A fortnight ago, I attended a reunion, held every two years, for the boys who joined the RAF Apprentices at Halton in January 1954. I was one of them, and I was 16. If you had asked me then if I was prepared to lay down my life for my country, I would have looked at you in amazement. Nothing could have been further from my mind! I was there to get away from school, to get away from my Dad, and to learn a trade. Some seven years later, I was on an aircraft which, unknown to us, had on board what we would now call a terrorist bomb, which exploded shortly after take-off from Kuwait. If you had asked me even then whether I was prepared to lay down my life for my country, I would probably have used robust language in order to say ‘not likely’. In almost eleven years service I never met anyone who even remotely thought ‘death or glory’. It isn’t like that. Laying down one’s life for one’s country is not a natural instinct. Survival is.

That is not to say that there is no courage, no bravery.. Think of the Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Croucher. You might have seen him last night at the Festival of Remembrance. Whilst serving in Afghanistan he threw himself on top of a grenade in order to save his comrades. His backpack saved him, but he was prepared to lay down his life, and so has quite rightly been awarded.the George Cross.

But consider this. My wife’s Uncle Robert died at the Somme in 1916, wounded on the first day of the battle. He took two days to die, so it wasn’t a glorious death, and he didn’t lay down his life - he lost it. He died because of an almighty cock-up, as did thousands of his comrades. The family has the letter the chaplain wrote to Robert’s mother, and he did try to put the best possible gloss on the event. But Robert’s mother went into a deep depression. The casualties of war are not just service personnel. Mothers, fathers, wives and siblings also paid the price in both World Wars when civilian casualties went into millions.

So, today we remember them, the service personnel and the civilians. We remember them because it was all a loss – every life taken was a loss. Remembering them would seem to be the least that we can do. As Laurence Binyon suggests in his famous lines, they didn’t get the chance to grow old, as some of us have. They were for the most part cut down in the flower of their youth, many of them in their teens. I think of one of my boyhood heroes, Jack Cornwell, the youngest person ever to receive the Victoria Cross, a boy sailor who died of wounds received at the Battle of Jutland He was only 16,

Jesus said that there is no greater love than this: that you lay down your life for your friends. Just another of his hard sayings. How many of us would do it? He also said, in an equally hard saying, that his followers are to love their enemies. And he also said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’.

Thinking on these things, then, let us go out there, wearing our poppies with pride, and remember those who lost their lives in war, whether bravely, or absolutely terrified. Let us do it, as Rudyard Kipling put it in his poem ‘Recessional’, ‘lest we forget’.

Listen to Rudyard Kipling Let me give you a couple of stanzas for the flavour

The tumult and the shouting dies—

The captains and the kings depart—

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget!

Far-call'd our navies melt away—

On dune and headland sinks the fire—

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget.