Armistice Day

The name of Armistice Day, which commemorates the end of the 'War to End all Wars', was changed, after the Second World War, to Remembrance Day in Britain, but it lost none of its impact through the change of name. The Armistice was signed at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month and all throughout the country we mark it with a minute's silence.

Once, I was doing my grocery shopping in Tesco's when the call to Remember came. On the announcement over the public address system, trolleys stopped moving, people bowed their heads and stood still. We resembled the blasted trees in this picture, dotted around the silent supermarket. Each one alone in our thoughts.

I always find this act immensely moving, no matter where I am. I usually end up full of tears. I suppose I was primed to sympathy by the fact that I had to study the First World War Poets for English when I was sixteen. Ever since then I feel a particular pain on thinking about the Great War.

One of the poets we did NOT study and someone I had not heard of until this week, when I listened to a biography on BBC Radio 4, was Isaac Rosenberg. He was a working class man, unlike most of the other better-recalled poets of that era, and from a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia who settled in the East End of London. His letters home were almost unbearable to listen to. He died in April 1918, after two years in the trenches of France.

Two years.

He wrote poetry while he was there. He was, it seems, a very talented poet as well as an artist.

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet's poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies,

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver -what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in men's veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe,

Just a little white with the dust.

- Isaac Rosenberg