Underneath the Larches

Well, OK, it wasn't actually the arborial species made famous by Monty Python under which I consumed my lunchtime eats in Cavendish Square today- there it's mainly pollution-beating London Planes, actually- but what's wrong with a little artistic licence in order to pay homage to two of the most popular entertainers of those dark days of the Second World War when spirits most needed a lift? Flanagan and Allan, underneath the arches of London's many railways or wooing the audiences at the Palladium caught the eternal need of the human spirit to see a brighter hope and to revel in the comforting little things of life in dark times.

I'm not sure that their ilk exist in today's society. Maybe we need more of that kind of homespun, cheery sound again as a world made dark not so much by war but by terror tries to let normal life go on, just as much as beleagured Londoners did during the toughest times of the blitz.

Today is Armistice Day, the enduring reminder of the time and date in 1918 when the guns fell silent on the Western Front and other theatres of war, in the most bloody and meaningless mass atrocity ever to assault humankind. It is still hard to take in the magnitude of millions of promising young lives, snatched from us in an instant through a conflict most folk had forgotten the "reason" for by the time it came to an end. If indeed it ever did have a reason. All that World War I proved was that mankind does not often learn the lessons of history, for it is destined to make the same,horrific mistakes all over again, albeit in another time and/or another place.

And yet... there is hope today, in the ironic fact that the years have not dulled the senses of a new generation like mine who had no personal experience of the horrors of either global conflict last century, but want to respect the memory and the sacrifice of those that did. We are not glorifying war, far from it, but recognising that these were humans too, with feelings,families and fears. These were barely more than boys out of school, called to do a nation's dirty work on the bloody field of pre-nuclear conflict. I shall never forget how deeply moved and touched I was by the War Poets module of my A'level English course back in the 1970s, when there were far more old comrades around from the First World War than there are now. And yet, I never knew until last year that I had lost a great uncle to this senseless collective slaughter near the fields of Flanders, where poppies still grow today and remind us with their scarlet petals of the blood shed there and the bodies which are indeed buried in the corner of a foreign field which is forever England- or Kent, or Middlesex, or Surrey- whichever the regiment these poor, hapless souls gave their lives with.

This morning at 11.00, I stood with four colleagues, only one of whom is old enough to remember the Second World War, and along with much of the nation observed the restored Armistice Day silence, which has become a much needed pause in our national lives these last few years. For much of this week, I have been remembering and pondering, thinking not just of my own losses but those of others, and I was deeply moved too by the very thoughtful piece contributed this week by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity's Nick Spencer. Find it at www.licc.org.uk/culture. Delve deep enough indeed through the links on that page, and you'll find another familiar name, but modesty forbids me saying more here.

At the end of our silence, I read out Lawrence Binyon's ever-familiar but never failing words of homage and remembrance:

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning:

We will remember them.

Amen.