…but the TV is still on

Whether he said it gazing wistfully out of his office window, or during a chance encounter at the Foreign Office, it seems certain that British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey did say at some point during the first week of August 1914 ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.’  Tonight public buildings and private households are being encouraged to douse all but one light at 10pm as an act of remembrance on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the  ‘Great War’. The thing is, that one light is likely to be the flickering blue-ish glow of the television.

On it, at some point after the reports from Mons, Westminster and Liege, there will be yet another report from Gaza. As military music from Europe fades into the background, screens will fill again with the pathetic human flotsam and jetsam of a merciless urban war. Many an old soldier from the Somme would shudder, I suspect, at the terror rained down upon children in schools and medics tending the sick.

Dare we invest so heavily in remembering whilst we still continue to forget, I wonder? It has been my privilege to visit many of the battlefield sites of Northern France. I have stood in the cool shadow of the gargantuan arch at Thiepval. I have looked at the ‘danger tree’ from the trenches at the Newfoundland Regiment memorial. I have stood on a blustery day at the Chinese cemetery in Picardy and remembered those who died from the flu whilst digging trenches for another man’s war. It is impossible to visit these places without being moved by the mind-numbing scale of what took place in them.

And yet all the while, on the other side of the world, in the very lands in which the words of Judeo-Christian heritage were first penned, the destruction of homes and lives continues.

A member of the Accrington Pals battalion, from which only two members survived after the Somme, was once asked by a TV interviewer if he blamed God for what had happened. He was nonplussed at the question and replied ‘it weren’t nowt to do wi God – it were folk‘

In every sense it is down to ‘folk’ what happens next, don’t you think?