Remembering old comrades
War veterans lead town’s tributes to the fallen
The annual Garden of Remembrance dedication service was held at the Top Cross in Hamilton on Saturday.
It sees crosses with the names of fallen soldiers placed into a specially created garden.
The service is held every year in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday and was organised by the Hamilton Branch of the Royal British Legion.
Led by a piper, ex-service personnel marched up Quarry Street. There were readings, hymns, and a rendition of the Last Post before wreathes and crosses were laid in the garden. South Lanarkshire Provost Eileen Logan was among the dignitaries paying their respects.
Ian Forsyth MBE, convener of the Joint Ex-services Committee and a Second World War veteran, said: “This has been quite a year, having had so many commemoration services to attend, none of them being very pleasant to think about.
“But it made some of us wonder at the state of the country one hundred years ago, caught in the midst of a war that few ordinary people understood, when family after family on both sides were left to grieve the loss of a loved one or in many cases the loss of more than just one, a whole brood. We simply cannot imagine the heartbreak, the anger – and there was anger – of those living at that time.”
He added: “How stupid war is, for, as I have said many times, there can never be a winner, only two losers.
“So today let us think about those young men, those who sacrificed their lives in the belief that they were doing so for the sake of the future of this nation.
“But neither let us forget those who have returned home broken in body and spirit to a very different country from the one they had left and, in many cases, a country without sympathy, to a country that could be very selfish and, in a way, a country that wanted to forget.”