It is a truth universally acknowledged that the whole business of forgetting and remembering increases in significance as we age: we struggle to recall what happened yesterday, while early memories remain sharp. I can, for example, remember my first school Anzac Day.
I was four and a half, and my mother had made me a cross of white chrysanthemums. I held my partner's hand as the long crocodile wound toward the town's memorial; then I deposited the cross beneath the list of names I could barely read.
And it was on that day that I saw the words 'Lest We Forget' for the first time: it took me ages to work out what they meant, but eventually I learned that the word lest comes to us via Old and Middle English; it is best translated, I think, as for fear that.
I recently read a piece called 'George W. Bush and the Forever War' by fiery American journalist William Rivers Pitt. He does not mince words, Pitt, and is enraged by the fact that former President Bush is publicising the book that contains 66 portraits he has painted of men and women maimed during fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts for which Bush should bear the lion's share of responsibility.
Pitt has a list of epithets for Bush that is almost as long as the number of portraits, but finishes by calling him 'the man with no shame'. The writer is also highly critical of the TV hosts and journalists who are giving Bush so much time and space.
What really appals Pitt, however, is the ease with which people apparently forget. He points out that the media forget, politicians, in their extreme cynicism, always deliberately forget; we ordinary people also forget. But it can be argued that whoever wants to live must try to forget; forgetting is, at least in part, a defence mechanism.
This was (and still is) a major problem for veterans who were victims of shell shock, now called PTSD; they found it practically impossible to return to so-called normal life, since even if they could forget on a conscious level, their unconscious minds gave them no rest from terrifying nightmares and flashbacks, as many a sleepless wife could testify.
The phrase 'Lest We Forget' entered the culture of remembrance because of Rudyard Kipling, author of the hymn 'Recessional'. Kipling has had a mixed press over the years, being labelled a jingoist and