Two names on a Cenotaph

I was going to do this for Remembrance Day this year.  I was going to talk about how I was connected to the wars.  But instead I will talk about the cenotaph.  This year I went to the public service in the town.  It was a social occasion people came and greeted each other and they talked and the kids talked and played, but there were not that many kids.  Most people were older than me, but I would say I was the median age. There were a lot of younger people that were never touched by war.  My father was born in the war time years, my mother was on the crest of the baby boom after the war.  Both had parents in the war, my father's father in the infantry I think, maybe in the engineers; it was never talked about.  My mother's father was in the RAF as a recon pilot.  My my mother's mother was nurse in a POW camp in Espinola.  Through them, my parents, I have a connection to the war.  But others do not.  During the moment of silence, there were cars driving past, were the drivers thinking, what is going on over there?  Oh yeah that thing.  We're they born so that they never had to serve?  Were their parents?  Did they ever care?  

The cenotaph has been augmented over the past few years.  Two new stones, large, black and shiny, with all the names of those that made the ultimate sacrifice.  Two stones, one for each World War.  Two lists of names from different times of the town.  

After the movie I was walking through the common grounds, marked by the cenotaph, I saw a group of kids playing near the stones, one a girl found one of the wreaths had fallen from when the clean up crew had removed the chairs.  She picked it up and placed it reverently back where it was supposed to go.  I had been approaching the stone to read the names.  I greeted them and gathered them closer and then I pointed out the names that I knew, men who had died nearly ninety years before they were born.  I pointed to Lt. Percy Jackson, who is buried in Balsam Cemetery, died in 1917.  I pointed out Clarence Taylor, my great-grandfather's brother, who died, i am not sure if I am spreading myth, on the last day of the war in 1918, but that is what I told them, something to crystallize the idea of the war.  They said that it sucked to die on the last day.  It did suck.  It sucked that anyone should die in war, but on the last day or week, that double sucks.  

But if there ever is a first person to die in a war that sucks too.  I hope, sincerely, that children only know war at the cenotaph and that know one is the first to die in war again.