The Duty to Remember

Maureen at Kings Cross Station

After 2 weeks in London we are becoming accomplished travelers on the London train system.  In most cases there is a variety of routes one can take to any destination and it is fun trying the different routes.  I did find it challenging sitting on the train all in a row with the same opposite- it is like two Police line-ups viewing each other and to avoid the awkwardness most seem to use their mobiles - perhaps before them people talked.....  The Central and Victoria Lines seemed warmer, busier and more polluted that the others and we often preferred travelling to the London Blackfriars Bridge station with great views of the river before taking the underground.

 On Sunday 12th January we visited the Imperial War Museum - again too big for one sitting so we focused on the excellent WW1 and Holocaust galleries.

As I wound through the recounts of the Western Front I could not forget the words of Wilfred Owen in Anthem for a Doomed Youth and remembered by cousins Thomas McCarthy (wounded on Western Front 1917) and Patrick McCarthy (killed Messines Ridge 1917):

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

The Holocaust gallery was harrowing in detail and confronting as one would expect with many artifacts and stories of victims who survived and  ~6 million who did not.  The Nazis burned all Jewish books but If This a Man by Primo Levi and  Night by  Elie Wiesel should now be compulsory reading for all to retain the memory and lessons of this event that demonstrated the evil of which humanity is capable - sadly lessons forgotten too soon and hence the evils repeated many times over since.