Remembering the First World War

There have been a number of articles in the news recently (or at any rate in the BBC News website, where I get most of my news) leading up towards the commemoration of the centenary of the start of the First World War next year. One could argue they represent a resurgence of interest, but tbh I don't think the interest ever really went away: Four years ago when the last veteran resident in Britain died, there was a big hoo-har; the authorities wanted to give him a state funeral but he refused. In the decade before that, there was interest because there were only a few veterans left and it was important for people to hear their stories whilst they were still alive. Before that, the late Queen Mother represented a living link to the generation of those who fought in the Great War (her brother died in the conflict); and when I was little, it would be the First World War veterans who would lay the wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

(By contrast, aviva_m tells me that with the national obsession with coming to terms with what the nation did during the Second War War, in Germany the First World War is as forgotten as if it never happened. My other non-British readers: How is the war remembered in your countries?)

In every town and village across the UK, there is a memorial to those of that locality who died in the war (often, though not always, also serving to remember those of the Second World War); and at school, I studied the play Journey's End, set in the trenches of Picardy, and the First World War poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke. Many people, I'm sure, are familiar with lines like:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

Or:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

It was as I was reading an article on how the tombstones in the military cemeteries of northern France and Belgium and being restored in time for the centenary that it struck me: The First World War is the חוּרְבָּן of the British people: A national disaster of unprecedented proportions, in which a substantial proportion of an entire generation died.

With this insight, the intensity of feeling about commemorating the war, that makes the British want to restore headstones and commission television programmes, even after every last person who served in the war, and indeed all bar everyone who remembers it, makes new sense: It is the British equivalent of Tisha BeAv. And the reason its commemorations persist and were not eclipsed by those of the Second World War was precisely because it was unprecedented in its scope, in the same way that commemorations of later disasters to befall the Jewish People, including the Destruction of the Second Temple, got rolled into the commemoration of the destruction of the First.