, the stately homes emptying? How much longer will we think first of poems and poppies, not school projects done long ago? How much longer, in fact, will it be before this war, and then its successor, stop being Events and become History?

There is a gulf of significance between the two, though the difference may seem slight. Events are remembered. They inspire art, get passed through families and reside deep within our identities. History is taught, can be forgotten when we leave school, and doesn't touch our real lives. All British WW1 veterans are dead as of two or three years ago. By the centenary of WW2, there most likely won't be anyone who remembers those battlefields, either. My worry is that after this year, the Great War will be talked of in more and more distant terms, until in another hundred years time, it is nothing but a small note in a calendar. How many of you will mark the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo in June 2015? It was, until 1914, the biggest battle ever seen, the defining battle of European identity. Today? It's trivia.

World War One is what has made the world what it is today. Issues of politics, economics, identity and, yes, warfare are directly influenced by what happened then. If collectively we cannot retain a sense of the unprecedented horror of the War, if we cannot truly hold to our hearts the lessons learnt by it, and pass those lessons on to our children and their children, then one day that war will be fought again, and more boys will leave the villages and go off and die in part of something unimaginable.

So tonight, as the lights go out across Europe, remember. Remember that the outbreak of war was not just a date, or a history lesson, but was an event which can never be understood or explained in full. Remember that the War was not simply a clash of nations, but was the death of millions of men and boys and women and children, the horror you will never experience, but that others do around the world today. Remember that the War must never become History to you, or it will be another Event for those who come after. Remember.