Remembrance Sunday

Today was Remembrance Sunday, or "Poppy Day" as it is colloquially known. On this day we remember all those who gave their lives in conflicts around the world. Naturally, the focus here in Britain is particularly on those from this country who lost their lives in wars, particularly the two World Wars but also the Gulf Wars and Balkan conflicts. As usual, there was a ceremony at the Cenotaph in London as well as many others up and down the country.

Earlier in the week I saw a programme on TV: "The Last Tommy". It followed the stories of the last surviving British soldiers from the first World War (1914-1918). All of them are between 102 and 109 years old. Soon, inevitably, they will all be gone. And with them will go the first-hand face-to-face accounts of that war, the so called Great War, that bring home its awful horror on a terrible scale never seen before and almost unimaginable in these days of remote control precision warfare.

The accounts of the centenarians was of their experiences in the front line as boys of 17, 16, even as young as 14 years of age. I watched this as I sat feeding Oliver on my knee. He sat there in my arms sucking away on his bottle in blissful ignorance of the heart-wrenching stories on screen. I was moved by these tales of boys caught up in something for which they were utterly unprepared. And I thought of how lucky I am that Oliver lives in a time of relative peace, within Europe at least. And I felt more deeply than before the loss of those boys and young men who died and that of their loved ones left behind.

I won't go too deeply into how I feel about the politics of Europe, except to say that it is all too easy to forget why it is better to unite with our neighbours than to stand apart from them and why our post-WWII political leaders strove to bring together former enemies to avoid any repeat of the horrors of those two world wars.