REFLECTIONS

Looking is one thing; understanding is more complex. Visiting military cemeteries, battlefields, walking round castles, touring former military sites, watching re-enactments of historic battles: activities like these increasingly form part of ‘educational’ school visits and longer trips or family days out. Pleasure, excitement, and a dash of education: good value.

Informative material provided by organisations managing these kinds of ‘heritage’ or ‘museum’ sites is often excellent. But presentation of the sites and their histories almost always reinforces the impression that the act of war is an inescapable, often heroic, certainly legitimate and generally inescapable part of the fabric of life.

It is a challenge to students and adults to look more critically at the military cemeteries, military strongholds and monuments to see what brought them into existence. How much are they models of aggression, not signs of a wish for peace? How much do they represent people’s past readiness to solve disputes by killing? What peaceful acts might have been more heroic? History is packed with struggles to survive against poverty, bad management, disease and the weather, struggles mostly unhonoured unlike those of the makers of war.
Material here looks at memorials and sites which in some way embody a 'memory' of war.