THE 200th TO DIE

This morning I was too ill ( blame a walk in the pouring rain in Central London Friday because of a Tube fire) to make the annual Remembrance Day service at the war memorial in Hebden Bridge. I was, though, well enough to hear on the radio that the 200th British soldier to die in Afghanistan announced and I wonder how many more deaths it will take for the Government to acknowledge it's time to bring the troops home.

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

A couple of years ago I spent a week in Tuscany Driving back from Florence on a baking hot day, we noticed a sign for a war cemetery where hundreds of young men who had fought on the often forgotten Italian front lay buried. We stopped off to pay tribute to those lives lost in battle. Most were in their early twenties - most from the UK, Canada, the US and Australia. It was a sad and sobering experience.
The Second World War was just round the corner for most of my generation. Our parents had all fought in the War, endured the horrors of the Blitz, terrible family losses and of course the advent of the nuclear age, with its prospect of an horrific Armageddon for all of us.
In 1989 I was part of an official delegation who were taken to is a war cemetery near St Petersburg where the thousands who had died in the Leningrad Siege against the Nazis lay buried in mass graves - each one marked not with names but with the year they had died. Auschwitz and Birkenau, where no-one remains, are equally terrible testaments to man's inhumanity to man.
Today, we're faced with genocide in the Congo , and needless deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. The suffering goes on.
Which is why next Sunday I will be laying wreaths at two Cenotaphs in the locality - and attending the memorial services afterwards. And I will also be wearing a red poppy. Not to glorify war, but to remember its tragic consequences. And hope that at some point in the future the killing will stop.