Remembrance Sunday 2025

The whole village was involved one way or another in this years Remembrance day. From people putting up he large poppies on lampposts and fences, the decoration of the Church, selling poppies house to house and the Scouts outside the shop doing their bit.

28th Odiham Scout Group

You might be interested in the background to the Crondall War memorial and the brave people that gave their lives for our freedom. Here is a link to the Crondall War Memorial https://www.roll-of-honour.com/Hampshire/Crondall.html

Courtesy roll-of-honour.com

One of our residents, Roger Thompson, gave a Remembrance Address in the Church which is reproduced below:

REMEMBRANCE ADDRESS given by Roger ThompsonAll Saints, Nov 2025Good morning and welcome to our Remembrance Service. Remembrance remains at the heart of British tradition. Little has changed in over a hundred years, even though twice the number of war casualties now seek help. Meanwhile we, the nation, have forgotten the meaning of compassion. It is as though we no longer care enough.So let’s return to our memorial when we paused for two minutes’ silence. What were your thoughts during that moment of peace? A family name, war, maybe soldiers going after a battle to collect their dead; a chinook under fire, landing in the heat and dust of Afghanistan to lift a wounded soldier to safety. Thinking about war is not easy. War is beyond brutal. We understand battles, armies, ships, but in reality it’s thousands of men and women hanging on petrified, while comrades around them already lie dead.If that picture doesn’t gel, it’s not surprising. We are now out of touch with the armed forces. The bonds are broken. Ten years ago these pews were crammed with old soldiers, airmen and sailor. Lord Bramall, who landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, alongside Admiral Mansfield, whose ship suffered a torpedo attack when two hundred lives were lost. They wore gallantry medals shoulder to shoulder; every person quietly remembering. Never the glory; always the cost. The cost of survival, and who paid the price. On Remembrance Sunday in this place were men and women who could stand ten feet tall in any company. Our congregation was part of history, our history. But today we have forgotten who and what we are, and our sense of duty.So let us return to our memorial and the words of the Kohima Epitaph, “For your tomorrow we gave our today.” You may have heard that somewhere before. “He died so that we might live.” A powerful concept; the true Christian belief; a supreme act of sacrifice. He died so that we might live. We have to understand those words, because they are our legacy. The dead are dead, but for so many, the consequences of war are not confined to the battlefield. They extend beyond the names of airmen, sailors and soldiers who died in combat. None of the dead will have made that sacrifice alone. Grief has no boundaries—a wife, a mother, a child—all pay the price.Consider the Royal Navy in 1941 in the North Atlantic. HMS Hood was sent to destroy the pride of the German fleet, the battleship The Bismarck. With one shell Hood was blown to pieces. Fourteen hundred sailors died in less time than it takes you to walk back down the aisle. Four. Only four survived. Twenty thousand at home entered the fray, suffered the agony. They faced the consequences, they needed help.

You may have seen Gaza or Ukraine on the television. You cannot measure the cost of war in human terms in pounds and pence. No spreadsheet can ever produce a bottom line. So let us think about the physically and mentally wounded needing public help, but knowing that public money has dried up; a huge gap that we the able must be able to bridge. The media love anxiety and mental stress. For the armed forces PTSD is a constant outcome of battle. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was called shell shock. Soldiers who wavered in battle could be executed—shot at dawn.PTSD is still with us. Many are going through hell. They need our help. The Combat Stress clinic in Leatherhead cares for veterans with mental disorders. I met a soldier who was parachuted into Arnhem in September 1944 with only a rifle and very little ammunition, to be met by two hundred German tanks. He survived ten days of savage fighting, and would never have been admitted to the Combat Stress clinic if seventy years later he did not suffer from crippling flashbacks and urgently needed treatment.Then there was Scotty—blown up twice in Northern Ireland, and in 1982 fronted the Scots Guards’ attack on Tumbledown in the Falklands, where an explosion blew him across the rocks. He survived. But forty years later, at night in the New Forest, he would drag his wife from bed and throw her under the stairs until “the attack”—what attack?—had passed. And think of those who returned to their pre-war lives, continuing until riddled by doubt—isolated, plagued by survivors’ guilt—they took their own lives.Combat Stress is a private company mentored by a London City tailor and public donations. They need our help, and will do so for a long time. We must accept responsibility for remembrance. It boils down to one question. Can we be trusted to safeguard the legacy left by them? Are we worthy of the sacrifices of those whose names appear on our memorial and the fifty-three thousand other British memorials around the world? We can never repay what we owe. The dead are dead. They gave the most that anyone could give. We will remember them, especially the suffering.I’ve painted a black picture of indiscriminate brutality and killing, carnage and its terrible consequences. The question for us is what can we do to ease the pain, and banish further hurt? We must be compassionate as a way of saying “thank you”. We must engage. These people are not strangers, whether from Bath, Bali or Belfast. Their actions and sacrifices have shaped our lives, our community and our nation. They are our people. They have earned our deepest respect. They died so that we might live.Turn to Saint Luke’s gospel—the Good Samaritan. Be mindful. Become involved. Reach out and find your compassion. Never ignore those in need. Never pass them by on the other side. So many need our help. Thank you.