Today I attended a brief service at the war memorial at Old Eldon Square in Newcastle. The old soldiers were there, WWII veterans now as we have lost our veterans from WWI. Also there were school children with their teachers.
The crowd I became a part of assembled and a cleric said a few words followed by some military person who blew a whistle to mark and end the two minute silence. At the end more words from the cleric and then we started to disperse.
At this point I went up to the war memorial to see a box with medals on display, next to it was the photo of a man in more recent modern military gear. The kind worn in campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan. Then an elderly woman started to weep. I took no photos of this image as that would have been an intrusion. It seems obvious that this must have been her son, killed in action in either of those two recent theatres of operation, to use the military euphemism.
That photo and that woman crying over her dead son had more pathos to me than the dates on the memorial of the two world wars. Yes, people fought and sometimes gave their lives in those wars an we honour them, my own paternal grandfather served at one of the major sea battles in WWI in the Royal Navy, but to those young people, like the children with their teachers, that is ancient history. But the women and the photo are more recent and the grief is still raw and this shows that even today men and women put themselves in harms way to keep us and others safe.
So as we remember those who gave their lives in the two world wars that , please let us not forget those who gave their lives in other conflicts since then and the conflicts still going on around the world today.
Stickings90 