Armistice Day - the mud, the blood and the green fields beyond.

The mud, the blood and the green fields beyond is the flag of the Royal Tank Regiment, brown, red and green. Like the RAF, they were a new weapon of WW1 and like the RAF, they were instrumental in ending the War to end all Wars, working closely with the ground troops and creating a line that moved forward beneath a rolling barrage, with the RAF spotting for them, keeping the communications open to a degree that had never been seen before that, decisions were made faster than ever and up to the minute intelligence was on hand for the Generals to make informed decisions that would save lives. It ended trench warfare forever.

Now we can do nothing but reflect on a generation that gave their lives so that we might live, free. It is odd to think that as we look back over 100 years, at the time of World War 1, in 1915, they could look back 100 years to the Battle of Waterloo. How the technology had changed, gone was the thin red line, replaced with the thin brown worm-like lines of the trenches. This was war on an industrial scale, machine guns, long range artillery, tanks, planes, chemical weapons and flamethrowers. A war of Land, Sea and Air. Let's not forget the Royal Navy and the Battle of Jutland, arguably a victory or a defeat but the German Navy never sailed again until they were moved to Scapa Flow.

I went to Greenwich and the Naval Chapel. Before 11am the Last Post was played and then the silence, the remembrance of those that "will never grow old". The chest of the old men and women, laden with medals and some younger, this is not a celebration of War, this is a commemoration for those that gave their lives, those from all the Countries of the Commonwealth, the Anzacs, the Canadians, the Indians and Africans and some Americans that came over early, to fight for the Motherland. My Greatfather served in both World Wars and his sons followed suit in WW2, career soldiers that joined early, my Grandad was in the British Expeditionary Force in WW2, he wasn't evacuated when France fell, they fought their way south and boarded a ship to Africa where they served with the 7th Army and Monty in the deserts of Egypt. He never spoke of it.

That may be the saddest of things, we stand upon the shoulders of giants, people that made this land Great yet it is history to us. Ancient tribes believed that previous generations stayed with them and lived with them, in the spirit realms but we have consigned them, all that knowledge and experience, to a folder that we drag out as a commemoration, to honour our dead.

I went to Weyland's Smithy in the Summer. A long barrow, a burial mound for our ancient people and I couldn't help but think that I was walking in the footsteps of my ancestors. Their bones, long gone but making up the land upon which I stood and my bones would one day mingle with theirs and future generations would walk the same path and someone would wonder, like me, about the nameless people lost in history, that created this most beautiful and rich tapestry of a landscape that I was looking out on. History seems so final, as if death was the final chapter but as the World turns, all that we achieve in life contributes, positively and negatively to those that come after us, our names may be lost in time, but our lives make up the bricks of this Nation.
It's a shame that our commemoration for the people that sacrificed themselves on the fields of the Somme, Ypres, Amiens and the many other battle grounds of the First World War as well as those of Dunkirk, Dieppe, the Atlantic and the skies of Britain and France and those that have died in the Falklands, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, that it is just once a year that we remember them and the ultimate sacrifice they made for us to be able to determine how we will live, as a free thinking and sovereign nation.

Let me finish with my favourite poet, Wilfred Owen, the man that changed the face of writing leading into the last century, the romanticism and naivety was gone and the realism and starkness took over. Beautiful words that housed death and brutality, there was no heroic deaths in the World of Owen and the trenches, just another death. He was killed a week before the Armistice was signed and as the bells peeled throughout the UK to mark the end of the War, his family were being told about the loss of their son. And as with all the lost of WW1, we mark them in every city, town and village across the UK, memorials to the fallen. I always took them for granted until the realisation dawned, the scale of the remembrance and massive loss that every community must have felt. It keeps them alive and with us.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Are we living in the time of the green fields beyond the mud and the blood? I am not sure that we are...