For the Fallen?

11/11. A date as seered in western memory as another equally chilling "11" date was to become 83 years later. At 11.00 a.m. on the 11th November, 1918, the guns fell silent as the "war to end all wars" came to an end.
Nearly ninety years after that most terrible act of collective youthful slaughter finally ended, we still remember Armistice Day on this date every autumn. Although the national remembrance commemorations now culminate on the nearest weekend to it , it has been touching and humbling how the 11th has once again taken on a significance of its own in recent years.
Across Britain today, people will have gathered in shops, offices, factories, schools, churches and streets to take just two minutes out of the timespan of eternity to remember those who lost their lives in the defence of others. With war in Iraq seeming no nearer its end, and casualties continuing to haunt the headlines on all sides, somehow the grief of remembrance takes on an even more poignant feel even for those of us untouched directly by war. Lawrence Binyon's famous words, quoted this morning and a thousand times over during this Remembrancetide, are as moving as ever.

And yet, this morning as I decided to watch the BBC coverage of the Field of Remembrance service attended by the Queen outside Westminster Abbey, the silence was shattered not by the dolesome toll of Big Ben chiming the eleventh hour, but by the insistent ringing of my telephone. Given the timing, I felt sure it could not be something or someone who could not wait. When the call transferred to my mobile and displayed "Unknown", I knew I had even less reason to answer it.

Actually, there was a certain irony in this. To quote another great poet :" send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee". As this irksome shattering of the silence invaded my consciousness, the TV pictures were showing the inscription on the tomb of the "Unknown" warrior inside Westminster Abbey. However, it goes on to eulogise the "freedom" for which he and countless millions died in four bloody years early last century and yet which so many others have suffered the same fate since. So much for the "war to end wars".

War makes me angry. It should make any sane soul seathe with anger not at the alleged aggressor or the foreign foe, but at the senseless cruelty of it all. The questionable motivation of the present conflict in the Gulf only highlights just how awful for ordinary souls with little care for the great affairs of state is man's continued inhumanity to man. I could not say that war is never justified, even though my natural inclination has always leaned to pacifism. Nevertheless, the causes for which it is prosecuted these days seem geared ever more to a balance of payments than a balance of power and it sickens me.

Despite the interruptions, I tried to observe the silence as solemnly as I could, and reflect on young lives so mercifully ended. Today's forces in Britain are at least volunteers with some comprehension of the horrors they may face, but the combatants of World War I and II were largely conscripts, with little choice in the matter. But why did they die? Was it for "freedom"? Freedom from what? A freedom from breeding bleeding or a freedom for breeding greed?

When I listened to the voicemail message my failure to answer the phone had led to, I was livid! It turned out the call was an appeal to little more than my basest avaricious instincts, to inform me that I have "won a holiday" and needed to key 9! To quote the late John Junor: "pass the sick bag, Alice". This was an insult, to the fallen and the surviving. What crass soul in some corporate ivory tower the other side of the pond deemed it necessary to set an auto-dialler to call my number at the very moment those who breathed their last were being remembered? Did they die wielding bayonet and bullet so he could live touting Visa and MasterCard? The cause of freedom is ill-served by such thoughtless manifestations of our riches-obsessed society. If the nation's largest retailers can have the decency to remember them, who the years will not condemn, could not the unknown corporate moguls who perpetrate this automated telephonic nonsense have the humanity to do so too.