Reflections on Remembrance Sunday

In the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, covering the wall of the main stairwell is a work of art entitled “List of Names Random.” The artist Douglas Gordon has attempted to write the names of every person he has ever met. And every year he comes back to the gallery to add more names. It is no coincidence that it looks like a war memorial, the names displayed in columns. Memory, frail human memory, is precisely that: a memorial to all our yesterdays. Douglas Gordon says of the painting, “It was an accurate and honest statement but it was full of mistakes (like forgetting the names of some friends), so there were some embarrassing elements in the work, but that all seemed to be quite close to the truth of how our head functions anyway. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.”

 But perhaps most striking of all is how finite and relatively small that number of names is. At the last count, it was just over 2,000: which, psychologists tell us, is about all the people who we will meet in a lifetime whose names we will remember. Remembrance Sunday is something of a challenge. Individually – in our entire life - we remember the names of about 2,000 people. Of those we will count in our whole lifetime just 150 as friends. And yet we are called to remember millions! We may have 150 friends in a lifetime; those who have died in Afghanistan in the last year number 111.

 List of names, random. Names that mean so little to us. On Sunday from carefully-tended war graves in France and Belgium, to the granite lists of names, random, in chiselled remembrance in villages the length and breadth of the land on windswept hillsides and in town squares people gathered to honour their fallen, and those lists of names, random, call out to us. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song ends with that scene and the piper playing Flowers of the Forest. “McIver tuned up his pipes and began to step slow round the stone circle by Blawearie Loch, slow and quiet, and folk watched him. The dark was near, it lifted your hair and was eerie and uncanny. The music rose and rose and wept and cried, that crying for the men that fell in battle and there was Kirsty Strachan weeping quietly and others with her, and the young ploughmen they stood with glum, white faces, they’d no understanding or caring, it was something that vexed and tore at them, it belonged to times they had no knowing of.” We may have no knowing of these times; on Sunday we too stood in solemn silence with something that vexed and tore at our hearts because we struggle to remember that which we have not known. But remember we will, for the list of names random speaks to us.

  In 2007 another list of names was unveiled, more epic and vast in its scale than Douglas Gordon’s “list of names random”. For the last three years we now have the War Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire to remember those who have lost their lives in terrorism, conflict and even armed forces training exercises since 1945. How sad, as one widow has said, that there are spaces for another 15,000 names on the vast walls. During the ceremony to dedicate the memorial, a letter was read out by 9-yr old Georgina Chapman, a letter she had written for her father Lt Commander Darran Chapman who was in Basra, Iraq. The letter told her father the news from her home and neighbours, adding: “I am having a very fun time at school with all my friends. I am not going to school today because I have this really bad cold. Lots of love, Georgina.” Her father never got the letter; he was killed in a helicopter crash.  But maybe one day, Georgina will go back to the National Memorial on a day like today when the leaves are falling and the sun is shining. There she will see the rays of the sun shining through a gap in the vast marble semi-circular walls. For the memorial is designed that at precisely 11am on the 11^th day of the 11^th month, the rays of the autumn sun will light up the central stone of remembrance.

  It is a sight that is hoped will give strength and inspiration to the families of the 16,000 men and women who have lost their lives in service to their country since 1945. Remember Georgina. To her, to so many others, it is not a list of names random. In June another 119 names were added to the list of those carved on the Portland stones at the National Memorial. As the Chaplain-in-Chief on the Armed Forces said at a special service, let us chant their names and call them home.

      1917 was one of the wettest summers in living memory and the rains continued through the autumn. On the battlefields near the Belgian market town of Ypres, with the drainage channels bombed, soldiers and animals sometimes disappeared into the mud. Human bodies were used as stepping stones. And in this horror, a private writes home to his wife: John William Mudd - better known as Jack - was a cockney from Bow in London's East end. In his absence his wife Lizzie held the fort, raising their children - a situation of which Jack was all too painfully aware: “I often take your photo out of my pocket and look at your dear face and think of the times we have had together, some lovely days eh love, and when I think again of some of the worry I have caused you it makes me only the more eager to get home to you to atone for all the worry and anxious moments you have had to put up with.” A few days after receiving the letter Lizzie received the dreaded news: her husband was missing in action. They never found his body: he has no grave but his name is there to see on the memorial at Passchendale.

     Lat Jack Mudd have the last word. In that final letter to Lizzie he ended with these words:

“Please God it won't be long before this war is over, and then we will try and keep a nice home. I will know the value of one now. Goodnight love; God bless you and my children and may he soon send me back to those I love is the wish of your Faithful Husband xxxxxxxxx Jack”.

 List of names random. One day, maybe one week, a year the names speak to us. How fragile our community when those we actually remembered number only 2000; gone too as one reporter wrote last week in The Times are the days when every village and town could boast its own community of veterans, emergency services, armed forces, the Guides and Scouts, Mothers Union and so on. Are we forgetting how to remember? How short our memories! Remember – the average person will have eight great-grandchildren, and of those eight, only two will remember your first name.

 The names will not let us forget. They speak of the value of home, and country and family. Gifts half understood by those of us who grow old. But from that mythical Scottish moorland amid the heather and the biting wind, as the vexed ploughmen shuffled back to their homes, and the skirl of the pipes died away on the wind, the people turned for one last look at the memorial. They had had the last of the day but maybe they didn’t need it.

You can do without the day if you’ve a lamp quiet-lighted and kind in your heart.