November 11th 1939

November 11th [Armistice Remembrance Day]

Today has been one of poignant memory; but it has also been, I think, a great day, one thing that stands out as symbolic of something that is stirring in the depths of the nation’s being.

It could never have been a day of Mafeking for victory; it might have been one of profound dejection for spiritual defeat. But the public utterances of all leaders of thought seemed to have arrived at an unusual unity of atmosphere.

No ringing of bells, nor beating of breasts, but solemn rededication to a cause too colossal for one generation, to an end left incomplete together with full and grateful realisation that the millions of dead sacrificed their lives for an ideal too stupendous, too staggeringly new, to be universally accepted at once.

Out of these two terrible months, which have seen the temporary extinction of one nation, and menaces to others, one or two vivid pictures emerge - pictures which, trivial though they may be, I shall carry with me in years to come.

I see a phenomenally fine October and clear bright sunshine on deep russet leaves, and the green-brown of the hills. Looking over the country with the trees bowed down with fruit, I knew that that - more than all the pomp of clowns and governments - for me stood for England. Something fundamental in me found the thought of those quiet fields and generous trees in the hands of someone else utterly intolerable.

The other memories were aural: a Frenchman reading John Barbour’s “Freedom is a noble thing”* with such perfect understanding and sympathy that seemed to give an added lustre to the words; and little Clare sitting on my knee saying the 23rd Psalm in a clear crisp childish voice without a trace of over-emphasis or self-consciousness “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil for thou art with me”.

*A, Fredome is a nobill thing is a medieval Scottish poem by John Barbour (c.1330-1395). The full text is available in a YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=636lx2gfuxo