Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

Remembrance Day. When I was a romantical teenager I used to copy out poems to memorise, including "In Flanders Fields". I can remember every word of that poem - "that mark our place and in the sky" - "loved and were loved" - all of it was designed to make the heart ache.

There are some pop tunes like that, especially some recent Neil Finn ones and some from his Crowded House days. And then there are the pop tunes that are the soundtrack for past loves. Some make my heart ache so much I can't actually listen to them.

One thing that makes my heart ache these days is thinking about soldiers who have fought and died so that I can live this incredibly free and sensuous life. In fact, all of the people in history who worked towards a goal they didn't know they would achieve, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

I'm thrilled and heartbroken by:

The stoicism of the soldiers of General Washington's Continental Army who left bloody footprints on the icy roads of New Jersey as they marched to oust the British from Trenton at Christmastime 1776.

The prescience of George Washington who said, upon learning that he had been unanimously voted commander-in-chief of the army in June 1775, "...from the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation." We think highly of him now but he had a terrible time during the revolution.

The flexibility of Thomas Paine, an English radical and pamphleteer, who "hated war with the passion of his Quaker forebears" but believed that, just maybe, some "evils in the world were even worse than war" and who wrote so eloquently in December 1776, "these are the times that try men's souls".

The cleverness of Betsy Ross (for I know in my heart it was she) "a beautiful young widow" who wined and dined the 36 year old Hessian aristocrat Colonel von Dunop in her house in Mount Holly on the 23rd, 24th and 25th December when he should have been moving his troops to Bordentown, a place six miles from Trenton, chosen so that he could support the town against any attack.

There's a great book that covers that period, 'Washington's Crossing' by David Hackett Fischer, 2004.

He's very careful to say that no one knows if the woman who distracted Dunop was Betsy but doesn't it make sense? Can't you see her, late in the evening over supper, just a few candles and the firelight, pouring out the good claret and bantering, just a bit, and sympathising enormously and flirting in the coolest way?

The horrors of the Iraq war and the terrorism war are so gobsmacking to us because of the devastating power of modern technology. But in those days there was no quick communication, medical advances or food and fuel available in an instant. They had to be mentally resilient and resolute. This makes me feel humble and grateful.