...Day tells about ourselves as Australians was triggered by my decision to attend the morning service after Remembrance Day at St Bartholomew's Anglican Church in Rogate, a village with a parish of perhaps a thousand people.

Founded in the eleventh century, St Bart's is a product of the Norman Conquest, a small stone church much enlarged in the 1870s in the Victorian-Gothic style. The service drew a hundred or more, many among them armed services veterans in navy jackets emblazoned with ribbons and service medals.

From footnotes to the order-of-service I discovered the source of the tribute, "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old". Moved by the carnage of the battle of Mons, Laurence Binyon, British army officer and former Deputy Keeper of the British Museum, penned the poem "For the Fallen", published in the London Times and later set to music by Elgar.

Led by the priest, the congregation joined in another refrain, "When you go home, tell them this and say / For your tomorrow, we gave our today", conceived by the Greek poet Simonides, inspired by the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, and translated into English in 1944 during the battle of Burma...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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