What is Lest We Forget?

Lest We Forget is the closing line of the Ode of Remembrance, the four-line verse recited at every ANZAC Day dawn service and Remembrance Day ceremony in Australia. The phrase commits the living to keep faith with those who died in war, and is the most repeated phrase in Australian commemorative practice.

The words come from a longer poem, 'Recessional', written by the British writer Rudyard Kipling in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Kipling's poem warned that imperial pride would fade without humility, and the refrain 'Lest we forget' urged readers to remember God and duty. The phrase was lifted out of the poem after the First World War and added to the end of recitations of Laurence Binyon's poem 'For the Fallen' at memorial services across the British Empire.

In Australia, the words are spoken in unison by the crowd at the close of the Ode. The leader recites the four lines from Binyon ending with 'We will remember them', the crowd responds 'We will remember them', and after a brief pause the crowd adds 'Lest we forget'. The phrase is then followed by The Last Post on the bugle and a minute's silence.

Lest We Forget appears on countless Australian war memorials, on the stonework of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, on Returned and Services League badges, on poppy appeal collection tins, and on military headstones in war cemeteries from Gallipoli to Kokoda to Vietnam. The phrase is also used at funerals for veterans and at moments of commemoration well outside the formal ANZAC Day calendar, including the anniversaries of major peacekeeping deployments and the deaths of individual servicemen and women in the line of duty.