Rector’s Remembrance Day Speech – 10 November 2006

At the beginning of this week, I spent some clear time between meetings in London visiting the Tate Britain Gallery. There was a wonderful Holbein exhibition; a brief chance was taken to look at the Turner prize exhibits, and then freedom to wander in this huge Art Gallery. Perhaps it was the knowledge that Remembrance Day was approaching that made me conscious of the prevalence of war images, painting of battlefields, sculptures of conflict and so on. In the rooms dedicated to nineteenth century narrative paintings, paintings which have a traceable story in them, one painting held me for some time, The Order of Release by Millais. A Highland soldier, heavily swathed in bandages, being given back to his wife, signed off, useless, right arm strapped to his body – someone whose life had lost its shape and meaning. Somehow it went beyond Victorian sentimentalism.

His young wife’s look combined love, gratitude and fear for a future which was going to be so different now that her young husband had been invalided home from the Jacobite rebellion. I instinctively straightened my poppy in the lapel, while noting the colour link between the poppy and the redcoat. That painting of a time 250 years ago, is one of many potent images for us when we think of individual soldiers returning from battle. And today, as Dollar Academy pauses, we share in collective memories.

The great conflicts of the 20th Century likewise are continually being distilled into images. All of you who have studied the First World War in history classes will find the cinema of your minds running sequences and individual shots of the trenches – the hectic scrambling over the top. The Spanish Civil War in the 1930s can be imagined through Picasso’s Guernica. The Second World War in that same cinema of your mind probably screens a mixture of torchlit processions of the Nuremberg rallies and of stark images of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz. By the time of Vietnam in the 1960s, the world was transfixed by the image of a little child running screaming along a truck-lined road, her body seared by napalm. In the poem we heard today, Falklands 1982 was brought powerfully to mind.

And now, what are the images which fill your minds at the thought of Iraq or Afghanistan? Rather than any image of conflict, I suspect, comes the symbolic genesis, the still unbelievable footage of the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11. Yet somehow, the Twin Towers moment seems filmic and distant. The poppies worn today have a genuinely local function of directly supporting the care of ex-servicemen and women whose lives, rather like that of the soldier in the Victorian painting, have been irrevocably altered by war.

There will, I suspect, be no-one in this hall today whose family tree will not have a silent branch as a result of a death in one of the twentieth century’s main conflicts. Many here will have relatives or close family links with the current theatres of war in Afghanistan or Iraq; a soldier who recently died in Iraq was taught by the wife of one of my colleagues, and was sitting in her class four years ago. People are still dying in war, and if nothing else, today must make us think more seriously about our own lives and perspectives on conflict.

In 1992, a radical post-modern historian, Brenda Marshall, wrote that ‘History lets us think we know the past. Instead, history should not be looked on as linear, a line leading straight up to today. It’s about chance; it’s about power’. Fair enough, but her comment sits awkwardly with the lack of historical understanding shown by too many of today’s world leaders – politicians who expected to deal ruthlessly with Afghanistan, when historical evidence suggests minimal chances of success for the away team; similarly any awareness of the history of Iraq might have encouraged caution. The Prozac generation of politicians might have made more effective risk assessments had they evaluated the patterns of history. Do the poppies mean anything to them?

Above all, the poppies remind us all here of the losses. The list of names on the School War memorial constitutes an extraordinary proportion of the Dollar community in the First and Second World Wars (the names of those who died in other conflict areas are listed also). The sheer numbers of deaths still bear repetition in global terms – 10 million deaths in World War I; 10 million in the Russian Civil War; 20 million further deaths in Russia; 10 million deaths of soldiers worldwide in World War II; 5 million deaths of Jews; 10 million deaths of other civilians – with 200,000 estimated deaths in Dresden, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki as the techniques of violence focussed on individuals, on citizens, on non-military personnel. Over 110 million died between 1914 and 1973 in war.

Our wearing of the poppy is above all a symbol of our common humanity – our corporate awareness of loss. And if you read George Kerevan’s excellent article in yesterday’s Scotsman you will learn the poignant story of the unpredicted growth of the symbolic poppy in the years immediately after World War I; as haphazard, indeed, as in nature.

Barbara Ehrenreich in her highly personal reading of the History of War – Blood Rites - suggests that the “war to end all wars” was not the First World War, but is yet to come, and will in fact come only if we have many leaders throughout our world willing to “fight against war on this war-ridden planet… (and they) must prepare themselves to lose battle after battle and still fight on, to lose security, comfort, position, even life”.

Today, when the bell goes at 11am to mark the beginning of two minutes of silence, don’t be scared to touch your poppy, to personalise this matter of memory. You have pinned on your poppy to help you to think – about loss, about the reasons for men and women giving their lives, and about the apparent inability of human beings to avoid division, conflict and deadly war. And it is your thoughts, not the thoughts of others, which are of importance here. Ultimately, it will be your actions which will determine whether or not the names on our war memorial will be anything more than individual human tragedies.

© JSR