The armistice was signed at Rethondes, France at 11am on the 11th of November 1918.  The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  Armistice Day is now used in many countries to not only remember those fallen in World War I, but to remember the fallen of all conflicts.

At 11am today, many, many people will fall silent as an act of remembrance for those that have given their lives during many conflicts.

The poppy was chosen as a way of displaying this remembrance.  The symbol was chosen because of the glorious poppy fields which now grow where once men fought in diabolical conditions in some of the worst battlefields at Flanders.  It was popularised as a symbol of remembrance as a result of the Canadian military physician John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields.

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning.  We will remember them.”  This oft quoted line on Remembrance Day, comes from the poem For The Fallen, by Laurence Binyon, first published in 1914 in the Times, London.  These few lines from this one poem are perhaps the most poignant in remembrance:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them”.

The author of this piece was in the Royal Air Force as a boy, as was his brother and his father.  Another brother fought in the Falklands Conflict as part of the Royal Navy on HMS Broadsword.

We will remember them….