Never forget. “At the going down of the sun we shall remember them.”

It started with the First World War, was embraced by the Second World War and with conflicts since.

Many Caymanians lost their lives fighting with the British troops but more fell prey to the German U-boats when they were serving on British Merchant Ships. One of these was our Publisher’s brother Ladner Watler.

There is no grave for him. Just a plaque, a piece of stone, affixed to a wall in Elmslie Church and a name on the Seaman’s Memorial in George Town with others.

We must remember all of these brave men but it is no time for celebration.

In an article written by Boyd Tonkin in the UK’s Independent he writes:

“In these memorials, the studied absence of triumphalism matters above all”

“To the poet and Western Front survivor  Siegfried Sassoon – one of the authors whose sorrow, rage and pity did so much to fix later attitudes to the Great War – the Menin Gate was no more than a “sepulchre of crime”. In this respect, the poet’s view has not prevailed. Even people who accept the now orthodox verdict on 1914-1918 as a genocidal folly in which the vain, deluded old men of a doomed ruling class “slew half the seed of Europe, one by one”  (Wilfred Owen’s words) still find themselves touched by memorials.

“Why? The studied absence of triumphalism matters above all. The British architecture of remembrance does not, as a rule, celebrate victory. Neither does it trade in windy patriotic abstractions. From Ypres to the smallest of the 54,000-odd subscription-raised local war memorials in Britain, it identifies and honours individuals. “Their name liveth for evermore”: Kipling, the literary architect of Great War memory in Britain, himself chose that phrase from the book of Ecclesiasticus as a standard inscription for ‘stones of remembrance’.

“Another quality that has reconciled the war memorials to later, more sceptical generations is their strange sense of detachment from formal Christianity. Those “stones of remembrance” – Lutyens’ idea – have a severe, pagan monumentality, as does his still-mysterious Cenotaph in Whitehall.”

Tonkin also says, “Perhaps the names are no longer enough. Now, they may soothe more than they sting. Hence the recent hunger to hear the words of the final First World War survivors, fed initially by oral histories such as Max Arthur’s books, and then by the bittersweet twilight celebrity of the “last Tommies” such as Henry Allingham and Harry Patch. Frequently interviewed before his death aged 111, Private Patch said, repeatedly: “It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. The First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row.”

“Thomas Hardy published “Drummer Hodge” late in 1899, when Harry Patch – more or less a child of Wessex himself – was a year old. Effectively, it took more than a century for the common soldier to acquire not just a stone, or a name, but a voice people heard. For many who remember this weekend, that will be their best memorial.”

Go to http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/remembrance-day-we-remember-but-we-do-not-celebrate-8929747.html to read the whole article.

Now in our modern wars we have unmanned drones that fly like predators to targets thousands of miles away. They are unclassified and secret and are highly immoral. Will there be monuments with the names of the dead that have been blown up by a machine controlled by computers.

Will the new generation remember the dead that fought in trenches and could actually see their opponents? Or will it all seem to them like a video computer game where you gain points for each person who is targeted as an enemy you kill or even maim. If you can actually blow up a town you immediately go up to the next level of the game.

You can become desensitized to such killings at an early age and in adulthood the drone kills seem just that a game.

How can we then remember? It must become a celebration instead