Why Remembrance is a privilege as much as a duty

It was exceptionally cold, that strange Armistice day. I was used to spending the two minutes silence squinting into the winter brightness at college memorials or in English country church yards. Mid November is rarely freezing cold in the UK: it is often cold and crisp, the temperature is just enough time to stand outside whilst sunlight dances on stone memorials. Prague, however, where I spent that strange Armistice day a decade ago, is very different. Eleventh November is the feast day of St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers and the Czechs have a saying which alludes to the typical Central European weather on Armistice day: ‘St Martin comes riding a white horse’. 

Snow did indeed fall that day. I, only a student, stood alongside various ambassadors, military attaches, oddly exiled Anglican clergy, tech entrepreneurs and men who had married Czech wives during the republic’s great awakening to the stag do in the 1990s.