24 April

At school we had to sing the hymn, based on Kipling’s Recessional, from which ‘Lest We Forget’ comes. Do people still sing it in schools? It doesn’t have the meaning we give it today, as shown in the picture. It’s maybe an irony that we’ve forgotten what Lest We Forget means. It means lest we forget the primacy of God, a forgetfulness of which human wars are one symptom. Kipling drew from Deuteronomy, “Then beware lest thou forget the Lord which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt". It’s worth reading all of the lyrics of the Recessional. Anzac Day for me is about not forgetting that war is hell and evil. We need to honour those dead men and women, but we need to do much more. To truly honour them, whether you’re religious or not, we have to remember that their lives were worth more than the petty human squabbles which led to their deaths. If we didn’t forget this, we would be much more angry about every new crop of young people we send to war to be killed. But we aren’t. We did forget?