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Remembrance Day

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  • 11-11-2005 11:58am
    #1
    Bluetonic
    Registered Users Posts: 7,588 ✭✭✭


    I find that a lot of Irish people are extremely ignorant when it comes to Remembrance Day and the symbol of the poppy, so I thought I'd post this up what with the day thats in it.
    About 200,000 Irish people served in the Allied forces in the Great War; at a minimum 35,500 of those died on the battlefields. Few households on the island would have been left untouched by the loss.

    Each story has its own sadness: Private Jack Tansey sent a wildflower with each letter to his wife and was killed just a week before the end of the war; sixteen year old Frank Forde had fooled the recruiting sergeant and was killed at the Somme; Lance Sergeant William O'Reilly had eloped with his sweetheart in 1914, but his wife died a few months after giving birth to their daughter, whom he never saw.

    http://www.greatwar.ie/stories.html


    RIP to the brave Irish men and women who gave their lives in the Great War (WWI)


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    #2
    SpitfireIV
    Registered Users Posts: 4,504 ✭✭✭SpitfireIV


    Bluetonic,

    Good post and thanks for brining the topic up. Sure enough I would hazard a guess and from my looking into history that the Irishmen who fought for 'King and country' were and are all but forgotten (Except of course by there families, I mean that history as a whole, has forgot them). I hear the comments 'traitors' and other words used to describe these men. Many people are ignorant to the fact that these men went off to fight in the belief that there service to the king would grant Ireland home rule earlier, as it had been shelved with the outbreak of war, so they perhaps made there own blood sacrefise on the fields of France or the beaches of Gallipoli.

    I guess pay is another major factor, there was of course great poverty at that time, and the army pay, although not great was appealing.

    Its easy to judge these men morally for what they did, but many of them, as stated, 35,000 gave the ultimate sacrefise, many in belief that they were making a difference for there country.

    Sort of beside the topic at hand, but seen as you mentioned that young man that was killed just one week before the ceasefire, I remembred that probably the last Commonwealth troop to have been killed was at 10.58am, just two minutes before the Armistace.

    Lest we forget.

    CroppyBoy1798


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