WHO COULD FORGET?

DESPITE THE SACRIFICE OF LIVES AND LIMBS, THE WAR TO END ALL WARS FAILED TO DO THAT, AND WE STILL PAY THE PRICE

Folks, just in case any of you forgot, tomorrow is Remembrance Day. At 11am we’ll reflect on the sacrifice of those who died in The Great War, 1914–18.

Well, it was initially called The Great War, then the War to End All Wars and finally World War I some time after the next big conflict lurched over the horizon with the dreaded inevitability of a dodgy curry making its unwelcome reappearance.

World War I introduced modern weapons to warfare which had a devastating effect on the old ways of fighting. As a boy, I recall being shocked at watching the high-speed, black and white footage of troops ‘going over the top’.

It was a simple system. Basically, someone from a long way away would give the order and soldiers would leap from the relative safety of their trenches and run full tilt across no-man’s land towards the enemy.

Whoever thought galloping thousands of men toward a line of machine-gun nests in broad daylight, without so much as a blade of grass for cover, was either a lunatic or not very likely to join the ‘brave lads’ on their one-way dash into a hail of bullets.

Still they weren’t as idiotic as the high-ranking clowns who, after the twitching, shattered bodies had been cleared from the battlefield, thought it would be a clever thing to do the same thing again. Over and over again. The tactics course at officers school must have lasted an entire three minutes. Decisions like this didn’t exactly inspire me to want to join the army, so I joined the Reserves instead.

I want to tell you the reason I signed on the dotted line was motivated by patriotism, but it wasn’t. My selfless act of part-time duty had quite a lot to do with finding out reservists had access to large amounts of tax-free (i.e. extremely cheap) alcohol.

Don’t judge me, others have signed up for less noble reasons, possibly.

Anyway, tomorrow we’ll remember the fallen, but the one thing we won’t need to be reminded of is how lasting peace still manages to elude us.