This is Me speaking . . . : November 2012

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Lest we forget

Today is the 11th day of the 11th month.

aka, Remembrance Day

Today, we remember the fallen soldiers of WWI

The Unknown Australia Soldier

    Twentieth century warfare resulted in millions of unknown dead resting in unknown graves.
   Of Australia's war dead from World War I and World War II, 35 527 (about 35 per cent) have no identified grave. They are commemorated on Memorials to the Missing.

   The names of many Australians who died in World War I appear on memorials along the Western Front, including the names of about 18 000 men of the Australian Imperial Force with ''no known grave'.

In 1993, to mark the 75th anniversary of the 1918 armistice, the Australian Government exhumed the remains of an unknown Australian soldier from the Adelaide War Cemetery, near Villers-Bretonneux, France for entombment in the Australian War Memorial’s Hall of Memory, Canberra.

The funeral for the Unknown Soldier was held on 11 November – Remembrance Day – 1993. Before proceeding to the Hall of Memory, the Unknown Soldier’s coffin was placed on the Stone of Remembrance outside the Memorial where the then Prime Minister, the Hon. Paul Keating, delivered the eulogy:

… We will never know who this Australian was. Yet he has always been among those we have honoured. We know that he was one of the 45,000 Australians who died on the Western Front, one of the 416,000 Australians who volunteered for service in World War I … and one of the 100,000 Australians who have died in wars this century. He is all of them. And he is one of us …

As Australia’s Unknown Soldier was laid to rest in the Hall of Memory, the late Robert Comb, a World War I veteran, who had served in battles on the Western Front, sprinkled soil from Pozieres, France over the coffin and said, “Now you’re home, mate”.