I'd like to add my thanks to those given by BigV.
It seems strange to have reached the age of 58 and yet never to have had to participate in any form of warfare - to have had the ability to choose an uninterrupted career over service in one of the forces. When you consider the number of wars that occurred during the 100 years before I was born, the absence of any involvement seems all the more remarkable. I wasn’t even required to undertake National Service, as that obligation ended before I reached qualifying age.
It is hard therefore to really understand the atrocities of war, what troops in battle had and have to face. It’s all too distant.
Armistice day, as today is called here, is more about the veterans of the First World War, the end of which it commemorates. Amazingly there are still surviving soldiers alive today – even one ex-soldier aged 107, who joined the War in 1914 when it began and served and survived the whole bloody conflict.
The reason I started my cycling trips to France was to visit the battlefields and museums of the Western Front. To try to understand and appreciate the atrocious conditions and horror of the trenches that was faced on a daily – more likely hourly basis.
Visiting the areas and witnessing the evidence of life and conditions does bring this home. Not that it could ever be possible to really experience this, but then, from what I have learned, I wouldn’t want to. Who could want to face the smell of death as a part of every waking moment, to have ones skin crawling with lice, rats scurrying endlessly around, feeding off the remains of severed limbs (quite likely and suddenly, all that remained of a colleague who had been conversing with you only a few minutes earlier), to be required on command to go ‘over the top’ and to run towards a faceless enemy and against its relentless machine gun fire, to face the burning of your lungs and to fight for every breath as mustard gas is spread into your ranks, to live in mud and stagnant water, to suffer feet that swelled inside boots, becoming so swollen that you could not remove your boots even if you wanted to, to hear the cries of comrades wounded and slowly dying, as much from infection in their wounds as the wounds themselves, lying in shell holes just a short distance from your trench, yet unreachable.
I have placed a link here to
Hill 62 and Sanctuary Wood, a battleground to the east of Ypres where there is a small but remarkable museum - remarkable for the collection of facts and evidence it has gathered. Compared to the clinical aspect of many museums, this rather basic looking hut holds some of the most compelling and horrifying detail - mainly through the 3D images mentioned on the linked page. There are other links from the initial page, many of which are to my mind very moving and appropriate to the remembrance of Armistice Day.
Veterans of any war have faced conditions if not exactly the same then just as horrific as those I’ve described above. That they did so and by doing so secured the freedom and lasting peace we have enjoyed since is more than any man should ever be expected or asked to do. But they did it and that is why they should and will always be remembered. How can we who have benefited from their devotion ever give adequate thanks for what they achieved for us.
I regret that in my short time here, I have not come to know the names of those of you in the Cellar who have served your country, and in conflicts far more recent than I have described, but you have my lasting respect and appreciation that you have been willing to back your beliefs with your lives and by so doing have made our lives all the more secure.