Remembrances on Remembrance Day
- aksmith304
- Nov 9
- 3 min read
It is Remembrance Day again. The opening section of my new novel, Where No Shadow Awaits, is situated in the Belgian city of Ypres for the 70th anniversary of the Armistice, 11th November 1988. Here, my journalist protagonist Helen Parkes, meets a mysterious old soldier and the adventure begins. Helen is about remembrance. Even as she begins to investigate the past, the decades between her and the stories she must tell loom large.
But writers were grappling with the complexities of remembrance within a few short years of the end of the First World War. In her 1934 novel, Company Parade, set between 1919 and 1923, Storm Jameson examines the act of remembrance on Armistice Day from several different perspectives which belie any real consensus. It is 11th November 1921, only three years into the peace. In an ancient Yorkshire church, central protagonist, Hervey Russell, attends a service with her mother. In the church she regards a memorial tablet for her younger brother, killed in action in the Royal Flying Corps. Angry at the priest, whose faith endorses the war, Hervey finds the two-minutes-silence interminable and oppressive. ‘The silence drew into itself every quiver of light reflected on the walls and so strengthened it upheld the thin shell of the roof which would have been crushed: which would have fallen on them.’ (263) The tears of the congregation are drowned out, first by The Last Post, then by the organ playing God Save the King, as Hervey wonders, ‘What is man? He spoils and kills, and then laments with a simple unendurable grief.’ (264) But she finds no answers here.
Meanwhile, back in London, Hervey’s friend, David Renn, composes a long poem about the poverty in London as the strains of The Last Post catch his ears. His poem, which borrows stylistically from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, blends imagery of the slum dwellings that Renn visits with motifs from the trenches, in a way that illustrates his own neurasthenia even as he pushes forward with his socialist agenda for a fairer post-war world. This is socialism tinged with remembrance.
Another of Hervey’s friends, the deliberately named T. S. Heywood, a research scientist, catches the warning for the two-minutes-silence while in his laboratory but is completely absorbed by the present not the past. His focus on the chemical weapon he is developing for the next war is interrupted only by thoughts of his wife’s adultery. He registers the end of the silence along with the understanding that for him to pause from his work would be an act of hypocrisy.
Then the ambitious, social climbing, William Ridley is caught out by the silence in the street. He feels a nostalgic warmth towards the dead he left behind, whose names and faces he has forgotten. He basks in the freedom that he imagines the war has delivered to him. He looks only forward and not back at all. The tears in his eyes as The Last Post sounds are for show rather than a genuine emotional response. The post-war world is only good to him, offering opportunities that would have been unheard of in 1914.
Writing sixteen years after the Armistice, Jameson cleverly catches the complexity of the post-war moment. The culture of Remembrance that lures Helen Parkes to Ypres in 1988 has not yet fully formed. Past, present and future mingle in these varied responses to the Armistice, but in 1921, the prospects for the living are still as much a part of the moment as the memory of the dead. I am left wondering what complexities colour attitudes to Remembrance in November 2025.
Comments