It's one of those decidedly archaic traditions that I'd always really wanted to witness in London. Once upon a time, nothing stirred my heart to more joy than the thought of soldiers in polished armor, atop well groomed warhorses, sustaining a century's worth of tradition to provide yet another thing that tourists can photograph to show uncle Biff and cousin Sally back in Arkansas what a good time they're having before knocking off to McDonald's before midday.
Evidently, my sense of wonder has diminished somewhat over the intervening years from when I first read Ford Maddox Ford to the present, but I felt like trying to recapture some of the glory from a youth spent with its identity trapped in classical literature, and our dorm-mates from Portland had been the day before. So why not?
And as the guards filtered out into the daylight, armored cuirasses glinting under the sun's height, the flanks of their steeds shiny and smooth, even I had to admit that the choreography was flawless, the production values were nothing to sniff at either.
The men and beasts stoicly payed no heed to the ring of babbling sight seers. Perfectly still in the sight of a hundred years of grand military tradition, they defied their status as a tourist attraction with an excercise in martial pride laced with an almost noble contempt of the audience all around. Ten minutes of shouted orders passed, and then, with the words having been said, one rank filed off across the grounds on their patrol of the St James Parklands.
In 1982, in the midst of the IRA's terrorist actions in the UK, the Blues & Royals were the victims of a bombing, an attack that killed four men and seven horses. Many members of the group have also given their lives in battle and died as heroes on the field of war. There is something noble in those things, something that should be remembered and honored. Indeed, when you look at the Guards, you are looking at members of an operational military force who still serve their country. I can respect soldiers, I do respect soldiers, but I don't know if I will ever understand them.
London, like Sydney, is dotted from side to side with memorials to the fallen of the First World War. I fully understand those. They are monuments, and by very definition they are not celebratory, rather, they are sites of morning. In the modern world of state sponsored war memorials its easy enough to associate them with nationalistic ideals, but such sites seldom were, they were more often than not built by the same hands that had gripped the stocks of rifles in the Somme or Ypres. They were built by men who had experienced the futility and horrors of war first hand. Our cities are marked by dire warnings for the future, warnings we continue to ignore as a species.
More harrowing, to my mind, is the additional knowledge that there are precious few memorials in London noting the results of Britain's long traditions of Imperialism. In my homeland, as in countless other places throughout the world, the British Empire's legacy is not one of military honour, but of destabilisation, discrimination and genocide. What ageless cultures, what eons of habitation, what millions perished under the heel of what one watches celebrated here?
The men of the Blues & Royals are not to be blamed for Britian's colonial history, of course. Neither are the tourists here for their photographs, standing wrapt in fascination and awe. But in the dark leather of those stirrups and in the feathered plumes adorning golden helms there was, for me, a feeling of unease. And. as the mounted guard departed the square I did not feel any shared cultural pride. Instead, their was only the hot dust thrown up from a sea of white gravel and echoes of ancestral terror, under a sun that never sets, left in their wake.
No more than a few minutes walk up the guard's daily route we passed the Ugandan High Commission, tucked away behind the Admiralty Arch. It was closed for the renovations.
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