9
A Trysting-Moment with the Brave and Faithful
What Remembrance Day Means
THE YPRES TIMES
Specially Contributed to the Ypres Times By Henry Benson, M.A.
OX Wednesday, November nth, with customary solemnity, the nation
celebrated the thirteenth anniversary of the Armistice.
Once again, during the Two Minutes' Silence following the eleventh
hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the life of the nation came to a
standstill, and in the solemn hush the British race commemorated its glorious dead.
Over a million men, the flower of the Empire, made the supreme sacrifice in the
Great war that civilization might be safe," as we so optimistically put it at
the time.
On Remembrance Day they come back to us. On Remembrance Day, in a
myriad homes, all round the world, a bond of sympathy unites the living with the
dead. Once again in the beautiful stillness of the Two Minutes' Silence we feel
our lost loved ones close to us. Summoned back by tears and longing, they return
to touch our busy lives in that brief space when, all other thoughts shut out, we
commune with those from whom we have been parted so long. Had they lived,
Time would have laid his finger upon them as upon us. But, even as they left
us, so we see them once moregallant, youthful and steadfast. Men who would
be almost middle-aged now are still to their mothers My boy, my little boy."
For that, if tor nothing else, Remembrance Day is wonderful and beautiful. It
is, indeed, a day worthy of a great people; one of those rare occasions in our
worldly preoccupations which serve to chasten and subdue."
To many the Great Silence is a trysting-moment with those who left
them with a smileperhaps a joketo fight because they thought it right to do
so. Some of them were mature and thoughtful, and may have foreseen some
thing of the fretful bewilderment, the selfishness, the slow wasting of human
effort, of human faith and hope that would follow the struggle. Again, a large
number were old Regulars who already knew war in all its horrors, and
went without illusions concerning glory and honour; or perchance a sailor who
faced with knowledge the long watches in the lonely seas, with only Death as
a companion.
For the most part, however, they were simple, ordinary men. They were of
all ages, but nearly all of us think of them wistfully in forms of vigorous youth
troops of lads who were quickly turned into soldiers, who passed from their
schoolrooms and their sheltered homes to scenes of unspeakable horror and
suffering.
How poignant is the memory of those khaki-clad lads who disappeared into
that black cloud we called the warand died! How many mothers in the Great
Silence echoed the touching words of a Yorkshire woman, who confessed to
me in a little cemetery near Arras last summer, I hate to leave him here. He
was always such a timid little fellow." And yet that timid little fellow," as the
headstone above his grave proclaims, had won the D.C.M.