Music for Remembrance Day

Although - as I pointed out earlier - I won't wear a poppy for a host of reasons, I'm not opposed to publicly remembering the victims of war, which I see as very different to the triumphalist, self-deceiving jingoism of the armchair generals and politicians who go on about freedom, sacrifice and the Glorious Dead.

War for many combatants was not voluntary, heroic or admirable. It was savage, vicious and a mark of social failure. Harry Partch, the WW1 veteran who died recently aged 111 described it as 'organised murder'. I'm no pacifist - I'm proud of my ancestors who fought against the British in the Boer War and the Easter Rising, for instance, and those who opposed Nazism, but I'm deeply suspicious of those who romanticise military service, and use it as cover to justify war. We forget that millions of soldiers came home determined to create a better, peaceful world rather than boast about their deeds.

One of my final-year students is writing her dissertation on poetic responses to the First World War (hopefully not the overly-familiar texts we all know too well), so my thoughts drifted to Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer who volunteered for service even though he was 41. Perhaps he was caught up in the patriotic fervour of the moment - though in many ways he was a critical thinker - but the effect didn't last. He survived the war and responded to the horror by composing music which expressed disquiet about the myths of the 'Great' war, especially in his Pastoral Symphony, which uses a military bugler's false note as a key motif through which to explore the nature of war and the hoped-for peace, under the deceptive prettiness of the work's other themes.



His 'Dirge for Veterans' refuses to glorify war either - it's a serious-minded elegy for the victims of those comfortably sitting far behind the lines sending men out to die.



The other war-related piece VW produced was his 1946 Symphony No. 6: a surprise from a man popularly associated with contemplative nostalgia: it's often interpreted as a vision of the horrors of the 1939-45 conflict, and dread at what seemed to be the imminent nuclear war.

The annual, weary, poppy debate

It's that time of year, when social pressure means that anyone in the public eye is compelled to wear a poppy for Remembrance Day, and anyone not wearing one is looked at funny.

Why don't I wear one? Because David Cameron is just plain wrong when he says that:

wearing a poppy [is] to remember those who have given their lives for our freedom 

The poppy appeal raises money for British Army veterans and their families. It doesn't restrict funding to those who fought in the one justified war the British have fought in past centuries (WW2, in case you're wondering). It represents one side in a string of conflicts, many of which can't be justified: Ireland over the centuries, India, Kenya, Malaya, South Africa, Suez, Iraq, Afghanistan (repeatedly) and a whole string of other vicious wars of conquest and oppression which can't be justified. Most of these people haven't given their lives for 'our freedom', but for colonialism, capitalism and racial supremacy. I can't see how 'our freedom' was served by invading Iraq, arming Saudi Arabia or bombing Libya: there are arguments for and against these actions, but no Saudis have been freed, let alone the rest of us.

The usual counter-claim to this is that we're helping and remembering the soldiers, who don't make policy. There's something to this: economic conditions drive people into the armed services very often, and I wouldn't blame individuals for that - though I do note that the UK Armed Forces are professionals: nobody's been conscripted. If the poppy symbolically represented all those who did what they were told without being responsible for wars' intentions, then we'd remember all those German conscripts too.

I will wear a poppy one day: when it represents all those killed in war, without regard to which side they were on, or whether they were military or civilians, such as the Bloody Sunday victims. It's time that public discourse on this grew up: the British state is not and rarely has been unequivocally supportive of freedom and democracy. Not every war has been a 'just' one.