We should never forget that the price of liberty is high, we should never forget our good fortune that not all of us get the bill.
This is the weekend of Remembrance – a time when we show our respects to those who have paid for freedoms they never enjoyed. As the images on screens this weekend show what liberty means to those poor citizens of Kherson and elsewhere in Ukraine, the sense of undiluted patriotism is to be applauded – we are all from somewhere and that somewhere is to be cherished and celebrated.
We should never forget that the price of liberty is high, we should never forget our good fortune that not all of us get the bill.
The Soldier by Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
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