To All my People.Tuesday next, November 11th, is the first anniversary of the Armistice, which stayed the world wide carnage of the four preceding years, and marked the victory of Right and Freedom. I believe that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of that Great Deliverance, and of those who laid down their lives to achieve it. To afford an opportunity for the universal expression of this feeling, it is my desire and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into force, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, there may be, for the brief space of two minutes, a complete suspension of all our normal activities. During that time, except in the rare cases where this may be impracticable, all work, all sound, and all locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the Glorious Dead.No elaborate organisation appears to be necessary. At a given signal, which can easily be arranged to suit the circumstances of each locality, I believe that we shall all gladly interrupt our business and pleasure, whatever it may be, and unite in this simple service of Silence and Remembrance. George R.I
- Proclamation by King George V before Armistice Day, 1919
"… One of the most tragic features of the Great War was the number of casualties reported as ‘Missing, believed killed’. To their relatives there must have been added to their grief a tinge of bitterness and a feeling that everything possible had not been done to recover their loved ones’ bodies and give them reverent burial. That feeling no longer exists; it ceased to exist when the conditions under which the fighting was being carried out were realized.
But when peace came and the last ray of hope had been extinguished the void seemed deeper and the outlook more forlorn for those who had no grave to visit, no place where they could lay tokens of loving remembrance. … It was resolved that here at Ypres, where so many of the ‘Missing’ are known to have fallen, there should be erected a memorial worthy of them which should give expression to the nation’s gratitude for their sacrifice and its sympathy with those who mourned them. A memorial has been erected which, in its simple grandeur, fulfils this object, and now it can be said of each one in whose honour we are assembled here today: ‘He is not missing; he is here’."
- Field Marshal Lord Plumer
While those who fought this war are by and large sadly no longer with us, their successors are and still need our help.
I was in a large chain hardware store, in a wog area.
Announcement came over loudspeaker it’s eleven o’clock etc and two minute’s silence from now.
Sweet FA response from the wogs, apart from staring in wonderment, which only increased the jabbering, at the few Anglo Aussies in the store who all stopped and stood at loose attention for the two minutes.
A few of us made pointless comments to the wogs in a foreign language, being English, to little effect.
Actually, I can’t remember whether it was two minutes or just cut to one for commercial convenience.
Like RS I have experienced similar incidents on Rememberance Day, and today of all days. For two minutes I absolutely refused to acknowledge customers no matter how much they stared, growled, tried to interrupt my solace.
After the two minutes silence one of the wog boys remonstrated very loudly and threatened to complain to management about my attitude. I told him to fuck off. I’ve had relatives fight and die in wars so these ungrateful bastards can stomp around treating everyone like crap, because they will own this country one day.
So this bloke went off and complained to one of our better managers who also told him to fuck off. About time some people learnt respect.
Reminds me that maybe ten or twelve years ago I came back to my office on Remembrance Day not long before 11 a.m.
My secretary says there’s two blokes outside waiting to see you. They’re standing outside the front door. I look out and see two Asians.
I go out and it’s just before 11 a.m. so I’m going to make them observe the silence.
Joy of joys, there’s an RAAF flyover that comes pretty much over the top of us on the way to the Shrine.
So I point at the planes and say something like
“We remember the war now.”
And I make sure we all keep our heads down for a couple of minutes.
I know, I was childish, racist, petty, unreasonable, arrogant, unfair, humiliating etc etc
All of that.
Turns out the two blokes were Japanese, which makes it so much better.
Well, fuck em.
Their lot were childish, racist, petty, unreasonable, arrogant, unfair, humiliating etc etc last time around. And a lot nastier than I was, with a bloody sight less reason.
You do highlight a problem though. We are labelled racist, arrogant, churlish etc because we are both proud and humble of those men and women who have fought and laid their lives down for liberty, freedom and survival.
We are always reminded to respectful of new immigrants, to respect their cultures, religions, to be welcoming to them.
And I am not known on this site for short responses.
Reciprocal in this context means to me mutual respect, in the sense of the guest and the host.
The guest accepts the host’s house, family, cuisine, circumstances etc, and politely accepts what is offered, within reason.
The host tries to accommodate the guest, according to the host’s principles of hospitality in the host’s culture, and tries to avoid offending the guest, within reason.
If the guest doesn’t like it, the guest can piss off.
It’s not the host’s problem.
Much more so when the guest is uninvited and the host is doing the guest and his family a favour by putting them up and feeding them, instead of turning them away at the gate.
Applying that to migrants to Oz doesn’t mean they have to fall to their knees in gratitude for being here or love everything about Oz, or that they can’t agitate for change, or maintain their culture, or that we can require bullshit of them like being able to cite Bradman’s batting average or sing the national frigging anthem (I don’t know more than about five words, not necessarily in order, and I’m not interested in learning - I come from a generation that stood up in picture theatres for ‘God Save the Queen’ as she rode a horse somewhere) but it means they do it reasonably and without trying to make us conform to their every requirement or regarding us as inferior and contemptible because, say, our women go the beach in bikinis. Where their oafish blokes strut around in minimal budgie smugglers and regard women not like theirs as sluts because we don’t live in a culture where women can’t go out without a male relative or two present at all times because these apes are living in the seventh century and think so called honour killings are something to be proud of if their daughter or sister talks to the wrong bloke without a male relative’s permission.
Like the Sydney gang rape cases, with their idiot relatives blathering on on 60 Minutes about how their good little Muslim boys were unjustly convicted by the Skip justice system of gang raping Aussie sheilas as a racist act to humiliate them, or even raping any sheila ‘cos good little Leb Muslim boys don’t do that. Then their idiot families also said that the Aussie sheilas brought being raped on themselves by not observing good Islamic dress and behaviour, which apparently their good little innocent Leb Muslim boys who didn’t rape the sheilas and make all the phone calls couldn’t resist.
Beats me how you can’t gang rape sheilas to show how Lebs can fuck Aussie sheilas Leb style, with mobile phone call records showing all the boys turning up for a bit of Skip meat, and then say the sheilas brought it on themselves. Either you raped them, or you didn’t. Which just shows how fucking dumb those pricks are. Sixty years was about the right sentence. I’m against capital punishment for reasons of principle, but I’m prepared to consider exceptions.
On the other hand, down here in sunny Melbourne the idiot press and talkback radio are lately getting stuck into the Sudanese because they’re supposedly a big crime problem. The latest focus was a Sudanese kid who got bashed to death, probably by a mixed migrant / Anglo group. Kevin frigging Andrews got onto it, to whip up more bullshit to bolster his endless cock ups as a minister.
Somehow a Sudanese kid being bashed to death demonstrates that the Sudanese are the sort of people we don’t want here. I would have thought that the people who killed the poor bastard are the ones we don’t want here.
I read something recently by a woman who’d worked with the Sudanese. She ran into a Sudanese women she knew, in a supermarket. The Sudanese woman was in tears. The writer tried to comfort her. The Sudanese woman explained that she wasn’t crying because she was upset. She was crying with happiness that she was lucky enough to be in a place where there was so much food. That’s beyond anything any of us who grew up here can begin to understand.
We don’t have any idea of the misery and horror many of the people who come here have experienced. A lot of it makes Kokoda look easy. At least both sides were armed there. Everybody had a fighting chance.
Not like the oppression and butchery the poor bastards who’ve come here in various waves have experienced, which goes back to some of the Greeks under the colonels and the Vietnamese after we ditched them and the Chileans after Pinochet and the Argentinians after Galtieiri and the Iraqis and Iranians when those two nations were at war and countless other miserable episodes.
I’ve dealt with a few people from each of those and other sad places and they do it hard here, but they press on. The average Aussie who slags them just because they’re different wouldn’t have the same guts and perseverance, and is too ignorant to appreciate the fine qualities of people who have overcome adversity no Australian has ever known in Australia, despite the grandstanding from various whingeing groups (e.g. lesbians moaning about how discriminatory it is that they can’t get IVF on Medicare, who’ve occupied a million times more newsprint than, say, an Iranian woman I knew who came out of Iran on a terrifying journey of hundreds of miles in the 1980’s, much of it in the boot of a car, never knowing is she’d be abandoned locked in the boot or shot at the next exchange point by people she didn’t know who, she hoped, had been paid by her husband who’d got out first).
Having said that, there’s a few bearded caftanned pieces of lace headed shit I’d round up and send back to places where you’d think they’d be a lot happier in the bosom of Islam. Funny thing is, those places don’t want them. Because they’re troublemakers. Which is absolutely hilarious when you consider that some of these places, like the Saudis, have been exporting this sort of vile bile for years but don’t want it on their home turf. If they’re not good enough for the defenders of Islam, they’re not good enough for us.
But you’re not allowed to say that. By our anti-discrimination laws, or the Saudis.
Why do I think I’ve missed the plot?
P.S. Strange to relate but true, but I’m one of those reviled people, a vaguely lefty civil libertarian.
What really pisses me off (among an unbelieveably large constellation of things that piss me off) is the political exploitation by our national politicians on all sides of turning up at the couple of funerals we’ve had for Australian soldiers who’ve actually died in something approximating action as distinct from a similar number who’ve died in barracks through stupidy or suicide or murder.
If we were in a war even vaguely like Vietnam, never mind WWII, the politicians wouldn’t be doing anything but attending funerals.
Different in America in recent years, where close to 4,000 service people have died.
Politicians crying crocodile tears over the coffins of people who’d still be alive if the politicians had done their jobs half way properly will never make me respect politicians who always exploit the service dead while carefully avoiding sending any of their precious children on these missions of national survival.
I say the above as the father of a 17 y.o son whose army enlistment papers, against my better judgement, I signed a couple of months ago.
I did the same at his age, but it’s a bloody sight different when it’s my kid and I look at the shits who are running the country who love to have a khaki election. Not one of those cunts have ever been in uniform, or been in a decent barroom fight where people lose eyes and sometimes die, but they love to send other people’s kids off to war, so they can turn up at funerals in election campaigns and cry their bullshit tears for something they never experienced or even really value, as long as they’re safe, but expect the lower classes to do for them.
Perhaps Rising Sun’s posts and mine should be moved to another thread as there seems to be some interest, Also it will allow the memories of those who made the ultimate sacrifice to remain in context.
Well, for a start, I don’t have ideas so much as fleeting impressions which I try to convert into words before they become fully formed concepts, let alone coherent arguments. I am a little picture man. My wife says I’m more of a jigsaw man, with most of the pieces missing.
I think my last post should be put into a thread entitled “Drunken ramblings of a certified but fairly harmless dickhead.”
I don’t disagree with anything I said (I rarely disagree with myself, but there have been a couple of nasty incidents which we - me and the other me who’s not allowed to post here - won’t go into) in my last post, but I just think I took a bit too long to say it.
I think I’ve pretty much answered whatever the question was.
Last Post is a bugle call used at UK and Commmonwealth military funerals and ceremonies commemorating those who have fallen in war. The Last Post is also the name of a poem by Robert Graves describing a soldier’s funeral during World War I.
Last Post was originally a bugle call used in British Army camps to signal the end of the day. The name derives from the practice of inspecting all the sentry posts around such a camp at the end of the day, and playing a bugle call at each of them. The “last post” was thus the last point of this inspection, and the bugle call signalling that this post had been inspected marked the end of the military day. This custom dates from at least the 17th century, and originated with British troops stationed in the Netherlands, where it drew on an older Dutch custom, called Taptoe. The Taptoe was also used to signal the end of the day, but has more prosaic origin. Taptoe originated signaling the moment that beer barrels had to be shut, hence that the day had ended. It comes from the Dutch phrase Doe den tap toe, meaning “Turn the tap off” (not to be confused with Taps which has a similar function but different tune and origin).
During the 19th century, Last Post was also carried to the various countries of the British Empire. In all these countries it has been incorporated into military funerals, where it is played as a final farewell, symbolising the fact that the duty of the dead soldier is over and that they can rest in peace.
Last Post is used in public ceremonials commemorating the war dead, particularly on Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth of Nations (known as Veterans Day in the United States). In Australia and New Zealand it is also played on ANZAC Day.
Since 1928 Last Post has been played every evening by buglers of the local Last Post association at the war memorial at Ieper (Ypres) in Belgium known as the Menin Gate, commemorating the British Empire dead at the Battle of Ypres during the First World War. The only exception to this was during the four years of the German occupation of Ypres from 20 May 1940 to 6 September 1944, when the ceremony moved to Brookwood Cemetery in England. On the evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres, the ceremony was resumed at the Menin Gate, in spite of the heavy fighting still going on in other parts of the town. These buglers are quite often mistaken as being from the local fire brigade, however they are present everyday, in function and name of the Last Post Committee, they are indeed members of the fire brigade, and can sometimes be seen wearing the uniforms, it is not the Fire Brigade that organizes Last Post.
Last Post was used by British forces in North America in colonial times, but its function was taken over in the United States by Taps, which has been used by the United States Army since 1862.
Last Post was incorporated into the finale of Robert Steadman’s In Memoriam - a choral work on the subject of remembrance. Last Post is also incorporated into Karl Jenkins’s mass The Armed Man and Peter Sculthorpe’s chamber orchestra work, Small Town from the Fifth Continent.
The “Ode of Remembrance” is an ode taken from Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen”, which was first published in The Times in September 1914. Binyon wrote it while sitting on The Rumps in Cornwall.
The seven-verse poem honoured the World War I British war dead of that time and in particular the British Expeditionary Force, which had by then already had high casualty rates on the developing Western Front. The poem was published when the Battle of the Marne was foremost in people’s minds.
Over time, the third and fourth verses of the poem (although often just the fourth) were claimed as a tribute to all casualties of war, regardless of nation.
[b][i]They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
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.[/i][/b]
The line “Lest we forget” is often added to the end of the ode, which is repeated in response by those listening. In Australia, Canada and New Zealand (and often in the United Kingdom), the final line of the ode, “We will remember them”, is repeated in response.
The “Ode of Remembrance” is regularly recited at memorial services held on days commemorating World War I, such as ANZAC Day, Remembrance Day, and Remembrance Sunday. In Australia’s Returned and Services Leagues, it is read out nightly at 6 p.m., followed by a minute’s silence. In New Zealand it is part of the Dawn Service at 6 a.m. Recitations of the “Ode of Remembrance” are often followed by a playing of the Last Post. In Canadian remembrance services, a French translation is often used along with or instead of the English ode.
“They shall grow not old…” was set to music by Douglas Guest in 1971, and has become a well-known feature of choral services on Remembrance Sunday.
Time of our Darkness is the title of a novel by South African author Stephen Gray. The last two lines of For the Fallen are ‘As the stars are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end they remain.’
‘Condemn’ or ‘contemn’?
There has been some debate as to whether the line “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn” should end with the words ‘condemn’ or ‘contemn’. Contemn means to ‘despise’ therefore either word would make sense in the context of the stanza.
When the poem was first printed in The Times on 21 September 1914 the word ‘condemn’ was used. This word was also used in the anthology The Winnowing Fan: Poems of the Great War in 1914 in which the poem was published later. If the original publication had contained a misprint Binyon would have had the chance to make amendments, so it seems unlikely that the word ‘contemn’ was meant.
The issue of what word was meant seems only to have arisen in Australia, with little debate in other Commonwealth countries that mark Remembrance Day.
Received wisdom on my part was that the correct word was contemn, but that condemn was normally misused.
I haven’t been in an RSL http://www.rsl.org.au/ club for decades when the ceremony is performed, but I used to find it quite moving. The lights were dimmed, everyone faced ?the honour board?, the words were recited and, I think, a recording of the last post was played at the end. It might have varied a bit from club to club.
That was in the days when the membership was largely WWII servicepeople. Not many Vietnam veterans, because the RSL was often hostile to them. If you read personal accounts by Vietnam veterans, you’ll find them being disparaged by the WWII diggers as not having been involved in a real war and so on. There’s still a lot of bitterness about it.
Now the RSL clubs are all feeding on poker machines and everybody can join, although not as an ex-service member, so if they still perform the ceremony it’s probably meaningless to most of the drongoes feeding their pay and pensions into poker machines.
