From the Deputy Headmaster

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, all the way back in 1918, hostilities ceased on the Western Front, and peace descended upon an exhausted Europe.

Next Monday, the armistice ending World War I will be commemorated in Remembrance Day ceremonies across the country and worldwide. At Churchie, we look forward to continuing this important tradition, reminding our boys of the fragile world in which we live and the extraordinary stories of courage and sacrifice that built our freedom. These stories are deeply woven into the history of our own community, of course, and so there is an immediate and profound relevance.

The armistice in 1918 was actually signed in a railway carriage in the Compiègne Forest, France, in the early hours of that morning, but the cessation of fighting was agreed to take effect later, at 11 am, to allow time for word to reach all fronts. Such are the strange details of history. In an effort to remember the horrific sacrifices of WWI, important monuments were built in the years that followed. Menin Gate in Belgium is one such example, famously commemorating the thousands of unnamed British and Commonwealth soldiers who fell. Still today, it stands in quiet solemnity.

Writers and poets also sought to convey, somehow, the unprecedented nature of the calamity. Siegfried Sassoon is among the most revered, winning the Military Cross for bravery in WWI before becoming critical of the protracted nature of the war. In On Passing the New Menin Gate, Sassoon expressed the anguish that always shapes our remembrance:

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate—
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

We shall offer our own response to Sassoon next Monday, though one of Sassoon’s main concerns was that we could never truly understand the horrors that he and his generation had experienced first-hand. He is right, of course, just as we—in the comfort of a relatively safe and stable country—are not truly able to fathom the terrifying reality of conflicts that are still taking place across the world today. Our rituals are indeed feeble next to the weight of these catastrophes, and yet they are still profoundly important.

Next Monday, we shall pass through our own version of Menin Gate—remembering and honouring our troubled past in the very best way we can.

Richard Wheeldon
Deputy Headmaster