The 10th of November 2024 will mark Remembrance Sunday, a day to commemorate those who have lost their lives to war. During remembrance ceremonies, you’ll likely hear this striking verse from Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
That final line – We will remember them – arrives as a promise, but also provokes a question. How do we enact our remembrance? And perhaps the answer is hiding in the very format of these words themselves. For poetry, and literature more broadly, is a powerful way to remember the lives of those who can no longer speak for themselves. By reading and writing about the people who have experienced the horrors of war, we can connect with the human tragedy of the battlefields and remember these soldiers not just as facts and figures, but as
real people who suffered terrible things.
If you’re wondering where to start reading, then perhaps look to the poems of Wilfred Owen. Regarded by many as the greatest poet of the First World War, Owen writes to us directly from the trenches and the battlefields themselves. These words, from Futility, depict the body of a soldier killed in action:
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Owen asks us to see not only the nameless soldier, but the young boy safe at home, and the endless sunrises that he is robbed of in death. Owen himself was killed in action only a week before the signing of the Armistice, at the age of just twenty-five, yet through his poetry he and his fellow soldiers are able to survive in the nation’s collective memory.
Reading fiction set around conflict is another way to remember real events with the humanity that is often lacking in the history books. Fireweed, by Richard Vaughan-Davies, includes a historically accurate portrayal of the June 1944 Normandy Landings through the eyes of Adam, the book’s protagonist. By placing a fictional character within factual history, Vaughan-Davies is able to depict the human tragedy and horror of the invasion as well as the facts of the event:
A hundred and fifty thousand men had landed on the beach that day, the biggest invasion in the history of the world. Ten thousand men were to die where families played and children swam in peacetime, where the sea was now churning so full of bodies that it had turned scarlet.
Like Owen, Vaughan-Davies is writing to emphasise the human waste of war. By placing the image of the scarlet sea against the families and children playing in peacetime, he helps us to remember the ‘ten thousand men [that] were to die’ as real people rather than a detached statistic.
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