We will remember them

This morning G, M and I went to the remembrance service at the war memorial in Holt. It's a relatively small town, but the main road though town is closed to hold a very traditional, moving and well attended service every year, helped I think by Gresham's school. 

This is taken from the service we were all handed to follow:

'Some 65 million men were mobilised across Europe during World War 1. Nearly a third of them - some 21 million - were wounded. Another 8.5 million were killed and some 7.7 million were taken prisoners of war.'

When I was a youngster I felt that the remembrance day commemorations partly glorified war. I was wrong and gradually that changed and it shifted significantly when I volunteered to make and plant poppies in the moat at the Tower of London in 2014. You couldn't help thinking of the individual life lost when you were creating the poppy and kneeling down to plant it. Then you looked up and saw over a hundred thousand poppies stretched out ahead of you in your section of the moat. It really bought home the individual sacrifices behind the statistics. 

As part of this special centenary service white birds were released 'as a symbol of our hope for peace across the world' - you can just see one on a roof in the photo. 

My granddad died 11 years after the end of WWI as a result of being gassed in the trenches, decades before I was born.

We will remember them.