BBC Radio 4 2015-11-11

The urge to remember is one of the most powerful human impulses. It kindles our imagination and rouses our emotions at both individual and shared levels.

On the eleventh of November – year in year out – we offer an elegy to the fallen, military and civilian alike, in the wars great and small of the past centuries and our own. It’s often combined with an extra ingredient – gratitude.

Gratitude towards those who placed themselves between us and danger, quite deliberately if they were in an Armed Service and with an acute sympathy for civilians killed or maimed when caught up in the dreadful collateral of war.

Next spring and summer will mark the centenary of the great North Sea Battle of Jutland at the end of May, where a single stricken battle cruiser could take with it the lives of a thousand men inside half-an-hour.

And the start of the Somme on the first of July, when on that day alone the toll on the British Army was over 19,000 dead and a further 35,000 wounded, at the start of a battle that would last four-and-a-half months.

Perhaps understandably, these great engagements of the all-out wars represent the events that cling most firmly to the velcro of collective memory.

But, on Remembrance Day, thoughts need to go wider. For example, to another conflict – the great 40-year East – West confrontation we call the Cold War. The greatest shared boon of our lifetime is that it did not end in a third world war of unimaginable destruction following the exchange of nuclear weapons. That it did not rested on those who strove mightily to prevent the Cold War turning hot – not just the men and women in the armed forces but also the men and women of the intelligence and security services whose skills and bravery we also honour today.

The idea of individual sacrifice for the sake of the well-being of others is central to several faiths.

In the Mass Catholics are daily confronted with Christ’s injunction, which he delivered the night before his death on the cross, “Do this in remembrance of me”. It’s a reminder of the transcendental nature of sacrifice but also a quiet insistence that sacrifice is something to which all of us are called. . For most of us it’s in small ways in our relationship with others in our daily life. But for some it’s the ultimate sacrifice of the laying down of their lives. But, intrinsic to remembrance of the past is that it should alter our present.

For me, Remembrance Day is a precious and a perpetual thing – part of the wider sense of memory which the novelist Penelope Lively described as ‘the vapour trail without which we are undone.’