We will remember them

Saturday, 14 November 2009

It’s been a poignant week. The week that includes Armistice Day, 11 November, always gives one pause for thought, but this week’s services of remembrance took on an extra significance.

It is because this is the first Armistice Day to be remembered without a single veteran of the First World War left alive. Ninety-one years have passed since the Great War ended, and on Wednesday the Queen led a service in Westminster Abbey which marked the passing in the past year of the last three veterans of the War from Britain.

In 2008 Henry Allingham, Harry Patch and William Stone were able to attend the ceremony at the Cenotaph in London, but not this year, or ever again, as Mr Stone died in January, aged 108; Mr Allingham died in July, aged 113; and the last one of all, Harry Patch, died a week later, aged 111.

These sad deaths, together with increasing fatality rates in Afghanistan, seem to have brought new meaning and understanding to the remembrance services this week.

The fact that we no longer have any veterans from the First World War gives new poignancy to the oft-quoted line from Laurence Binyon’s poem: “We will remember them”.

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