Just 5 surviving veterans of WWI now...

[WendyWeber]

I hope some of them will still be with us next November

Bless them! They make me cry every year.

I saw a Chelsea pensioner today, I wanted to weep.

I can't bear to watch the videos now.

But "The youngest one of the two was blown up twice but he didn't get any bad injuries" made me smile. See, that's a real man.

Indeed.Studying ww1 poetry made me cry.Seeing the blokes with their service medals selling poppies and people ignoring them shopping for consumer goods makes me cry.What must they think?We should remember themand all people in active service,even if we do not agree wwith our governments reasons for current warfare.

My grandad was an Old Contemptible (to do with being part of the "contemptible little army" which was the BEF in 1914) who died in 1966; at his funeral one of his contemporaries read out

"They shall not grow old, as we who 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 shall remember them."

which was the first time I'd heard that verse - Remembrance wasn't a very big thing then. At the time (being about 15) I thought goodness, aren't they all old...it's stunning, and sobering, to think that some of them are still here.

(Yes, WT, being blown up twice is obv nowt for a Real Man )

sad]

To me these guys, and others like them are true HEROES. Not bloody football players, or X factor stars.

agree saltire. We always takeour dds to the remembrance service at church so they will start to see the importance of what these men did for the world.

Exactly real life super heros

i had one mum at my nursery this week objecting to her dd doing a poppy picture as "her and her partner take no part in supporting this country going to war"

being a army wife i could of swung for the cow lady but instead i explianed in the terms that even her 2 year old would understand what the poppy actually represents and i have printed information of the internet which i will be going over with my highlighter tonight and handing to her first thing monday morning.

hopefully by monday lunchtime there will be one less ignorant person in the world.

Kerry - I just don't get people who think that buying a poppy means supporting war. Like you I'm a military wife, and would have doen the same as you in that situation

She should think herself lucky that she has a nice country to live in. If it wasn't for all those heroes, this country would be an awfully different place.

i saw the man you are talking about on the news. It made me want to cry.

I am totally opposed to war, especially when as in ww1 and ww2 those guys were effectively given no choice. Nowadays, army personell make their choices based on thier beliefs and i respect that. We need to listen to these old guys when they say, please no more. But how could that ever be?

We had an ex-serviceman come to school to talk to the YR5's about WW2 and he said that while the children were very interested and polite and thanked him nicely, the school did not even write to him to thank him for his time. I don't think he'll be doing it again this year and at school.

Glad you took a stand against that stupid woman at your nursery, kerrykatona. My DS had a poppy sewn on to his coat by me last week. If nothing else, he'll know in future years that he'll be remembering his grandad who was called up for National Service, was packed off to Korea and saw his mate blown to pieces next to him. He certainly didn't go to war out of choice or desire. Indeed he still keeps a photo of a group of children he found in the ruins of a school and whom he has always assumed were wiped out. You see relatively few people wearing poppies, but they seem to be increasingly harder to find each year. The attitude that wearing them is supporting war is just ludicrous.