Remembrance Day

I was really proud of my  younger son on Monday. He told me that he stopped work for the two minutes silence even though most of his workmates didn’t bother. Like me he is very anti war, but that doesn’t change the respect we feel for those who have lost their lives.

War is evil. I used to be a pacifist, but now I have come to feel that sometimes it can be the lesser of two evils. I think World War 2 was justified because the alternative would have been worse. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s evil. It shouldn’t be glorified as it often is.

A few years ago we visited the Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. I was overwhealmed with emotion, not just at the loss of all those lives but at the feeling that it was being glorified. Perhaps I was wrong but that’s how I felt, so much so that I cried in the car as we were leaving because I felt that until we change this there will always be this enormous loss of young life.

I see soldiers the same way that I see police officers, they are doing a job which sometimes involves killing, but it is not glorious, it is horrible, but sometimes it has to be done and I respect those who put their lives in danger.

During memorial weekend the military files at Ancestry were free, so I took the opportunity to discover service details of people on my family tree. I found a cousin of my father’s called Albert Rogers. He joined up in 1915, a fit young man going to serve his country. On the next page were details of his discharge and later his admission to a sanitorium for TB induced by his war service. He was granted 40s pension. He died in the sanitorium in 1926. I was really moved by his story. I always though that if they came back they had survived. I never thought they just took years to die, and what for? Wold War 1 was just a polititcians war and it led to World War 2. All of those young lives lost for what?

So on Remembrance Day I remembered  Albert who I might have known if it hadn’t been for that war, and I wondered why.