Stop and think
"This week, the Royal British Legion released a single called 2 Minute Silence, which is competing for top spot in Sunday's Top 40," BBC News Magazine reports. "… The Legion's video features noiseless contributions from some famous figures." Silence has been used as a show of respect for many years, says Prof. Adam Jaworski, author of The Power of Silence, but it really became established on Nov. 11, 1919, with the first two-minute commemorative silence on Armistice Day. King George V had directed that "all locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead."
The unknown warrior
The idea for this tribute to the British fighting man came from army chaplain Rev. David Railton, The Daily Express reports. "One evening during the war he had just returned from conducting a service for a fallen friend in France. He passed a small garden in the corner of which was a grave marked by a makeshift cross. It bore the sad words: 'An Unknown British Soldier of the Black Watch.' " He eventually received official support for his idea of a grave in Westminster Abbey. However, his suggestion for the name - The Tomb of the Unknown Comrade - was not accepted.
A shortage of men
Describing early events of the First World War, which began in August, 1914, historian Paul Fussell writes in The Great War and Modern Memory: "By the middle of November these [manoeuvres]had all but wiped out the original British army. At the beginning of the war, a volunteer had to stand 5-foot-8 to get into the army. By Oct. 11, the need for men was such that the standard was lowered to 5-foot-5. And on Nov. 5, after the 30,000 casualties of October, one had to be only 5-foot-3 to get in."
Photography and grief
"Grief on a global scale during the First World War inspired many - including Arthur Conan Doyle - to try to communicate with spirits and capture their ghosts on film," Chris Womersley reports for Australia's The Age. "… Rather than provoking alarm among the families mourning the men who had been lost in the dreadful four years of [war] the apparent evidence of the existence of such spirits was, for many, a source of great comfort. The dead, then, were not gone but, rather, waited calmly on 'the other side,' hovering benignly about the widows and orphans as they went about their daily business. Obviously, life after death was not a new idea but, thanks to technological advances, those in the land of the living finally believed they had scientific proof of an afterlife."
And in Germany
- "The German army today," The New York Times reported in 2008, "has no awards for courage, only for attendance."
- "Instead of marking Veterans Day or Armistice Day on Nov. 11, Germany observes Volkstrauertag, its national day of mourning for soldiers and civilians alike who died in war, as well as for victims of violent oppression," The New York Times noted last year. "German society has a complicated relationship with war, because of the Nazi era. The result has been a generally pacifist bent and an opposition to most armed conflicts.… The German men and women in Afghanistan set off for war without the support of the populace, and they know that when they return there won't be crowds cheering in the streets, ready to make heroes of them. Germany has turned its back on hero worship."
- Last weekend, German officials laid wreaths in honour of the roughly 12,000 Jewish soldiers who died serving the country in the First World War, The Canadian Press reports.
Reconciliation
- A British Second World War veteran will be awarded a top Japanese honour for his reconciliation efforts, Kyodo News reports. The award will be given at the Japanese ambassador's official residence in London later this month. "Philip Malins, 91, will receive the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays medallion for his work to bring together former British and Japanese troops." The veteran, who was never a PoW himself, fought the Japanese in Burma (Myanmar). "While many British veterans maintained a long-standing hatred of Japan due to the atrocities meted out to PoWs, Malins worked hard to promote reconciliation between the two countries," the news agency says.
- In September, Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell announced that he will declare next April "Civil War in Virginia" month, rather than "Confederate History Month," as he once again expressed regret for a proclamation earlier this year that omitted a reference to slavery's role in the war, The Washington Post reports. "One hundred and fifty years is long enough for Virginia to fight the Civil War," he said at a scholarly conference on slavery and race, drawing laughs and then appreciative applause from 1,600 attendees.
Thought du jour
"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
Ernest Hemingway