Homage to the fallen

A different day to the lighthearted pageantry of the Lord Mayors Day. 

Remembrance day is made of far more sombre stuff. The military bands have been playing a range of well known favourites. Music to march to, music to die to, something for all !! 

A single navel gun fires, dead on 11 to signal the start of a two minute silence. The camera depicts a silent London, only the gulls swoop across the sky scrape to signal there is life on the planet. The gun fires again and  the buglers strike up to play that haunting refrain, the last post.The assembly of the good and the famous.The politician, royalty, the old Commonwealth represented by its independent government officials, all wait in turn to lay their wreaths on the Cenotaph. It's a ceremony and a pecking order which reflects the Establishment as much as it commemorates the dead. It represents the people who sent these brave lost souls to their death. The Queen from a family in Germany which decided it needed war for its own reasons, a family which bridged the gap between "us" and "them" by being on both sides at once. It didn't stop them mobilising, of unfurling their maps and deciding what belong to who. It didn't stop them committing millions of young men to death, it didn't evaluate the death and destruction to the civilian population who lay in the path of their manoeuvres. To go to war over a slight to a cousin, or ostensibly the assassination of another cousin by an anarchist seems an unequal quid pro quo for the millions who bled to death on the fields of Flanders and elsewhere.

Brought up on Jack Tar and the exploits of Jack Cornwall, 16 years of age, standing by his burnt out gun, his shipmates dead around him, firing still as the disabled ship disengaged. Jack with shards of steel penetrating his chest awaited orders.

We all await orders but it's who is issuing that worries me.