How to Destroy a Cenotaph

A word from the restless dead...

We weren’t going to say anything. But you’ve made that impossible. You, with your sanctimony, your hollow reverence, your Home Office howling.

They say the dead cannot speak for themselves. Hence the need to commemorate, memorialize, honor. And normally, we don’t mind. We may wince, shudder to ourselves, count the poppy pins, whisper about whose grief seems genuine, though most of the time, even false grief feels appreciated.

There’s a limit, though. Even for the dead.

We can take more slander than most. We have no choice. Our stories are in the ether; there is no clinging to them. The Tommies who cried to a mother we tried to be brave for. The trench soldiers who called over the top for a truce on Christmas. Those of us left strung from barbed wire while captains moved pieces on maps and got drunk on the company rum. Those of us who froze in the Baltic winter, or staved off heat exhaustion while the brass starved the communists in Malaya, or turned to skeletons in the Iraqi desert.

For many, too many, the ceasefire always comes too late. So many in fact that you can only bury us in an empty tomb, turn us into a metaphor, a present absence, sealed off with giant marble slabs.

And now you say the slab is insulted. By whom? By the people who think we are already too many? Who cannot lose count of the dead?

As if Death wraps itself in any flag. As if it defers to those of us trained to aim a rifle.

You don’t honor us. Only the guns we carried, the bombs we dropped, the landmines that tore the muscle from our bones. You use us now just as you used us then. And we know – bitterly, we know – what it is to be used.

Every single one of us were told that we were preventing atrocity.
Every single one of us was lied to.

They say that the dead cannot speak for themselves. But they can be brought back, if only by those who remember – really remember. Those who feel the massive gash we left in the earth when we disappeared, who can feel it getting larger, deeper, more bloody, the torn roots turned to sinews.

Let them come from miles away. Let them hoard and mill around this slab, around us, and we around them. Let them march and shriek and shout so much that they shake the ground that traps us. We can only hope that they stop our ranks from growing.