By the side of the road

All over France, just as in Britain, there are memorials to the dead of both the previous world wars. Sometimes in the middle of nowhere you catch sight of a simple engraved stone at the roadside and I've made habit of stopping and looking at them when time permits. Mostly these 'hidden' memorials are to members of the Maquis, the partisans, who continued the fight for France after she fell into German hands. Sometimes they are placed at the site of a skirmish, at other times where there had been a pitched battle. On French Armistice Day, however remote these these locations may be, they are decorated with tricoleurs and flowers. There is something so enduringly moving about the fact that young men and women who died in such tragic circumstances are sought out and remembered in this way, that it makes an old cynic like me feel not only humble but thankful too. Forgetting the politics and the machinations of nations, I think instead of the individual human sacrifice; each has a story to tell, each had a life unfulfilled each left a terrible void in a family somewhere. Here too at this time of year I make a personal pilgrimage to a lonely churchyard carved into the side of the North Downs. The tombstone in the South East corner of the graveyard bears my name, the same as that of a Sergeant Air Gunner, killed at the age of just twenty, the uncle I never knew. I spend a few moments in quiet thought, remove the small wooden cross that's still there from last year and replace it with a new one. In the unlikely event that people pass this way, they will know that this young man is still remembered.