By Mursi Saad El-Din This is a column I should have written in October when we were celebrating the anniversary of the 1973 War. If it makes me feel guilty that I didn't at the time, I feel it is never too late to write about a war that changed the region and which one Israeli military commentator described as "a Middle East earthquake". What gave me pause to consider the way we commemorate the October 1973 War was reading a number of articles in the British press about Remembrance Day for WWI. The articles brought back to me memories of November 1945, when I had just set foot on English soil. In particular, I recalled the sight of young and old ladies, with boxes strapped around their necks, selling red paper flowers. I learned later that the flower was poppy, and the occasion was remembrance of the heroes of WWI, often referred to as The Great War. What surprised me about the articles in the British press was the feeling that many of them expressed that remembrance is not enough. One article was about a lecture by Ian Hislop, the editor of the social gossip magazine Private Eye. Hislop's mission, as he stressed in his talk, was "to preserve the memory of a generation of heroes who fought in the First World War". He is quoted as saying "We say every year at the going down of the sun/ and in the morning/ We still remember them." He then asks, "But will we?" and goes on to say "I fear that by repetition it [is] forgotten because it's a cliché." Hislop is known for his caustic humour, and for him to adopt such a serious tone is quite revealing. His grandfather, he says, had fought in WWI, hence his obsession with the 1914-1918 conflict. Surveying attitudes towards that war in England, he found much apathy and ignorance. He has produced a television series, Not Forgotten, in which he toured some of Britain's 37,000 WWI memorials, which bear close to a million names. Hislop is quoted as saying "I stood outside a supermarket and stopped people...and asked if they knew they were walking past a war memorial." They didn't, and he found that quite a number of memorials had been neglected, even though others had been well-maintained. In Not Forgotten, Hislop traces names of some of the fallen recorded on memorials, then traces their descendants in what he describes as a "genealogy in reverse". In similar fashion, the Imperial War Museum and the UK National inventory of War Memorials will create a searchable database of names, with texts and photos. But even this does not satisfy the London Observer 's Tristran Hunt whose article is entitled "It takes more than poppies to honour our war dead". Even though England spent a week commemorating those who had given their lives for their country, the writer claims that "remembrance week is the small window in the official calendar when we honour their memory". Beyond the rituals of 11 November, the writer continues, "a sense of connection to our wartime past is widely absent from public life". As for WWII, it is commemorated, together with WWI, in Veteran's Day in the US. Here in Egypt citizens from Britain, Germany and Italy visit Alamein in remembrance of their dead who fell in the battles of the Western Desert. In England there is a National Heritage Memorial Fund which was established in 1946 "to honour the sacrifice of British troops". With substantial sums at its disposal, the Fund has bought areas of the countryside and historic buildings which are open to the public, as a memorial to those who died in both world wars. And here in Egypt, what do we do to remember our heroes of the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, the War of Attrition, the 1973 War? There are memorials in Cairo and the provinces. But what of popular remembrance? Why don't we have a Veteran's Day where popular lotuses or Egyptian roses can be sold, with the money collected endowed to the charity projects? Surely, our sons who sacrificed their lives so that we can live in safety and peace deserve recognition.
