60 Years and a Million Miles Away...

[apolla]

I don't know how long this is going to end up, but it's not going behind a cut.

And so today it is sixty years since thousands of brave men set down on Normandy beaches and fought and died for us.

I have been to Normandy- my school does/did a trip for Year 9 students. At the time I was more concerned with the fact that none of my friends were on the trip. I had, you might realise, my priorities a little skewed. It's a beautiful place, you know. When the sun is shining onto the golden sand, it's hard to believe the carnage there sixty years ago. Then you see the mulberry harbour at Arromanches and the enormous American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer and realise that you cannot forget. You see the nasty 50s/60s concrete architecture of rebuilt Caen and realise that you cannot forget, even if you would like to.

And then you watch those veterans sat in the June sun waiting for the Queen this afternoon and know that you don't ever want to forget what they did for you. These men in their 80s who ignored that fact and marched proudly for their Queen as if they were as young and strong as they were in 1944. These rightly proud men without whom our world would be very different.

And then the international event earlier: 17 heads of state. Seventeen! Can we just pause and think about how far we've come to have the Queen of England, the President of France, the Chancellor of Germany, the Premier of Russia and the President of the United States of America in one place? In sixty years, which in historical terms isn't that much, we've got to the point where we have a (more or less) united Europe and we're all friends! That, more than almost anything else is testament to the fact that the sacrifices made by soldiers on all sides was not in vain, will never be in vain. We're all friends! That to me is amazing. The German Chancellor was invited to the D-Day celebrations and he accepted! Just think about that! We've all come so far.

My grandfather wasn't at D-Day. He was in North Africa and Italy with the so-called 'D-Day Dodgers'. Never mind that he fought in about four D-Day scale battles (Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and I think Monte Cassino, although he may not have been there) and a bunch of fighting in between. He was a sniper and a signalman (the latter of which may have counteracted the usually short life-span of the former). I say this because today, of all days, I would love for us to remember all of the men who fought and killed and died for us. They all did their very best for us. The unborn generations of the world who today thank those men with all their hearts (and if they don't, they bloody well should).

This is the last full scale anniversary of D-Day, and I think that's as it should be. One last, glorious hurrah. We shall not forget, but as the veterans diminish in number and grow ever older, it's time to look forward. We're all friends now, and we should be working to make that a real and permanent reality. Then we can say that centuries of wars between the countries of Europe really was finished forever by those brave men in Normandy and in the Meditteranean and in Russia. That's something to be proud of.

I want you to look at the room you're sat in. Look out of the window. Look at whatever's on your computer. Think about the beliefs you hold and the opinions you have. Every single one of those things was secured for you by the people who fought in the war, because I guarantee that if they hadn't, we wouldn't have those things. Without people like my grandfather and the thousands of soldiers- British, American, Canadian, Commonwealth, French, Polish and so on- our world would very different, and not for the better.

I do not like war. I am at heart a pacifist, but that doesn't stop me from thanking these people from the very, very bottom of my heart. Everything I have, everything I have become was made possible by you, from the banalities of life to the deepest ideological beliefs. Thank you will never be enough, but it's all I have.

And because wars are almost as famous for their poetry as their violence, I shall end thus:

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon.


PS. I love how the Mayor of Arromanches got in a dig at the British inability to speak French. God love the French.

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*tears*