When you go home tell them of us and say `"for your tomorrow we gave our today".
I suppose I was about 8 when I first became conscious of Armistice Day and what it meant.  Our  history teacher used to set out the battle lines of the Western Front in different colours of chalk on the blackboard and tell us of the significance of the poppies that we were wearing.   
At that time the war that came to be symbolised by the poppy was still a vivid memory to many men & women, like my grandparents.   And when I went to patient's house with my doctor father and sat in the front room while he attended the patient upstairs, I often used to stare fascinated at sepia or black and white photographs of men in uniform, many of whom had never returned home from that terrible war to end all wars..
885 thousand British soldiers killed and some 8 million died in all around the world as a result of that conflict.   It would take, our teacher said, two weeks for one million of those dead to walk past us in single file.  This was the first war where more men died in conflict than were killed by disease, the result of advances both in destructive military technology and medical science.    
Today despite the photographs, the TV films and CDs  of men going over the top and in the trenches   somehow the First World War seems much more remote, like the Crimean or the Hundred Years War,  fought by societies that  I find almost beyond comprehension.  A war fought without radio or TV to report it, only censored newspapers and letters home from the front conveyed something of its flavour.    
On Remembrance Sunday  we mourn  the dead in all conflicts , and in recent time the young men and women who have lost their lives in Afghanistan or Iraq.  Our poppies are in tribute to them too, young people who knew about I-pods, U-tube and the X Factor.  We have lost 111 of them this year in Afghanistan.  
Yet what makes the First World War so incomprehensible is the sheer scale of carnage.  111 lost in Afghanistan in 10 months is very sad:  on 1[st] July 1916 on that first day of the battle of the Somme, 57, 760 British troops killed or wounded.   And the casualties went on mounting for months.  Down the road at Verdun at least a quarter of a million died.    Looked through the eyes of 21[st] century it's hard to understand that society in this country or any other country was able to endure the physical and emotional stress such a conflict. That brouigh death into virtually every village, every street and every home.  
And in the Second World War too, with its carpet bombing, its holocaust and its atomic bombs, going on for longer than the First War, was a conflict endured by societies on both sides,  in a way that is hard to understand.  
There are, of course, a lot of difficult questions to consider about all these conflicts.  Was the First World War ultimately totally futile, born out of the vanity of  European rulers and ultimately leading to another terrible conflict.   Were the sacrifices of our young men in that conflict vain?   
In the Second World war  It's easier to understand the Good versus Evil  factor, for want of a better phrase.  Hitler and his henchman were undoubtedly evil.  But it's harder to pin such a clear label on the Kaiser, Tsar Nicholas II, the Sultan of Turkey  or old Franz Joseph, who, arrogant and perhaps uncomprehending as they were, were floating uneasily on the currents of nationalism beneath them.   
Then we talk of men giving their lives: undoubtedly many did that for King and country.  But it must be true that others on all sides of the conflict, often conscripts, found themselves propelled over the top  by peer pressure, by force and threats.  We have a much clearer understanding today of the psychological trauma of war.  
And the idea of women going out on the streets to pin white feathers  of cowardice on young men not in uniform is again an aspect of those times that is today incomprehensible. 
Yet it's interesting how war brings out in societies across the ages, the same powerful feelings of loss and fortitude and tributes to valour. 
"Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by/ That faithful to their precepts here we lie"  is the epitaph of a Greek poet to the dead of the Battle of Thermopylae, between the Greeks and Persians, a turning point in ancient history in 480 BC .  Not much has changed over the centuries : "When you go home tell them of us and say............   
And we can also say of our own war dead as the Greek orator Pericles said of his in the fifth century before Christ : 
" Heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart. These take as your model...."
To me the loss of precious life in war,  no matter of which side of the conflict,  the loss of young life especially,   life that is  God's greatest gift -  is the saddest loss of all. 
We are the heirs and beneficiaries of past generations and what I hope we can take away this evening after this act of remembrance is a renewed sense of purpose in our lives.  For we are all mortal, and must account for our lives one day.    John Donne, the Elizabethan poet and preacher put is most eloquently in one of his meditations: 
"   Who bends not his ear to any bell which on any occasion rings?   But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?  No man is an island entire of itself; every Man is a piece of continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were...or a manor of thine own were.....Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.  And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it toll for thee. " 
So when we hear the last post, we should remember that we are personally involved with those honoured dead.   The bugle is  playing for us as well who one day will be gone too.   We must ensure that in our own lives we show ourselves worthy of the values that motivated so many of those whose lives were cut short by conflict.   




