Lest we forget.

Lonesome Crow

Pay at the gate.
The final scene from Blackadder, a scene of genius where comedy meets tragedy.


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Always brings a tear.
They fought for us.
They died for us.
Forever remembered .
 
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The title says it all
but we do forget that's why there is so much trouble in the world today, we forget the destruction, we forget the tragedies that destroyed family lives, we remember for probably half an hour
Then forget, it has become a charade
of its meaning
History is forgotten or is foresaken by
People eager to promote unworthy agendas whilst those brave men and women who sacrificed everything to remind us of the folly of conflict are given little respect but for half an hour once a year tragic isn't it
 
I wish I knew the answer to that question
But I have'nt, it's bugged me for years
One half hour of one day in a year seems to little a sacrifice for what was the ultimate sacrifice for those involved
Maybe the 80 years have dimmed people's thoughts
 
I wish I knew the answer to that question
But I have'nt, it's bugged me for years
One half hour of one day in a year seems to little a sacrifice for what was the ultimate sacrifice for those involved
Maybe the 80 years have dimmed people's thoughts
I find it horrifying Kendal.

Even worse is the sanctimonious crap from our politicians and public figures in Whitehall this morning, makes me feel quite sick.

I did what I have been doing for a few years now, walk to my local memorial, Poole Park this year, and stood on the fringes of a fairly modest crowd. Reduces me to tears every time.
 
I still see my next door neighbour in my head, A tall gangly 6 footer who's giant step used to leap over our adjoining wall in the back garden 21 years of age his whole life in front of him, used to pick me up and put me on the wall to watch the trains go by, lost his life in 1942 ......
Such a loss to his parents they never got over it
 
I'm just a little younger than you Kendal, my earliest memories as a child were of my father and grandfather remembering their friends and colleagues who died.

In between the interminable political arguments, grandfather was a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
 
For those of us who haven’t served it’s difficult to do much other than offer a little financial help and a lot of respect

I lost unknown relatives in the world wars and have friends who have been involved in more recent conflicts I have been to a service today, I go to the National Arboretum a few times each year to contemplate and consider the past what more can I do?
 
I’d rather not go to the Remembrance memorial’s at 11o’clock on the day. I usually like to go and look at the wreaths much later when everyone else has gone and I can stand in quiet and peaceful contemplation for a while.
I read endlessly(probably too much tbh) of our wars. Some of the things I read will quite often reduce me to tears. Some of the graphic recollections and memories of the old soldiers,documented by our best historians, are extremely harrowing. Like the paratrooper involved in the airdrop over the Rhine crossing. Having landed and shed his chute,and with “a war going on all around him”,he was moving forward when he passed a young officer writhing in agony on the ground. The poor fellow had been hit in the stomach by a ghastly phosphorus round. Alternately screaming out loud for his Mother and for someone to “please shoot me”. A few yards after passing him a shot was heard. He didn’t look back.Did some kind humanitarian soul shoot the young officer or was his own holstered pistol passed to him? No-one will ever know!
I would rather read and weep on the other 364 days of the year and regularly do. I have researched the names of the American Airborne Engineer troops that were in Burbage for both D-Day and Market Garden and have found some of their graves in Belgium and Holland. I carry a list of their names everyday inside my wallet.I prefer visiting the immaculately kept war cemetery’s to remember and honour these men!
 
@borebage53 I was drinking with a friend of a Gladbach mate of mine recently. I think he was from Arnhem in Netherlands. Every year they have a special day to remember Market Garden.
Yes schoolchildren tend and tidy graves and memorials and such like.
The Dutch people hid lots of British paratroopers stranded after Arnhem and the Dutch Resistance got hundreds of them back over the River to the Allied lines!
 
The rest of Holland still occupied by the Germans(Amsterdam,Rotterdam,etc) suffered “the hunger winter” of 1945. Reich Commisioner for the Netherlands,Arthur Seyss-Inquart, adopted a scorched earth policy. He had spent the war deporting Dutch Jews to the death camps,setting up the three concentration camps on Dutch soil, the “hostage executions” in reprisals against the Dutch resistance and mass deportations of the populace to work as slave labour in Germany.
Only in the last weeks,with the Allies closing in,did he relent and try to curry favour by allowing unhindered humanitarian Allied air drops of food and medicines for the starving Dutch people. It did him no good. Seyss-Inquart was arrested after he fled to Hamburg,was tried and sentenced to death at Nuremberg and executed as a war criminal!
 
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