We will remember them

IT’S almost 100 years since the signing of the armistice between the Allies and Germany marked the end of the one of the bloodiest wars in history.

By the time the final shots had been fired, around 17 million people had died and an entire generation had been brutally affected – not least all the soldiers on both sides who had battled to protect their countries and fellow citizens.

It was an Australian journalist, Edward George Honey, who, in a letter published in the London Evening News six months later, proposed a moment of silence to commemorate the fallen.

The letter led to King George V issuing a proclamation calling for a two-minute silence, to remember the ‘glorious dead’. And so Armistice Day, which became Remembrance Day after the end of WWII, began.

Some 98 years after the first Armistice Day was held, schools, workplaces, shopping centres and public buildings across the country still fall silent at 11am to remember those who have died in conflict.

Red poppies, the flowers that sprung up around the bodies of the dead on the battlefields of Western Europe, are sold by the Royal British Legion and worn in the run-up to Remembrance Day and Remembrance Sunday as a symbol of the sacrifice made by soldiers killed by war.

Today, conflict and division still cause immense suffering around the world.

As we think about all those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, the commemorations also serve as a timely reminder that we should never take peace for granted.