Acknowledging and respecting them.

 Subject: Acknowledging and respecting them.



It was nostalgic and for some tearful but beautifully poignant in its simplicity a memorial celebration which we are best at. Only 80 years ago men crossed the channel after enduring years of bad news to move the battle onto the other foot and this was probably the last meaningful occasion when men who were there were here.

I was sweeping the channels when I came across the smart rat  a tat of the staccsnare drum played by the band of the Royal Marines. It brought me out of my political sloth into a world of the achievable with fond letters written to wives on the eave of battle, the longing to be together agai, of course they never were

I like Charles although I didn’t as a young man, he seems to have matured I his old age. Not so his bride who I thinks flawed. Todays narration was beautifully tender without becoming mawkish, letters written on the eve of battle men who never returned, memories of men who went off to do their duty never weighing the odds only the common zeal to defeat fascism.

As we shrink today at the call to enlist our young people to seek skill and the meaning of esprit de corps, piling on a list of human right assurances such that you can never know your enemy. Everything is argued away on the presumption that equal rights have levelled the playing field and defined humanity to be better than it is.

The bugle call at the end of day speaks handsomely for the ‘ill men do to men’ but war is a messy business and the sooner we accept responsibility for the things which those men laid down their lives for the better we acknowledge them and respect them.