I am always honoured to make the acquaintance of servicemen and women, be they still serving or veterans. Listening to them is fascinating, like hearing an astronaut talk about what it’s like to walk on the moon, so alien is their experience to me. I learn so much, yet what I have come to know most surely is just how much is unknown.
At the heart of Remembrance Day is our Cenotaph, a word I must confess I’ve only just learned is derived from the Greek κενός τάφος, kenos taphos, meaning “empty tomb”. Around the corner from the Cenotaph, the unknown soldier lies at rest in Westminster Abbey. But so much else is unknown, too. What was any of it, any war, any conflict, any exercise, really like? The rest of us can’t know, no matter how many books we read or films we watch or even how many recollections we listen to. We can never know viscerally how it felt in any theatre of war. The more you think about it, the more the unknowns pile up. In any given conflict, do we really know what happened? Can we ever be sure what was being fought for and why? The consequences may remain uncertain – and what of those who never knew what happened in the end? In country churchyards, I’m always troubled by the graves of anyone who died in, say, the early 1940s, for whom even the outcome of that war remained unknown.
The answers often die with those who could have given them. My friend Paul Cook, drummer with the Sex Pistols, tells me his dad, Tom, whom I enjoyed the odd pint with, never spoke about his service in the second world war. And in turn his dad, Paul’s grandad, never talked about his record in the Great War. Neither was among the fallen, but the unknowns lived with them and then lived on without them.
Today is well named because, in the end, remembering is not only something we have to do, it is the only thing we can do. Making sense of it all is impossible.
Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
