TIME TO STOP CELEBRATING WAR.

The words of Albert Evans, a survivor of D-Day, make me think about the practice of continuing to commemorate the assorted dates of WW2 - its beginning, Dunkirk, D-Day, the assorted bombings, the liberations and so on. A couple of weeks ago, Albert Evans, was awarded the Legion d'Honneur, for his part in the allied landings at Pegasus Bridge in 1944 but, when interviewed, merely said :

"All your mates who were standing by your side one minute were gone the next

Is that not the truth and is it not such a horrible truth that those who survived need to be allowed to forget or, at least, not to be harassed by those who want to make a celebratory remembrance out of the horrors that it involved. ?

War is terrible. Old fashioned war, man-to-man with swords, axes and other sharp weapons was grotesque and more modern war in which the opponent can be killed at a distance may be less immediate but is even more destructive of both people and property. It seems that Albert Evans didn't see himself as being any sort of hero, he was just doing his job while his pals died.

He was right. He should be left alone with his memories. If he wants to share them, that's fine by me, but if he wants to try to forget, that's fine also. As someone who never had to face the horrors of warfare, I'm more than happy to allow those who did to try to put those horrors behind them. It seems that Albert Evans was rather badgered into accepting his honour, his granddaughter apparently saying that it had taken a lot of persuasion to get him to accept the award.

If he was my granddad, I'd have left him to make up his own mind; surely he suffered enough in WW2 without it being brought back to torment him so many years later. We remember the victims of warfare every 11th November and on every Remembrance Sunday; by inventing ceremonies for every imaginable date, particularly from World War 2, we diminish the meaning of those November events. We also risk ignoring the other conflicts - World War 1, Korea, Palestine, Kenya, Malaysia, The Falklands, Iraq and others - for which notable dates are less well known. 

We've already long consigned the dates of the many engagements of the middle ages, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Sevastopol, Balaclava, Omdurman, Khartoum, Mafeking and many more, to history; it's now time to stop creating so many other excuses to celebrate warfare and its horrors under the guise of remembrance.