Armistice Day & Remembrance Sunday 2011

We today who have not known the horrors of all-out war at first hand owe it to the millions of Fallen, to those who made the ultimate sacrifice, to those who fought for their country, for the freedoms we enjoy today, to remember them and to honour their memory. Their sacrifice should make us think how lucky we are.

Many of the Fallen were young men barely out of their teens, who still had the whole of their lives ahead of them, fresh-faced youths who would never mature and age, never rear a family, never know the many pleasures of life lived to the full. Barely out of school or college, they were thrust into the unspeakable brutality and cruelty of bloody armed conflict. They were truly the lost generation. 


The somewhat pampered youth of today who want everything and want it instantly, with all their electronic  gadgetry and fashion accessories, would do well to ponder in moments such as these the fate of those millions of other youths who never even had the chance of a real life. Never has a generation of young people been so privileged, so spoilt and so well-off as the present one, with parents who bend over backwards to satisfy their every whim and wish.

Though we may live in a world of plenty and lack for nothing - with some glaring exceptions in Africa and Asia -  our insatiable appetite for ever more material acquisitions is never quenched. Today's youth in particular, unlike their peers in earlier times when little could be taken for granted, are strong on their rights and privileges and quick to claim what they believe to be theirs for the taking, but are reluctant and diffident when it comes to assuming their responsibilities and obligations towards society. 

As we pay tribute to those legions of brave men who put themselves in direct harm's way in foreign lands, who faced the spectre of sudden death on the battlefield and who did not live to see their loved ones back home and to tell the tale, we would all do well to get things into perspective and count our blessings. For there but for the grace of God go we. 

I salute the many thousands of brave soldiers who responded to the call of duty regardless of the cost and I pay homage to both those that came back and those that did not. They were heroes and as such amply deserve to be commemorated and remembered as a shining example of self-sacrifice to all men and women everywhere.


This coming Sunday is what we call Remembrance Sunday, when there will be a formal ceremony of commemoration at the memorial erected to the memory of the victims of war, known as the Cenotaph, which will be attended by the Queen and other members of the royal family and by the prime minster, the leaders of the other political parties, war veterans and by dignitaries from many other countries. It will be, as always, a very solemn occasion but also a very moving one, an appropriate homage to the Fallen.