Days 73-78

Day 73: Not much of interest happened that day. We had British Politics and Literature with Dr. King in the morning and finally finished discussing Riddley Walker. I spent the afternoon and evening lazing around and working on the massive amounts of homework I had.

Day 74: I spent that day cooped up in the Senate House Library searching through the stacks for war poetry anthologies and journal articles to use in my final paper for Susie. After finishing my first draft of the paper in a process that took most of the day, I returned to the flat, had dinner, and didn't do much for the rest of the day.

Day 75: I spent that day cooped up in the flat, which made for a nice change of pace, working on my paper on Leontes' aside in The Winter's Tale for Jean's Shakespeare class.

Day 76: I got up early, pinned my poppy on my lapel, and walked down to Westminster. It was cold and misty, the city silent in the morning, the streets empty of everything but even emptier buses. As I turned onto Whitehall, I joined the throngs of people surrounding the Cenotaph, the bleak white edifice watched over by a single Coldstream guard pacing to and fro, saluting it as he passed. There were still two hours to go until eleven, when the city would fall silent for two minutes to commemorate the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the guns fell silent on the Western Front.

For the next two hours, regiment after regiment, dressed in formal uniforms, formed up around the empty Cenotaph: the Horse Guards with their tasseled helmets, military cadets in their greens, marines switching their guns from hand to hand in robotic motions. The people around me talked, laughed, and pointed at uniforms they found particularly amusing, as if we were at a party, or something, anything other than a moment for us all to stand and thank the deceased for their sacrifices, even though mere thanks can never repay them. This was especially poignant due to my position: I stood beside veterans of the current Mid-East conflicts, boys my own age missing both legs, half their face, or blind.

Down the street, Big Ben began to toll the eleven o' clock, and as if on cue, it began to rain. The doors to the Foreign Office opened; the Coldstream Guard in charge of the production shouted "Attention!"; and down the steps, surrounded by others, came a little old lady all in black, the Queen. I watched her, thinking about what a strange life she must lead, but I didn't feel anything more for her than a vague dissatisfaction at her status, at the fact that she lives in unimaginable luxury while the poor of England struggle to find jobs.

The silence ended, and in the rain we prayed and sang a hymn. But then the service part ended, and the parades began, the mood in the crowd doing a complete one-eighty from solemn remembrance and thanks to patriotic jingoism as 4,500 veterans marched past the Cenotaph, laying wreaths of poppies at its feet as if the dead give a shilling for poppies. It was different from the U.S. in that they at least spent fifty percent of the time in remembrance and fifty percent being jingoistic, compared to the U.S. where it's a hundred percent jingoism all the time.

The entire thing just reminded me of the History Boys, where they discuss how the best way to forget something is to remember it: to build monuments and hold ceremonies and give speeches so that all the lost sons congeal together into that formless mass of the Glorious Dead, to be honored forever for their formless sacrifices, and the real sacrifices- of fathers and sons and brothers, limbs and eyes and sanity- go unmarked.

It kept raining and the veterans kept marching: Bedford Boys taken from the mines to fight in World War Two, veterans of Burma who sweated and crawled through marshes, kids blinded and maimed by IEDs. And they'll never stop marching; there'll never be enough time without war so that war, and veterans of war, become a thing of the past, so that Remembrance Day can be just that- a day of remembrance- untainted by jingoism for the current conflict. The wars will keep going, and the veterans will keep marching, and the Cenotaph will remain wreathed in poppies, the Glorious Dead's wish to end war unfulfilled.

Day 77: Again, not much happened that day. I finished putting the final touches on my presentation for Barnaby's class.

Day 78: In British Life and Culture, Susie brought a sports journalist in to teach us about British sports. We asked about cricket, and an hour and a half of words later, I still understood nothing about cricket except for the fact that they have the best position names ever, such as 'silly wicket'. They don't have shortstops, they have silly wickets. We also found out that the longest cricket match in history went on for two weeks. On the whole, I'm quite glad cricket was never imported to the U.S.