Lest We Forget: The Eleventh Hour

At eleven o'clock this morning, in towns and cities across this country, traffic will stop. Shops will fall silent. A room full of people who have not necessarily agreed on anything all year will stand together and not speak, for two minutes, in memory of the dead.

It is an extraordinary thing for a modern country to do. Unfashionable, almost. No commercial benefit attaches to it. There is nothing to buy and nothing to post. And yet we keep doing it, year after year, because some things are not rational, and some debts cannot be repaid.

My great-grandfather's name is on a brass plaque in a village hall in central Alberta, along with thirty-one other names and the years 1914 to 1918. I never met him. Nobody in my family did — he died at Vimy before his first child was born. But every November I pin a poppy to my coat and think about the fact that I exist because of a person I will never know.

That is the whole of it, really. The poppy is not a political statement. It is not a defence of war. It is a small, quiet acknowledgement that the world we live in was paid for, and that we were not the ones who paid.

We are not very good at silence anymore. We fill every gap in the day with something. But the two minutes of Remembrance Day is one of the last deliberate silences we still keep together, and it is astonishing what happens in that room. The shuffle of feet stops. Someone's child asks a question and is quietly told to wait. The last post. The firing of the guns in the distance, or on the television, or on a phone in someone's pocket.

Then: the bagpipes, the laying of the wreaths, the slow walk back to the car park and the ordinary rest of the day. That is the point. We do not cancel the football or the grocery run. We simply stop for a moment, and then we go on living, which is exactly what everyone we are remembering did not get to do.

It is easy to be sentimental and difficult to be honest. The men and women we remember were not all heroes, and the wars they fought in were not all just. Some of them were frightened boys a long way from home who did not entirely understand the orders they were given. They did what was asked of them, and many of them paid for it with everything.

We do not have to believe that every war was a good war to honour the people who fought it. That is, perhaps, the mature position. We can hold the gratitude and the ambivalence together. We can honour the sacrifice and still insist that it must not be asked for lightly, ever again.

If you do only one thing today, take a child with you to the cenotaph. Show them the names. Explain, at their level, what happened, and what the eleventh hour means. Tell them if your own family lost someone, and what you know of who they were.

The generation that fought the First World War is gone. The generation that fought the Second is going. The memory is being handed to people who have never known a world at war and cannot imagine what it was like. That is a good thing, and it is also a fragile one. It survives only in stories and in one morning a year when the country, for two quiet minutes, refuses to forget.

Lest we forget.