Quote Originally Posted by Mr Lick View Post

My elderly father often speaks of his young friends who joined him in 1943 when signing up and never returned. Difficult to imagine during peacetime.
Err, perhaps that's why they call it Remembrance Sunday..........

Honestly, though, this dwelling on the past in such drearily, predictable mawkish terms is becoming more and more absurd by the year.

Can you imagine folk in 1950s getting all misty-eyed over the fallen of Sevastopol in the Crimean war? Or the establishment in 1910 weeping over the deaths of our brave servicemen in the Battle of Waterloo and the Peninsular War?

War is stupid but fun too if you are into that sort of thing. Most folk find it a bore and quite tedious, and, for many, terminally frightening. The thing is, we do like it as a means of furthering interests which is why we keep on having them.

Marvelling at a bunch of old codgers shuffling past a block of masonry is simply a ritual of self indulgence and a salve to some imaginary contrition masking the inescapable fact mankind is just a higher form of animal life capable of bestial acts.