Tom Tugendhat is a Conservative member of Parliament in Britain and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute.
On Sunday morning, I will join hundreds standing under a Norman keep before walking through a market town in an ancient kingdom for a ceremony that has been carried out every year for just over a century. On Armistice Day itself, or the nearest Sunday, this annual echo of the collective grief that marked the end of the worst conflict in British history is the one day a year everything stops, and we stand together in silent mourning.
In a country divided, this is our national day of unity. That’s no accident; it was sculpted to include everyone.
In towns like Tonbridge and villages like Hever, crosses carrying the names of the million who died in the First World War and those added in every conflict since will be decorated with wreaths of poppies, symbols of the battlefields of Flanders that still hold the dead.
The Cenotaph on Whitehall in London, a memorial that has no names carved in stone, will be saluted by the king at 11 o’clock, the hour the guns fell silent on Nov. 11, 1918. At that moment the United Kingdom will fall silent for two minutes.
The empty tomb was designed by Edwin Lutyens, the architect of empire who laid out New Delhi. It is raised 35 feet in the air and has no cross or symbol of faith. This memorial was always meant for all those who gave their lives. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and unbelievers could stand equal before the monument to their grief.
The Great War, as those who first gathered in 1920 called it, mobilized men from every corner of the British Empire. India, which never introduced conscription, sent some 1.4 million, the largest volunteer army ever until 2.5 million chose to serve in the Second World War two decades later. Ireland, soon to be torn apart in civil war, sent some 200,000, also volunteers, including my great-grandfather (killed at Neuve-Chapelle, France, in 1915). Those Muslims and Hindus, Catholics and Protestants, were equal in death.
That egalitarian ideal came early to the war. In the opening battles, some families paid to bring their sons’ bodies home, but most could not. To avoid the resentment of bereaved families, the War Office stopped bodies from being moved. The dead would lie where they fell.
In May 1917, Britain created the Imperial War Graves Commission to look after the plots of land that, in the words of the soldier and poet Rupert Brooke, would be “for ever England.” Headstones are identical in size and ordered not by rank but by action. Those who fought and died together lie together.
Across the world, there are more than a million pale stone slabs with a name, sometimes in Arabic, Greek or Hebrew script, recording the sacrifice of another time. Rudyard Kipling, who had pulled strings to get his son a commission in the Irish Guards, a prestigious infantry regiment, lost his boy at the Battle of Loos in 1915; like many other fathers, Kipling searched in vain for John Kipling’s body for the rest of his days, and today his words mark the graves of the thousands who were never identified: “Known unto God.” When bodies are identified today, families are traced and names given. John was finally found in the 1990s.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, as it is now called, maintains the cemeteries in countries that are hard to access, like Myanmar and Afghanistan, and has teams of gardeners who continue to care for patches of ground made sacred by sacrifice despite difficulties in getting pay or equipment.
Across France and Belgium, Greece and Egypt, plots are overseen by commissioners, one from each of India, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, and one representing each service: Army, Navy and Air Force. Parliament sends two commissioners, one from the governing party and one from the opposition — me. Our role is to remember the debt we owe and care for the creditors who gave so much.
In a nation where church attendance has never been lower, this is the secular faith that still binds generations and geography. Those who lived through the years of war saw the dignity in each of the dead.
When I walk with the parade from Tonbridge Castle to the war memorial and lay a wreath on behalf of the people I represent in Parliament, the same things will be happening in every town and village in Britain.
The same liturgy, vestments, silence, creed, poppy and shrine are there in every parish. Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, once called the National Health Service the closest thing the English have to a religion. Perhaps, but Remembrance Sunday is our holy day.
The post The one day a year Britain stops and stands together appeared first on Washington Post.
