Best laid plans.

Aside

Usually I watch the Remembrance ceremony at Whitehall, on TV, but this year I yearned to be in the fresh air with the sea and the sky and the wind; but not the torrential rain that rudely shoved the sun out of the equation. So I contemplated in my office; much less emotional and just as valid. Really Tuesday is the day, when at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month the Armistice was declared – 90 years ago. Tragically many men, on both sides were killed after that time, as the news didn’t get through to the front.

Shirley Williams was saying on the Andrew Marr show that the horrifying statistics of WW1 were more or less shoved under the carpet and when her mother, Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth) returned from three years nursing at the front to her university, she was told she had wasted three years. So it makes sense to me that it is now remembered in all its ghastliness - not glory.

Dan Snow, the presenter and historian and son of Peter Snow, came across letters sent by his great grandfather to his wife in WW1. He decided to follow in his relative’s footsteps which took him to the Somme. His great grandfather was Sir Thomas D’Olyly Snow and - Dan was shocked to discover - was a general who sent thousands of men to their deaths. Whilst standing in the chateau where his grandfather stayed during the combat, he asked a fellow historian if he blamed General Snow. The historian replied that he did and also a member of his own family had been killed in the battle. To make things worse Dan’s great grandfather tried to pass the blame for the carnage onto the men themselves.

Dan told The Observer

‘That is the darkest day in British military history, arguably British history, and my great-grandpa was one of the key guys in the planning and execution of that attack,'

(1893-1918) Wilfred Owen “Doomed Youth"

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
--Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

‘Lest we forget’ all the men and women who lost their lives in the wars.