Homework challenge for week ending 12th November 2012

[Maureen K Clifford]

As Remembrance Day is nearly here I thought this was an appropriate challenge.

LEST WE FORGET

At 11 am on 11 November 1918 the guns of the Western Front fell silent after more than four years continuous warfare.

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month attained a special significance as the moment when hostilities ceased on the Western Front and it became universally associated with the remembrance of those who had died in the war. This first modern world conflict had brought about the mobilisation of over 70 million people and left between 9 and 13 million dead, perhaps as many as one-third of them with no known grave. The allied nations chose this day and time for the commemoration of their war dead.

On the first anniversary of the armistice in 1919 two minutes' silence was instituted as part of the main commemorative ceremony at the new Cenotaph in London. The silence was proposed by Australian journalist Edward Honey, who was working in Fleet Street.

In 1993 the remains of an unknown Australian soldier, exhumed from a First World War military cemetery in France, were ceremonially entombed in the Memorial's Hall of Memory. Remembrance Day ceremonies were conducted simultaneously in towns and cities all over the country, culminating at the moment of burial at 11 am and coinciding with the traditional two minutes' silence. This ceremony, which touched a chord across the Australian nation, re-established Remembrance Day as a significant day of commemoration.

So your challenge, should you accept it, is to write to this theme. I have included a photo that I have put together for my own compilation of my late Grandfathers writings and poems – Words and letters from the trenches of France.

Go to it – and thank you to all who participated in the last challenge.

Cheers

Maureen

[Peely]

I have figured out a new way to make a topic sticky - a much longer, less direct method than I had before, but it appears to work