Remembrance Day.

[silver_sun]

While Sunday was the day for the most of the remembrance services, today at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is Armistice Day. And this year, 100 years since the start of World War One and with so many conflicts still destorying lives across the world today, it is perhaps even more important to remember why we hold this.

It is not to glorify or celebrate war or military might. It is to remember those who gave their lives, and in doing so think on the terrible human cost of war both to those who fought and to those left behind.

Although the First World War is now fast fading now from living memory it still remains something close to my own family. My nan, who will be 100 years old in January, lost her father in opening months of World War One, the batallion in which he served taking over 90% casualties in the first three months of the war.

Arthur Weller was just one of around 800,000 British soldiers who lost their lives between 1914 and 1918. He was 29 years old when he signed up in the August of 1914 and still 29 when on the 31st of October 1914 he was killed in action. He left behind three young daughters and a wife pregnant with their forth child, my nan.

A photograph of him in uniform, the only one they ever had of him, still hangs on my nan's wall.

It is hard to imagine the scale of loss of the First World War. 800,000 dead and many, many times that number injured. There were only 53 villages, the Thankful Villages , in the UK that did not lose at least one of their inhabitants to the war.

They called it the war to end all wars at the time, sadly they were proved to be wrong. So on this day we remember them and all those since who hve lost their lives through war. Not just the soldiers, but their families too and the terrible human cost of war.