Today, the world over, people of the Commonwealth and other nations – veterans especially – will mark Armistice Day, and remember the fallen of World War One (1914-1918), and all major conflicts that have occurred since, up to and including those still on-going in Afghanistan.
As the daughter of a former officer in the RAF, I have, every year of my adult life, always joined my father for services on Remembrance Sunday, and since it was formally reinstated here in the UK, I have always observed the two minute silence that commences at 11:00am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month as a mark of personal respect for all those who gave their lives in the defence of freedom and democracy – two things that in this day and age we all too easily take for granted, or vociferously proclaim to be ours without really understanding what they truly represent and mean.
Today will be no different. At eleven o’clock I will bow my head in silence for all those who gave their lives – and I hope each of you reading this will as well. For we cannot even begin to imagine the horrors they faced, in whatever conflict they were caught up in; nor can we really understand the sacrifice they made in giving up their lives. But we can, at the very least, remember them and give thanks; and hope that one day we will outgrow the need to bring down war upon one another.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
(For the Fallen, 1914, by Laurence Binyon)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 