Remember them

Out and about today, we saw numerous gatherings – large and small – for the Remembrance Day ceremonies. Duns had a large turn-out with the pipe band leading a parade of cadets, guides, brownies, cubs and Scouts and a goodly sprinkling of the Old & Bold. I think it is an important thing to keep going. Not just for those who will have sad memories but also for the young. Inevitably, the significance of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month will die out. The wars of today are not the human mincing machines of yesteryear – never again, thank goodness, will the country have to deal with 15,000 lost before breakfast. Any human death is a disaster but there is not the same national impact even when we may lose six in one incident. So few today know what went on in The Great Wars. Many of those who bother to listen or find out will have the modern day attitude – “Why did they fight? I’d have just refused to go”. There are reports that as battalions were marching towards the trenches, they passed engineers digging vast pits. They asked what these were for and were told they were for the dead from the forthcoming battle. Just imagine your caring Sun reporting that sort of thing today!
I’m quite intrigued about the fuss over ex-Ambassador Meyers and his memoirs. It seems a little bit difficult to work out exactly what it is that has roused the politicians ire. He has revealed the way that ministers and civil servants relate to each other. Is anyone so amazed that they sometimes met under intimate circumstances? Is some important matter of state to wait whilst John Major adjusts his braces? The disclosures of this sort help to de-mystify politics. Background detail that turns the writing into something better than dull as ditchwater reiteration of facts.
Maybe it is his frank but unflattering remarks about the abilities or otherwise of politicians. So, are there many that think Prescott has the vocabulary and delivery of Noel Coward? Jack Straw was a blustering rabble-raiser as a student activist – what may have caused him to become a latter day Descartes? B Liar – of whom anything unflattering is believable.
My end-of-exam verdict is connected with Meyers status – Civil Servant. That bugbear of lower middle classes who get some authority – pas devant les servants? Don’t they know their place? We are the Masters.
Luckily for me, it is all academic. My attitude is that all politicians are neer-do-wells. It goes with the job. Falsehood, blustering, plotting and duplicity are required ‘talents’ in the murky world in which they crawl.