On memory: When the pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray

Many Israelis claim the memory of the Holocaust will fade away if it’s not actively protected. British memories of WWI paint a different picture.

One of the most common claims in Israeli discourse is that if we don’t actively maintain the memory of the Holocaust, it’s just a question of time until the Holocaust deniers win. The witnesses will die off, the physical evidence will crumble, and in a short while the Holocaust will turn from history to myth. Ironically, the source of this notion comes from Orthodox preachers and “soul hunters”, who – out of an attempt to make people lose their critical faculties, which they call “making tshuva” – attempted claiming the mythical event of Mt. Sinai was as historical as the Holocaust.

The underlying argument of this claim is that there is something particularly dangerous in the Holocaust turning into a myth. It hints that if it is forgotten, or its historical veracity doubted, then this will pave the way for the next Jewish holocaust – other cases of genocide do not seem to matter to Zionists, who for decades went out of their way to deny the Armenian Holocaust. This concept clashes with the other popular one, that the Jewish genocide was a unique, a-historical event; these do not repeat themselves and are impossible to predict. This is not the issue of this post, however.

The First World War (WWI) ended today, November 11th, 93 years ago. The allies have won, but it’s doubtful whether there was more bitter victory since the days of Pyrrhus of Epirus. The French victory march began with a sight no viewer would ever forget: A march of the war invalids. Casualties were horrendous: France’s military college, St. Cyr, shows a plaque noting simply that the entire class of 1914 fell in combat. After the war, it was common in Britain to speak of the lost generation. France did not recover: When the next war broke out in 1939 it did not have the spirit for a second war. In Britain, Lloyd George – who, as prime minister, gnashed his teeth as he saw Douglas Haig, the butcher of Passchendaele, throw the lives of hundreds of thousands of boys onto the withered hills and shredded woods, attempted to remove him from command and failed – begged his country to kneel before Hitler rather than fight again. Six years earlier, in 1933, Oxford’s debating club decided that “this house will not fight again for King and country.”

As everyone knows, the end was different. As Churchill would later write, the young men of Oxford would be the few to whom “never have so many owed so much,” who brought about Britain’s greatest hour and who, for a year, would stand alone in the struggle for a free world, until Hitler would betray his partner, Stalin.

The British remember WWII, of course, but anyone traveling in Britain would be surprised to find just how strong is the memory of the earlier, terrible war, which could be said to be their country’s lowest hour. Orwell, writing about the English and their aversion to militarism, noted that they were always more interested in their defeats than in their victories. And, as time passes, WWII, for all its victories – for all its still living witnesses – is fading away, and the pain of WWI returns and takes its place.

Remembrance Day, in Britain, is November 11th – not May 8th. In 1915, a Canadian military surgeon, Lt. Col. John McCrae, wrote what would become the most famous poem of the war, “In Flanders Fields”:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

The poem became so popular, poppies became a sign of dead soldiers and memorial days. Anyone walking the streets of London in the last few weeks could see a large number of people wearing a poppy, or an imitation of it, on their lapels. “In Flanders Fields” contains three stanzas. The third one, the combative one (“Take up our quarrel with the foe…”) is often omitted; It goes contrary to the popular memory of the war.

93 years later, poppies are still worn in London. (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)
93 years later, poppies are still worn in London. (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)

The British remember WWI as a loss, a senseless waste of human life, and a yearning to a bygone age. It is also, essentially, an anti-establishment sentiment: It adopts anti-war poets like Wilfred Owen and his “Hymn for Doomed Youth”:

What passing bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

The British think of the soldiers of WWI in the words of, of all things, a German general (Erich Ludendorff, though the expression may be older): “Lions led by donkeys.” Needless to say, the percentage of donkeys, Ludendorff himself included, in the German High Command was not noticeably lower than the percentage in the British one. The last, bitter, poignant season of “Blackadder” displays the war as an asylum, from which Captain Blackadder attempts to escape at all costs. Every chapter mocks the generals more than the last one; the season ends, appropriately, in the pointless death of all the characters – generals excluded.

The politicians were not much better: The years 1916-1917 are the most bitter proof of the inability of leaders, on all sides, to end the bloodshed. Owen puts it well:

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

The memorial to the Royal Fusiliers, Chancery Lane, London (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)
The memorial to the Royal Fusiliers, Chancery Lane, London (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)

Look at the picture above. The monument is in Chancery Lane, in central London, and it is dedicated to the memory of the 22,000 (!) dead of the Royal Fusiliers, a London regiment, in WWI. The name “Royal Fusiliers,” of course, evokes “The Wall” immediately:

It was dark all around, there was frost on the ground,

When the Tigers broke free;

And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers,

Company C.

They were all left behind,

Most of them dead, the rest of them dying;

And that’s how the High Command

Took my daddy from me.

But that was “just” one company. 22,000 dead is very close to the total of IDF combat deaths in all its wars – and it is the number of one British regiment’s losses in four years. A regiment contains, give or take, a thousand men; The Royal Fusiliers lost their full compartment some 22 times. And for every dead soldier, there were several who were wounded and invalided.

A private memorial to the WWI dead, in an inner courtyard. (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)
A private memorial to the WWI dead, in an inner courtyard. (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz)

This is the official monument; there are also private ones, like the one above, erected by a London insurance firm to honor its dead employees. The official one still clings to the “ardor to desperate glory,” mentioned by Owen as precursor to “The old Lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”). The private monument has none of this. We have a slumped soldier, more asleep than dead, surrounded and defended by angels. The war, and its memory, emerge from many other fragments of British cultural memory. You don’t need Roger Waters’ angry defiance for it – you find it also in that Beatles paean to suburban life, Penny Lane:

Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout,

The pretty nurse is selling poppies from the tray

And though she feels she’s in a play

She is anyway.

Events, particularly traumatic ones like a world war, stay in public memory  – but that memory changes, blurs, fits itself for the needs of the people who remember; it then recedes into its own limited corner, and then fades away, no longer a part of life but the province of historians and antiquarians. Which is as it should be: The dead should have no possession of the living. Traumas should pass on or be repressed, or they leave us with no breathing space. The fact that an event like WWI left such an indelible mark on Britain, 93 years after it ended, should not surprise; It is the claim that somehow, the most documented and researched genocide in history, whose perpetrators have condemned themselves, that it in particular would fade away into myth – this is the claim we should be incredulous of.

Yet for some reason, this claim is very common, almost a truism, in Israeli society. Why? This is not, unfortunately, a question for historians, but rather for those dealing in national psychosis.