With great pride and humility, I commanded the Remembrance Sunday Service at the Stockwell Cenotaph and Memorial Garden two days ago. Standing alongside current and former servicemen, dignitaries of the Borough of Lambeth, members of uniformed and non-uniformed organisations, and a diverse gathering of people paying their respects, I reflected on the purpose of the service. I revisited the same process some 24 hours later at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of this eleventh month.

In my reflections were thoughts of and for the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who through two great wars and many other conflicts have paid the ultimate price in the fight for and defence of freedom. I recalled the succinct message put on these pages by my United States sister-in-arms, Odessa Katumu Sam-Kpakra, which reminded us that “freedom is not free”. I wondered how it would feel to live the sentiment of the Kohima Epitaph (in Burma) – “when you go home, tell them of us and say, for their tomorrow we gave our today”. I even had in my mind the biblical verse that advises that “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”, appreciating those who have paid the price for freedom have mostly done so not just for friends or family, but for the sake of all humanity.

There was a special thought for Major Josh Bowman – a fine officer and gentleman I served with in Sierra Leone; he was murdered alongside two colleagues by a “rogue” Afghan soldier. Only a few days ago we lost yet another fine soldier in Afghanistan and.my thoughts are with his family as well as with all our troops in that theatre and their families too. I remembered Drummer Lee Rigby – brutally murdered on a South London street in what to me was a stark reminder to all that the theatre of war in the fight for freedom is not as far away as many would like to believe.

Having just mentioned Burma and Sierra Leone, I must mention that I thought about the Sierra Leone contingent of the 81st West African Division which won battle honours in Myohaung. In 2005, I met Paramount Chief Alfred Lamboi-Foray, the traditional of the people of Gbo Chiefdom. He told me about arriving in Burma in 1942 with his compatriots to fight against tyranny before going on to tell me that his son, Lieutenant Aluisious Sama Lamboi-Foray of the Sierra Leone Army, had died fighting the advance of terror at home during the 1990/2002 conflict. He proudly summarised, “we both fought for freedom”. Today Sierra Leonean troops alongside colleagues from various African countries are fighting the advance of tyranny and intolerance in other parts of Africa. Some have already been killed and the husband of one of my cousins was actually injured in Darfur. We pray and hope for their safety and offer comfort to their families.

Burma Campaign veteran (of 1942 to 1945) Paramount Chief Alfred Lamboi-Foray with Major Kabia (UK Armed Forces)

The fight for freedom has been fought in so many places on all the continents. Sadly, the need for the fight endures. Sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends… all have been lost in order that others shall be free. For me, the pain for loved ones could hardly be more clearly expressed than the words of a mother I saw on a headstone in a war cemetery in France: “To the world he was a soldier. To me he was the world”. Let it be true that “blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”.

Alas, there are those who will use efforts to honour those who have sacrificed and sympathise with the loved ones they have left to promote ideas and thinking that show mankind still has much to learn. In various places including these pages, the symbol of remembrance, the poppy has been used side-by-side with attacks on people who look, talk, dress or pray differently. Can they not see that those we honour have died mostly in the cause of thwarting attempts to advance the cause of intolerance and bigotry? They enjoy the freedoms that allow them to express their ideas without understanding or genuinely respecting those who died or got injured securing those rights for them.

210 Squadron at London’s Cenotaph

There are also those who wrongly suggest Remembrance Services and symbols are about the glorification of war. This simplistic view fails to look at the context within which sacrifices were made and the choices presented to those who decided there should be a fight as well those who decided to fight. I have always subscribed to the view summed up by the Latin saying “bellum nec timendum nec prvocandum” – that war should not be feared nor should it be provoked. History is littered with examples of people who wished to have their views imposed on others while the present suggests the tendency to go down the path of wickedness is undiminished. We not so long ago witnessed the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina and today have, the determination of some in Nigeria to kill anyone promoting or receiving western education. In 2011, the peace of Norway was shattered by a Christianity inspired slaughter of innocent children only a few days before samosas were banned in Somalia because their triangular shape makes them “too Christian”. You really couldn’t make it up.

Today the poppies came off our lapels, shirts and blouses. They will return to those same places in about eleven months. Meanwhile, let us not forget that we will, with or without a poppy in sight, continue to enjoy the fruits of the sacrifices the poppy tries to remind us of. Let us not forget that for the men, women and children who have suffered  and continue to suffer because of war, combatant and non-combatants alike, the pain does not come and go with the mere slipping in of a pin or adjustment of a clip on a bit of clothing; the pain endures.

I am confident that I speak for many when I say, for these reasons: ”…at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them”.