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"We will Remember them......"
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Highest Explore Position #226 ~ On November 12th 2008.
Update ~ Now #219 ~ On November Thirteenth 2008.
Barbed Wire Fence - Longridge, Scotland - Sunday November 2nd 2008.
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WILFRED OWEN ~ Dulce et Decorum Est ~ Best known poem of the First World War One.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST.....
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
8 October 1917 - March, 1918
As what was dubbed the "War to End All Wars" is slowly consigned to history, the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I marks what could well be the last major anniversary for the dwindling numbers of veterans.
The World War I armistice was signed on Nov. 11 -- the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and went down in history as the moment, every year, when the world remembers the dead.
But not many combat veterans will be in attendance at Tuesday's ceremonies. Today, there are few surviving members of the British forces that joined France, Russia and Italy in the battle against Germany and the other Central Powers.
Erich Kastner, the last of the German troops, died on Jan. 1 this year, aged 107. The last French veteran, Italian-born legionnaire Lazare Ponticelli, survived him by only two months, dying on March 12, aged 110.
One of the five remaining British veterans died last week at the age of 108 in Australia, where he moved in 1928, the BBC reported.
Sydney Maurice Lucas, who was born in Leicester, England, on Sept. 21, 1900, regularly led the annual Anzac Day parade in Melbourne, said the report. He was among the last batch of conscripts to be called up in Aug., 1918. In World War II, he volunteered for the Australian army in June 1940 and was posted to a machine-gun unit.
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Reconciliation: France's Mitterand and Germany's Kohl at Verdun in 1984
Australia is also home to another of the known World War I survivors, 107-year-old Claude Choules.
Meanwhile, three of the veterans still alive in Britain are expected to attend this year's official celebrations.
Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110 and Bill Stone, 108, are scheduled to lead a two-minute period of silence at a ceremony in London.
The fight against forgetting ~ But even though few eye witnesses are still alive, "to forget would be the worst thing," as France's Minister for Veterans' Affairs Jean-Marie Bockel said last week.
"Now that the last (French) veteran has gone, 90 years on we once more share a moment of awareness. This war is part of our collective memory, and he who does not know his past has no future," he said, inaugurating a memorial.
France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, Britain's Prince Charles, the speaker of the German parliament Peter Mueller and Australia's Governor General Quentin Bryce will hold a solemn ceremony of remembrance on Tuesday.
They will meet at Fort Douaumont, epicenter of the 1916 Battle of Verdun, for speeches and prayers at the ossuary where the remains lie of 300,000 men cut down by machine-gun and artillery fire in 300 days and nights of hell.
Afterwards, Sarkozy will visit the nearby German cemetery. But in a break with tradition, will not commemorate the event at the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in the heart of Paris.
