I articulated my position in last year's thread, and anything more I might have said has largely been stated by others here. To me, Armistice Day and its derivatives represent something of a collective apology—several posters ask what makes veterans so special, and while people can argue back and forth about what constitutes 'heroism', at the end of the day every soldier is as much a victim of the wars they fight as those they fight against, military or civilian. We see it in physical scars, PTSD, and traumatic brain injury (
the direct successor to 'shell shock'), we see it in the sometimes abysmal state of national support services, we see it when elderly men break down into tears at seemingly-innocuous questions from their grandchildren. States may choose to dress up remembrance as counterintuitive celebration (maybe Arwon can testify; e350tb said last year's ANZAC Day was frighteningly triumphalist), but at the end of the day we cannot afford to forget that servicepeople are
people like the rest of us, but that whose occupation—conscript and professional volunteer alike—
demands that they forfeit a piece of their humanity so that the rest of us don't 'have' to.
The common soundbite is 'they died defending our freedoms'. When we have at last built a world where an office of veterans' affairs is no longer needed, we will have fulfilled our debt to their memory.
The guns spell money's ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.
When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.
O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.
Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?
—Stephen Spender, "Ultima Ratio Regum", 1939
