Salute
We raise a glass to the living and our dead.
We've been clearing the backlog of stuff for the move. masses of old photographs. Men and women in uniform... 4 wars worth. I daresay there'll be some plonker out there who'll say they were imperial wars... But the world you might have had without their sacrifice was not a very pleasant one. And the little districts in little far off countries gave more - by ratio - than the great powers did.
I stood at little memorial in the back of beyond in New Zealand. Beautifully kept... maybe 20 names in two wars. The same surnames repeated... In a sparsely populated area like that it must have seemed all their dreams gone to dust and ashes. And yet in the second World War those families sent more sons...
Here too. (And while it was English speakers who responded heavily, there were many Afrikaans volunteers too - my mother. There were Zulu volunteers who died heroically on the Mendi.) Yet, today the TV announcer in SA do not wear poppies (we do) and there are no headlines of rememberance services. The memorials grow weeds in many places.
Yet we will remember them, and the sun shall never set on them.
Salute.
We've been clearing the backlog of stuff for the move. masses of old photographs. Men and women in uniform... 4 wars worth. I daresay there'll be some plonker out there who'll say they were imperial wars... But the world you might have had without their sacrifice was not a very pleasant one. And the little districts in little far off countries gave more - by ratio - than the great powers did.
I stood at little memorial in the back of beyond in New Zealand. Beautifully kept... maybe 20 names in two wars. The same surnames repeated... In a sparsely populated area like that it must have seemed all their dreams gone to dust and ashes. And yet in the second World War those families sent more sons...
Here too. (And while it was English speakers who responded heavily, there were many Afrikaans volunteers too - my mother. There were Zulu volunteers who died heroically on the Mendi.) Yet, today the TV announcer in SA do not wear poppies (we do) and there are no headlines of rememberance services. The memorials grow weeds in many places.
Yet we will remember them, and the sun shall never set on them.
Salute.