Next Sunday, 12 November, is Remembrance Sunday, when the UK reflects on the sacrifices made by men and women who have died in the service of their country. Services and ceremonies of remembrance will take place at locations up and down the country, including the National Memorial Arboretum in the county of Staffordshire.

The Arboretum opened in 2001, and exists to ensure that –

• “the unique contribution of those who have served and sacrificed is never forgotten
• the baton of Remembrance is passed on through the generations
• there is a year-round space to celebrate lives lived and commemorate lives lost.”

I am, at heart, a child of the sixties, brought up in the era of the peace movement to the sound of Edwin Star reminding us that “War can’t give life, it can only take it away,” and John Lennon pleading with us all to “Give peace a chance“. I accept that warfare might sometimes be necessary as a last resort, the lesser of two terrible evils, but any attempt to promote or glorify it is, and will always be, anathema to me.

I therefore visited the National Memorial Arboretum earlier this year with a degree of trepidation, fearing it would be little more than a shallow, macho glorification of armed conflict, a misguided homage to the notion that “might is right”. As it happens, I had nothing to fear: taken as a whole, the memorials are broader in scope, more sensitive and more thought provoking than I had imagined. Indeed, some have little or no direct link to the military services.

More than 25,000 trees have been planted on the site, which was reclaimed from old gravel workings and measures around 150 acres (60 hectares). It currently hosts around 400 memorials to individual units of the armed forces, to specific incidents and to sundry other causes and organisations. Memorials come in all shapes and sizes, and in various materials including steel and bronze, as well as glass and stone.

The centrepiece is the Armed Forces Memorial, an imposing Portland marble installation upon which are engraved the names of around 16,000 servicemen and women who have died in the line of duty or been killed by terrorists since 1945.  Inspired by monuments of prehistoric Britain, a 43 metres diameter stone structure sits atop an earth mound 6 metres high. Depressingly, there is space on the walls for another 15,000 names to be added.

The Polar Bear Memorial was the first memorial erected at the site, and was dedicated in 1998, three years before the official opening of the Arboretum. It’s a tribute to the 49th West Riding Infantry Division, who adopted their distinctive polar bear cap badge after service in Norway and Iceland in World War 2. Around its base are the badges of the regiments in the Division, and the towns liberated or defended by them. Inside the bear is a capsule carrying details of those who died, together with personal mementoes. Versions of the Polar Bear statue have been erected at towns liberated by them in World War 2.

Another thought-provoking memorial is that to the crews of submarines. The Submariner’s Memorial was designed by sculptor Paul Day. Its representation of a conning tower, through which a sailor gazes up longingly towards the sky, eerily conveys the sense of confinement that submarine crews must have felt every day.

Some memorials, including the Clapton Orient memorial, hint at a fascinating story. Why, the casual visitor might wonder, do a soccer ball and a pair of soccer boots flank an obelisk commemorating members of the 17th Battalion Middlesex Regiment? The inscription gives the answer, telling us that “Clapton Orient were the first football league club to enlist en masse to serve king and country during the Great War.”

The club’s players enlisted in December 1914, serving in what became known as the Footballers’ Battalion. The inscription goes on to tell us that “Many [of the footballers] sustained wounds, and three of the club’s players made the ultimate sacrifice during the Battle of the Somme.” The memorial is based on an original, paid for and unveiled by Orient fans in 2011 at Flers, in the heart of the Somme battlefield.

It is not just members of fighting units who are honoured at the National Memorial Arboretum. One of the most striking sculptural works on display is a bronze memorial commemorating the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). Sculpted by Alan Beattie Herriot, it features a member of the RAMC carrying a wounded soldier over his shoulder. Since the foundation of the Corps in 1898, 29 medics have been awarded the Victoria Cross (VC), the highest and most prestigious decoration for military personnel in the British honours system.

Another soccer-related memorial recalls the Christmas Day Truce in 2014, when British and German soldiers met in no man’s land to exchange gifts, take photographs and play impromptu games of football.  For one day only these men decided to give peace a chance, and although hostilities resumed soon after, their action remains one of the most famous and inspiring encounters of the First World War. The memorial is based on a design by 10 year old Spencer Turner for the Football Association’s “Football Remembers” competition, and depicts a British and a German soldier shaking hands. Simple, but symbolic and very moving.

It was not only men who gave their lives in the service of their country. The Aguila Memorial, carved from wood on a stone base, commemorates 21 members of the the Women’s Royal Naval Service (aka the WRNS / the Wrens) who were lost at sea in August 1941 when their ship the Aguila was torpedoed by a U-Boat. The Aguila was en route to Gibraltar where 12 of the Wrens were due to take up duties as cypher officers, and the other nine as wireless operators.

“Free Spirit” takes a very different look at the victims of warfare. Animals can be in the firing line too, and this bronze statue of a horse designed by Georgie Welch commemorates more than 1,000,000 horses and mules used by the British Army during the First World War. Most did not survive the ordeal.

One of the notable features of the National Memorial Arboretum is that it recognises wars are fought and won on the home front, as well as on the battlefield. One memorial, for example, commemorates the Bevin Boys. These were young British men conscripted to work in coal mines between December 1943 and March 1948, to increase the rate of coal production, which had declined through the early years of the Second World War.

Another memorial marks the contribution of the Women’s Land Army and Timber Corps, and rightly so: over the course of the two World Wars over 240,000 “Land Girls” and “Lumber Jills” produced desperately needed food and timber for the war effort.

The National Memorial Arboretum is full of surprises, and gives the visitor lots to think about. Two of the most striking memorials commemorate soldiers who were executed on the battlefield during the First World War, and children evacuated from their city homes into the countryside to protect them from bombing during the Second World War. This post is already far too long, so I will write about these two very different, and very special, memorials next time.

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Musical postscript

Writing this post has inevitably led me to a period of sombre reflection. At such times I tend to find that music – particularly within the broad tradition of English folk music – is better able to capture the emotions engendered by the realities and consequences of armed conflict than mere words written on a page. With that in mind, I offer you links to two songs that mean a lot to me. I hope they speak to you too. Listen, and quietly weep.

“And the band played Waltzing Matilda” was penned by Eric Bogle, a Scottish-born Australian singer-songwriter. It describes the grim realities and consequences of war, and the short-sightedness of those who seek to glorify it.  Here is Bogle singing his anti-war masterpiece:

As a noted apologist for the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling, the English poet, short story writer, journalist and novelist, is not the obvious composer of an anti-war song. Perhaps he didn’t regard “Soldier, soldier” as an anti-war song at all? I do, for it is a stark reminder not only of the brutal consequences of war for the combatants, but of the pain and suffering of those watching from afar as events unfold on the battlefield. Here Kipling’s words are sung by English folk singers Anni Fentiman and Brian Peters, to an arrangement by Peter Bellamy