When the guns fell silent

[emanday]

I've just sat and watched the Remembrance Service at Westminster Cathedral.

When the two minute silence started I stood, as I always do, and bowed my head.

But there wasn't total silence. Beneath my window is a bird feeding station, kept well stocked by my downstairs neighbour. As usual at that time of day it was surrounded by a variety of finches and sparrows, all chirping away. Others, waiting in the bushes and trees for their turn, were singing and chirping, and I wondered...

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of that eleventh month, when the guns fell silent, were the the men still in the trenches blessed with hearing the birds singing and chirping in those fields?

[joette]

What a lovely sentiment.

[ninatoo]

It was lovely. I had a bird moment too, emanday. As I stood yeaterday in silence at my local school, where five hundred children managed to respectfully observe this tradition, a warbling Australian magpie filled the silence with his song.....and my thought, being in Australia was, "How appropriate for such a symbol of Australia to be making its presence felt in our ceremony."

[emanday]

I've also been watching Andrew Marr's - The Making of Britain.

Also included in the ceremony today, I've never seen that film of the funeral of the Unknown Soldier before. I didn't know how the body was chosen before today.

Although I knew many were buried in the areas where they fell, even without identification of who they were, I hadn't been aware that most of the dead weren't repatriated for burial here, at home.

I now understand the reason for the "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier" far better than I ever did before.

We will and must Remember Them , all of them, past wars and present "conflicts".

I doubt it will stop the inhumanity of man against man, but we can always hope...

[AndrewP]

Here is a link to the BBC website to a page about the Unknown Soldier buried in Westminster Abbey.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_f ... rior.shtml

All the best,

AndrewP

[Currie]

No sane bird would be seen dead on a battlefield. That insanity is for men alone.

I don’t think any dead soldiers were returned to their homelands. That practice has only been introduced relatively recently and probably would be abandoned if we ever had a war with numbers of daily deaths like they had in WW1.

Alan

[joette]

Hence all the War Memorials that sprung up the length & breadth of the Commonwealth.No funeral to plan,no grave to visit.Families needed a way to express their grief & a place of gathering to do that.
I remember my Granny saying that after WW1 many families wanted to go to France to "recover" their boys.Her cousin was one buried in Le harve.Poor soul had never left his Village & was so excited to be going off to War(he was only 18).
Clydebank have "done up" their War Memorial & it was ready for Sunday past.It also includes the names of the dead of the Blitz in 1941.Granny's cousin & my two Great-Uncles are on the memorial.I will be making a visit over Christmas to pay my respects.
Thomas Waddell's previous memorial in Dalmuir Parish Church was demolished recently & despite my request to the Archdiocese of Glasgow(the RC Church bought it several years ago) to retrieve it before demolition as far as I know it went with the bulldozers.My Great-Grandparents were very involved in raising the money for that Memorial.My Great-Grandpa's Church walls still stand though.

[Frances Kelly]

Thanks for that link Andrew.

Frances Kelly

[Adam Brown]

I don’t think any dead soldiers were returned to their homelands. That practice has only been introduced relatively recently and probably would be abandoned if we ever had a war with numbers of daily deaths like they had in WW1.Alan

Alan

Up until Spring 1915 rich and influential British people could have NoK returned from the battlefields. From 1915 until 1982 no British servicemen / women were repatriated. After the Falklands War that changed and we now have repatriations from war zones. Commonwealth countries followed the British practice for both World Wars but I don't know what their policy was for later wars.

The USA has always had a policy of repatriation if the family wishes it, and it only has 16 overseas war cemeteries.

Hence all the War Memorials that sprung up the length & breadth of the Commonwealth.No funeral to plan,no grave to visit.Families needed a way to express their grief & a place of gathering to do that.

That same feeling existed in many Scots communities for the dead of the Boer War. In fact Balmaclellan which lost as many men in the Crimean War as the Second World War (six) erected a war memorial to its lost sons in the 1850s. The feeling has always been there it just the scale of the First World War was unprecedented.

Regards
Adam

[joette]

Yes Adam & the War Memorial outside Inverness Station has the War dead from the Indian Mutiny et al.