Image from The Royal British Legion, 'a national champion of Remembrance'. Our obligation is to remember. The Legion came into existence after 'The Great War', when many that had fought joined together to support to each other. "The Legion advocates a specific type of Remembrance connected to the British Armed Forces, those who were killed, those who fought with them and alongside them."
This year is the 100th Anniversary of the end of that 'war to end all wars'. "The absolute horror of the First World War, if not realised when reading details, is brought home when we look at the numbers of dead and wounded", Open ossuaries
Update: stunned by something I've just read at SteynOnline: "Exactly a century ago - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - the guns fell silent on Europe's battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o'clock. And then they all went back to firing at each other for a final six hours. On that last day, British imperial forces lost some 2,400 men, the French 1,170, the Germans 4,120, the Americans about 3,000."
"The dead in those last hours of the Great War outnumbered the toll of D Day twenty-six years later, the difference being that those who died in 1944 were fighting to win a war whose outcome they did not know. On November 11th 1918 over eleven thousand men fell in a conflict whose victors and vanquished had already been settled and agreed." [my emphasis]Unbelievable: "Hell cannot be so terrible as this. Humanity is mad; it must be mad to do what it is doing.", anonymous French soldier, reference to the 'hell' of Verdun.
No comments:
Post a Comment