Remembrance Day also known as Armistice Day, falls on Thursday, November 11. And Remembrance Sunday falls on November 14.
Remembrance Day commemorate individuals in the armed forces who lost their lives in the line of duty. And sees politicians, the Royal Family and war veterans honour the end of World War I. As two Services and parades are held across the country.
Last years Remembrance was different because of the Coronavirus pandemic but this year’s service will feel more familiar. As tradition, a two-minute silence is observed at 11am.
How is Remembrance Day honoured?
Remembrance Day marks the day World War One ended, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918.
On Remembrance Sunday, November 14, there will be a memorial service at the Cenotaph attended by the prime minister, Royal Family and MPs.
The first 2-minute silence in the UK was observed on November 11, 1919, celebrating the day the war ended one year prior.
King George V made a declaration saying: “”All locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.”
The day also marked with poems and message in memory of the fallen ones.
Poems and Messages to honour the day
One of Britain’s most famous wartime poems by Laurence Binyon, ‘For The Fallen’ also known as Ode To Remember:
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.
A poem ‘Flaunders Field’ by a Canadian physician, John McCrae who fought across the First World War:
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, an English poet wrote ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Thomas Campbell, a Scottish poet wrote ‘Hallowed Ground’:
To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.
Rupert Brooke was a part of the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force during the First World War, he wrote ‘The Soldier’:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Rudyard Kipling wrote ‘The Old Issue’:
‘When you go home, tell them of us and say, for their tomorrow we gave our today.’
‘Your King And Your Country Need You’ a song by Paul Reubens:
Oh! we don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go
For your King and your Country both need you so;
We shall want you and miss you but with all our might and main
We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you when you come back again.
‘Adlestrop’ written by Edward Thomas, a britist Poet
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen, one of the best poets of the First World War:
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
‘MCMXIV’ by Philip Larkin an English writer Philip Larkin
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
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