Remembrance Day & Fall of Berlin Wall

The ongoing loss of so many of our young servicemen in Afghanistan makes Remembrance Sunday even more poignant in our time. What a shame that loss of life in war is not allowed to become an outmoded phenomenon that hardly anyone remembers! Yet unfortunately we know only too well the sense of waste, and we feel for the never-ending bereavement experienced by families who had no choice in the matter. I could just about understand the initial incursion into Afghanistan (though the Russians had already shown how difficult it was to win a war there), but I have always been against war in Iraq - one of my main reasons being that I didn’t want our own young people to die there, although I never imagined that it would be hundreds of them that would.
Yet of course Remembrance Day is mostly associated with the two World Wars in which so many private citizens had to take part as well as the professional military. It is hard for our minds to take in the vastness of the numbers involved, and we owe them a huge debt of respect and gratitude. As one of them once said to me, six years their youth were stolen. And those who survived had to cope with a lifetime of harrowing memories. They were asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, and they were not always rewarded.
We are lucky in that our generation has not been obliged to fight. When my husband was a small boy in the Second World War, he knew that his grandfather had fought in the First, and that his father was fighting in the Second. “And shall I have my war when I grow up?” he asked. His parents became very angry and told him not to be silly. No doubt it was too painful for them to contemplate another of these horrors, and they must have hoped, as had people 20 years previously, that it was a war to end all wars.
Some years ago I wrote a poem about how two minutes' silence once a year was not asking us to do a lot in return for all they had given. The poem, in a form called a villanelle with a double refrain, was called 'Two Minutes' Silence', and here it is:


It's not too much to offer those who died -
Two minutes' silence where we pause each year -
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.

Our fallen heroes are their nation's pride.
Too rarely in our thoughts do they appear -
It's not too much to offer those who died.

Yet war commands official homicide:
Let's think what lurks beneath the bold veneer,
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.

We'll honour more the dead if we provide
A better system in our human sphere -
It's not too much to offer those who died.

Let all the forms of partnership be tried,
Alternatives weighed up, and costs made clear,
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.

To heroes let no glory be denied,
So due to conscript and to volunteer.
It's not too much to offer those who died -
Enough to see war's waste is vilified.


My father-in-law fought in the Second World War, and was wrongly declared to be killed in action. We can but imagine how his wife felt to be told this. His name is found among the fallen on Durham War Memorial, and he later went to see it there. Yet he had only been injured in Sicily and invalided out and sent to Ireland to do educational work with barely literate soldiers. Such must be the chaos of war so often that the authorities lost track of him. He lived on till his 70's in 1989, a piece of shrapnel permanently in his lung. (Always setting off airport alarms!)
A year or so ago I went on an Internet taster session on family history, and one of the sets of records we were shown was of the military. So I thought I'd check up on my father-in-law, and see how the records now stood. To my surprise, he was not only still recorded as killed in action, but they were able to tell me on precisely which day he died, and in which cemetery in Normandy he is buried! He never fought in Normandy, but perhaps his regiment did and it was assumed he had perished. He presumably has a headstone there. With someone else’s body underneath. The Internet course tutor said she would quote this example of misrecording in future courses. My husband tells me that no-one in his family knew about this presumed grave in Normandy all these years. Father-in-law would probably gone and visited it, being a Francophile and, indeed, a French teacher! And fellow-soldiers of his must have been buried there.
Even war can bring out a sense of humour in people, which can help them to get through its rigours. I remember seeing the novelist Frederick Forsyth being interviewed on German TV about his time as a POW. He said that, having been to a British public school, he found the experience very similar, except that the food was slightly better in the camp!
I was born towards the end of the War, and my first memory of the subject, as a baby, was being told one day while we were seated near the Royal Pavilion in Brighton that bombs had fallen nearby only a month before. I was actually born during an air-raid. My father had had to go out in the blackout to try and find a taxi for my mother, almost being thrown over the handlebars of his motor-bike in his panic and in the darkness. After I was born, I was taken straight down to the shelter in the cellar, but my mother, who'd had a difficult delivery, had to be left in her bed, with just a blanket over her head to protect her from any flying glass. I apparently quickly developed a reputation for leading the crying, and nurses told my mother that they always knew which was her baby!
As I was starting to grow up, heaps of rubble were very familiar sights where houses had been destroyed. They also became playgrounds for us: what would Health and Safety have to say about this today?! Today's young people must find such a scenario very difficult to imagine. Actually, I once attended a portrait pottery taster session, and there was a young boy there who was clearly fascinated by the Second World War, so far from what he knows. I told him about one of my mother's stranger experiences. She was a Council office worker, and one night (yes, night) a coachload of Council workers were taken off to a mystery destination. She found herself in the port of Newhaven, manning a weighbridge for tanks and trucks for the Normandy Landings before they were embarked!

Another milestone we are recalling now is the Fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. I remember what an exciting time it was in 1989 when freedom was breaking out in people's souls and one wondered which would be the next Communist country to fall. I had visited a number of them during the 1980's. In Poland in 1988 one sensed that change was in the air. The churches were full of people listening but not usually taking communion: it was a political gesture, I was told, rather than a religious one. Yet the breaching of that monstrous Wall is truly iconic: it symbolizes all the anguish and pointless waste that the two Germanies had to put up with after the War. For all that we used to be enemies, we could empathize with the euphoria of that night.
Later, we talked to an elderly East Berlin couple who shared our table several times on a Rhine cruise, and we asked them if they'd gone through the Wall that night. No, they said - they were sure it was a hoax! They could not imagine it could possibly be true. But they went through the second night. They were touched by our interest in the history of Berlin (if you can speak the language, you discover how nice the Germans are), and gave us some pre-War post-cards of the city that their uncle had published, stacks of which they'd discovered when he died.
We visited Berlin the year after the Wall fell, and elsewhere in East Germany three weeks before Reunification. We observed the strange sight of West German military trucks bringing the new army uniforms to the East, and watched the signposts for Karl-Marx-Stadt being taken down and those for Chemnitz going back up. As our guide said at the end of our tour, we were leaving a country to which we would never return.
I've found German a useful holiday language for the sort of travels we tend to make. On winter holidays in the Canaries we joined in several times with German walking groups on the islands. From them we sometimes heard sad tales of the divided Germanies. One couple who had been able to move to the West had visited their parents in the East shortly before the Fall of the Wall. On that occasion the man's mother had shown them the family prayer-book, a prized possession, quite old and valuable. He did not know that she would secretly slip it into their suitcase before they left. East Germans were not allowed to export such things, and of course it was discovered at the border. The couple was held a long time by the border police, worried about whether they could get back to West Germany. Eventually they were released, but the prayer-book wasn't, and was never seen again. Soon after, the barriers were no more, but this family treasure, which could now have travelled easily, was gone for good. It would be easy for us to say, "The Germans shouldn't have started the War", but countless are the ordinary people on all sides who have to suffer because of political decisions.