In 2010, Argyll remembers

Remembrance Sunday is the opportunity to redeem from time those who have died in the service of their country. They may be people we knew or who were from our own community and are an enduring part of what it is.

This act of very specific remembrance is also a touchstone to our own humanity, to the ability to feel and to be moved by the various things that bring men and women to and beyond the point of death for something far beyond themselves.

It’s complicated. We cannot any longer accept that all of these lives are given and lost in large, worthwhile or even honest causes.

We have learned to deal with this by divorcing the sacrificial commitment from the thing that has required its giving. We have discovered that it is possible to pay tribute to one without endorsing the other.

What has happened in the village of Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire exemplifies this shift.

When the bodies of servicemen killed in action in Iraq started to be repatriated through RAF Lyneham, these were initially awkward occasions. Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister never once went to receive home the bodies of those he sent into that dubious war. He was afraid of the cameras recording what the relatives of the dead might say to him.

The country too was ambiguous – for very different reasons – and for a while there was a reserve about such occasions, the bodies of the servicemen somehow carrying the weight of national doubt, anger even, of why we were there and perhaps of guilt that we had not resisted it more strongly.

We kept count of how many were dying, as  much for ammunition to use in political protest against what had been done in our name.

Eventually we became ashamed at our failure to connect properly with and recognise the magnitude of young lives given and taken simply in service.

Wootton Basset organised, ritualised, personalised the passage home of every member of the British armed forces posthumously ushered through it on their mute return.

That ritual, like today’s, gives us pause, time literally to spare a thought ‘for whom the bell tolls’. Because it tolls for us, for the ordinary folk who find themselves – and their fellows – at the irretrievable point of sacrifice.

This is a moment at once measureable and unknowable, unimaginable, enormous – the passing of a life, the instant between being and gone.

All across Argyll today, communities have come together at their war memorials, to the sound of the pipes, to look at and make familiar again those names of the village dead they pass most days, although rarely without some degree of notice.

This is a day of communal repatriation, of carrying forward those who left some time ago into the present that this year is not the same as it was last year. Yes, it takes us back but yes, it brings them forwards.

Furnace in Mid Argyll can stand for all of the Argyll communities who gathered for this purpose today.

A party from the Inveraray and District Novice Pipe Band under Pipe Major Robert Stewart marched and played, The Reverend Roddy Macleod from Cumlodden Church led the service of remembrance outside the Village Hall by the War Memorial, in the cold winter sunlight. The bronze and rust of the leaves still on the trees on the hillsides added warmth.

The engine of a delivery van, ignorant of what was going on, roared nearer and dwindled to a sorry stop.

The usual two wreaths were laid.

Rob Irons, kilted, on the right in the top photograph,  laid the one from the British Legion; and the wreath from the Community Council was laid by its Vice Chairman, Robbie Bell, on the left, a man who endlessly and thoughtfully serves the community of Furnace from his work in the school, to his organisation of the Village Hall for community events, to his individual line in setting Quiz questions.

Me? I read the names of two Townsleys on the list of the dead in the first World War, members of a family of travellers dying amongst their settled countrymen.

I thought of the wise Jimmy Sinclair, whose story I wrote ten years ago, a young man taken prisoner early on in France in the rout of the 51st Highland Division in the second World War, spending the rest of the war in the salt mines of East Germany.

I looked at the name of Private Robert Campbell on the plaque on the War Memorial, commemorating those who died in that war.

He was a classmate of Jimmy Sinclair’s in Furnace School. As teenagers, they joined the Territorials together – to get a village drill hall they could use for other purposes. They served together. They were each in charge of a company of nine men dug in at a crossroads when Germen tanks came down the road and mortared them. Jimmy lost men from his company. None of Robert’s survived.

When Jimmy spoke to me of this fifty years later, tears filled his eyes when he remembered the lad who was Robert. They fill mine now at the poignancy of the turns lives take. Jimmy said to me then: ‘What a thing to be doing? Why do we?

Lynda Henderson