Remembrance Day 2015

It's over a hundred years since the Great War, also called the War to End War at the time, and now known as World War One, began with all its waste of life on all sides. Sadly it did not end war. We've kept on fighting each other multiple times since then. Sometimes they are big wars like World War Two, sometimes we've pretended they are not war like the 'police action' in Korea, sometimes we've rushed in without due thought and we and others have had to suffer the consequences and sometimes we have been dragged in by circumstance or have had no choice because we've been attacked. The end result is always the same. Blood is spilt and men, women and children - both military and civilian - die or are maimed, physically and psychologically.

Today at the eleventh hour of the eleventh month of the year we remember those who died in World War One because that is the time and date in 1918 that the Armistice was signed bringing that war to an end. But we also remember all the others whose lives have been lost in all the wars before and since.

Like every family mine has its lost ones. While my paternal grandfather, John, survived World War 1, my great uncle, Captain Horace Chamberlain, did not although his two brothers did and in World War 2, the four sons of that same John went to war but only two, one of them my father, survived.

At 11:00 AM today when the Last Post sounds I, along with many others across the world, will stop what I'm doing for one minute to remember these men and all the others whose lives were destroyed or irrevocably changed or damaged by war.

Lest  we forget.