Tim Laurence

Diary – 8 November 2018

How on earth should one do it? How should the centenary of the end of a war be marked? Not just any war — the Great War. A war which involved almost every country and resulted in millions of deaths. As we approach the 100th eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the answer is that we will mark its end in many different ways. This year 11 November falls on a Sunday, so the main remembrance events must all happen on one day. A gentleman’s agreement in Europe had been that each nation would mark it in their own way on their own soil. However President Macron has invited his fellow leaders to join him in Paris. Awkward. Does one snub one’s own country or the French? No doubt elegant solutions will be found.

In 1918 two American troopships sank off the Scottish island of Islay, the second in October, almost within sight of the Armistice. The islanders bravely rescued those they could and collected the bodies of the drowned. The women decided the dead should be buried under their national flag, perhaps thinking how they would like their sons or husbands to be buried if that was their fate. Someone found an encyclopaedia that showed what the Stars and Stripes looked like and the women sat up late into the night sewing a huge flag from what materials they could find. The story made a deep impression in the USA. When some of the bodies were repatriated after the war, the flag went with them and was kept by the Smithsonian. A kind American benefactor paid for it to be brought back for the very moving centenary event — a form of remembrance that pays tribute to a simple act with huge resonance.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, of which I am vice chairman, tends the graves or memorials of 1.7

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