At 11 a.m. today, 99 years ago, the guns fell silent at the end of the First World War. Today, all over Europe, and further afield, millions of people will attend memorial services. parades and events to mark the anniversary.
The Alliance for Peace and freedom has as one of its central aims the continuing effort to ensure that the Brothers’ Wars which so devastated our civilisation and our peoples remain a thing of the past. We still work actively to bring reconciliation and forgiveness in the places where the scars of past conflicts set European brothers nations against each other.
Our photo above shows a British soldier giving a wounded German prisoner some water to drink near La Boisselle, on the third day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
Our video uses images from the time together with a moving song by an English folk singer. It tells the story of the impact of the same bloody battle on a single English town, Accrington, which was one of the smallest places to raise one of the so-called Pals Battalions, in which men who joined up together were allowed to serve – and die – together. The song could just as easily be about many similar places in Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Serbia or any of the other nations where a whole generation was slaughtered in yet another war for the bankers, imperialists and industrial profiteers.
