Veterans Day over here, Armistice Day in the U.K., marked over there, perhaps, with unusual intensity this year, a century after the First World War began.
Over on Twitter, Dan Hannan links to “Last Post,” a 2009 poem written by Britain’s poet laureate, Carol Duffy, to mark the deaths of the last two British veterans of that war. In some ways it can be read as a counterpoint to Philip Larkin’s “MCMXIV,” a poem (written on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war) that, for many Britons, remains the definitive image of a world that was about to disappear forever:
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
By contrast, Duffy is looking from a vantage point at the end of the war and imagines rewinding history’s reel:
It concludes like this:
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too –
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert –
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.
But it cannot. History moves on, relentless, restless, but sometimes something endures.
In London today, a young cadet named Harry Hayes planted the last enamel poppy — the last of 888,246, one for each of the British and Colonial troops who died — in the great sea of poppies that now stands before the Tower of London. His great-great-great uncle Private Patrick Kelly of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, was killed in action on September 27, 1918, just a few weeks before that first Armistice Day.
And yet, nearly a century later, there is his great-great-great nephew planting that poppy, and in this newspaper report a handful of old photographs of a young man killed far too soon and a reference to a grave in France.
Not much, not nearly enough, but something.
R.I.P.