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Lest We Forget
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We'll be observing the silence in school today and we'll be watching the last episode of Blackadder goes Forth to remind the class what we're remembering and why.
We've also been asking the pupils to research their own family tree and quite a number have brought in medals / stories of ancestors who fought in the Great War which they had not known about previously.
Until the mechanised warfare of the 20th century such losses were unheard of.
So the poppy is about rememberance and about passing on our collective desire to prevent such things from happening again.
I'll be going up to the wreck of the "Overexposed" this morning - and thinking what a lucky man I am...
I felt physically and emotionally drained.
You know RW is in a slightly different time zone to the rest of us - 5mins ahead of GMT...
My grandad was a JPOW for five years. Fortunately he survived to not tell the tale but keep it to himself. Nevertheless we now know the brutality and degradation that they suffered on the Death Railway. Young men in their late teens who had probably never left their own villages in Britain never mind being held prisoner in the squalor of a tropical jungle at the other side of the world.
At work today we will be observing a two minutes silence and I shall be thinking of my grandad who I often think about when I'm out running. He gives me inspiration.
Men that did come home often never burdened their loved ones with the details of their experiences, never even thought of such a thing as counselling. They, rightly or wrongly, put the lid on it all and got back on with the job of living.
One reason for the shortage of poppies this year was lots got held up in the postal strike.
Strangely at precisely 11am the sun broke through.....
Sister-in-law in law is a war widow. No, he did not die of wounds, but in a much more revolting and horrible way, in a long drawn out dementia resulting, possibly, from inhalation of nasties when an arsenal which he was in charge of went up.
We don't know, the possibility was denied for several horrible years during which sis was faced with the prospect of paying the nursing home fees and bringing up two kids on a pittance.
Who saw to it that the record got put straight? The British Legion. Not just old folks stuff.
I quite enjoy shoving £20 notes in collecting boxes, and cry on remembrance Sunday, and during the silence. A very small price for a poppy, really.
Please please please don't forget the guys and girls in danger now either.
we had a minutes silence on the ward
the only chappie still speaking was an ex war veteran
his brain is not wht it was
Even I, the bugler, was touched by the sound of my cornet and the absolute silence that accompanied it and lasted the 2 mins and through the revaille.
The 10 mins before was marked by 3 WW2 veterans squabbling over who had seniority (and, therefore, control) but then there were a couple of mins when everyone was humbled and equal.
I have never lost anyone I love to war, and I have read the messages posted here with admiration and awe. Next time I will think particularly of the people mentioned; peoples' grandfathers and Stickless's brother-in-law.
I wish I could even hope that such carnage would never happen again. But I do hope it will never be forgotten.
Having said all of that, I'm ashamed to say I was in a meeting all morning today and realised at 12.15 when I came out that everyone including me had forgotten to ask for the two minutes' silence at 11am. So I had my own 2 minutes a bit later on.
Don't lets allow our children to forget - we should be encouraging them to wear poppies too. I haven't seen many kids with poppies this year, unfortunately.
The only sound to be heard at 11 was the happy noise of three year olds in the nursery next door, and frankly, that felt appropriate too.
Teenage kids might be bloody minded and and pretty obnoxious at times, but they aren't callous and given the chance they can show respect and be amazingly reflective.
Two minutes later, the lessons resumed and the normal hubbub reigned!
'In Parenthesis' by David Jones... one of the most incredible books ever to be written in the English language, and yet forgotten now... T.S. Eliot called it 'a work of genius... Here is a book about the experiences of one soldier in the war of 1914-18'. Anyway, I won't give my comments on it, as most of my research relates to the use of medieval influences, and would probably just put people off reading it. It's a fantastic read though - my boyfriend (who's in the TA, and is heavily into military history) thought it was 'enjoyable' in as much as any book describing the Battle of Mametz Wood and the decimation of the 15th Royal Welsh Fusiliers can be enjoyable...
The author himself fought in the 15th RWF, and was one of the minority who survived that battle, and one of the things that makes the book so good is the fact that it is historically accurate - a few military historians have even written books on it as a factual report of the battle...
anyway, I'll shut up now, before I get carried away - but do read it if you can!!
'We will remember them' x
REMEMBER