The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

[calmeilles (imported)]

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Today is Armistice day and an hour ago many observed 2 minutes silence in honour of our service men and women past and present. Sunday was Remembrance Sunday when services took place across the commonwealth and world.

It's ninety years since the armistice that ended the Great War was signed. Now there remains only one living British serviceman who was under arms on that day. Soon it will have passed entirely from living memory. Sadly we do not lack for veterans living and honoured dead from other wars.

I was born almost two decades after the end of the Second World War yet despite this it has always seemed to have had an effect on my life, sometimes in unexpected ways. When I moved to London my front rooms overlooked a small patch of open land that was the result of bombing in 1941. Not until 1995 was it finally cleared and built in again. And although there have been feverish periods of development careful searching can unearth other patches that remain even now.

Another influence was my paternal grandmother, my Bubba. She died when I was a small child. At the age of 6 hers was the first funeral I ever went to and the last until my maternal grandfather twenty years later. My memories of her are consequently sparse but I can see her in my minds eye as vividly as ever. Slim, unnaturally upright and usually unsmiling, tall - although I know she was not, that was just the child's eye view. I grew up with stories about Bubba. The happy ones, the funny ones to start with. Only as I grew older did the less palatable come to light. Through their migrations as Jews escaping Russia towards the end of the Nineteenth Century the family left a trail of connections, cousins, aunts and uncles, one brother from Minsk to Warsaw, Berlin, Hanover and Rotterdam. No one in the family knows where or how they died as individuals: all we know is that not one of them survived to be found after 1945. When I learned that suddenly all the stories about Bubba made a lot more sense.

I have worn the poppy for Remembrance since Sunday School and Cub Scout church parades. In more recent years I have worn it to honour friends. For all that I would like to be able to be a pacifist I cannot reconcile the realities of a violent world with that stance.

My first second-hand brush with war came with the Falklands and I have to say that for all my dislike of Mrs Thatcher in this she was right; democracy cannot be allowed to fall to dictatorship. One friend sent, another called up from the Territorials and a third missed being on HMS Sheffield when she was sunk only by a delayed train and the speed with which she put out of Portsmouth. Four friends have been navy men another six, of whom three were my lovers, in the army. All saw service in conflict.

This day brings other, connected memories too. One of the most beautiful from some years ago I happened to be in Cambridge and went to the American WWII Cemetery (http://www.roll-of-honour.com/Cambridge ... etery.html) at Maddingly on the edge of the city. It was one of those cold days without a cloud in the sky and in the chapel the strong winter sun shone through the stained glass that depicts the badges of the States. It was beautiful beyond description and something I cannot attempt to repeat for fear of spoiling the memory.

There will always be arguments to be had about the politics and morality of wars.

But always honour those who serve. As so many Cenotaphs stand carved with the injunction "lest we forget."

[MacTheWolf (imported)]

I was born a year after WWII ended.

My memories of the Second World War came from my late father who fought the Japanese in New Guinea and from letters from my cousin, Eugene, who was captured on Bataan, survived the infamous Bataan Death March only to die of dysentary at one of the camps in the Philippines.

I think of them on every military related holiday.

[mrt (imported)]

In Flanders Fields

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Canadian Army

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

http://greatwar.nl/frames/default-poppies.html

[Pueros]

Wherever I go in my travels around Europe, I try to visit in reverence, & if there is one, the local war cemetery of my countrymen, of which there are plenty dotted about, including a vast one in Belgium in which my paternal grandfather has been buried for ninety years.

As Paolo & Jesus here can verify, my most recent such visit was in September in Poznan, Poland, which, prior to the 1st World War, was in Germany and called Posen. Next week, I'll be going to north-west France & whilst there I propose a trip to the war cemetery in Pornic, near Nantes, where most of the burials are from the Lancastria disaster.

The sinking in 1940 of the RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Lancastria, loaded mainly with refugees attempting to escape the Nazi invasion of France, off St. Nazaire by German bombers caused the loss of at least 4,000 & possibly as many as 9,000 lives. The event represented the worst single loss of life in British maritime history, claiming more casualties than the combined losses on the Titanic and Lusitania.

I'm sure that I'll find my visit to the war cemetry at Pornic to be very poignant, as was my trip to that in Poznan where, besides my own countrymen, including many of the 'Great Escapers' murdered by the Nazis after their recapture, there were buried people of many other nationalities. For example, besides Poles, copious Russian soldiers are interred there, mainly killed in 1945 overcoming the last serious German redoubt before reaching Berlin.

The burials in Poznan were not just as a result of wars either. For example, Poles martryred in anti-communist demonstrations in 1956 were also present in honour.

RIP to them all!

PUEROS