One of my old customers at the bank was a very very old German lady. As near as makes no difference blind but the most wonderful lady.

We got really close and I took her out for supper one night and she made the joke about an English woman and a German woman being out together.

She told me that she had moved to Canada just before the war (2ww) and was a nurse here. Her and her fellow German nurses would save their wages and send packages of stuff to the German soldiers to help them. Much as any other coutry.

To speak to someone first hand from the "opposing side" who supported her troops and country whole heartedly made me see things from a different perspective.

Whether we agree or not - there are always those on the other side that have the same feelings and support about their boys and girls on the front line.

I suppose i'm trying to say that whenever and whoever you remember, that lost their lives during conflict for whatever reason, there are 2 sides to a war and whether we believe ours to be the right side and the other to be the wrong - people on all sides die.

If you're going to remember - then everyone needs remembering.

Some days I think you are a complete jackass and some days you prove me right.

You made it sound like it was a competition for some sort of bragging rights between Canada and the UK implying that Canada didn't pull its weight and doesn't deserve or have the right to honour its war dead.

You are one sad pathetic excuse for a human being and will be on my ignore list from now on.

Canada:

WW1 64,944 dead, 149,732 wounded
WW2 45,300 dead,

Is that enough?

And during WW2 Canada's fleet of 400 navy ships protecting the Atlantic convoys kept Britian armed and fed.

Its too many, its always to many after WW1

Honoring dead soldiers doesn't stop wars its just continues the fallacy that to die in battles is honorable, or that to kill for your country/politicians is good

Exactly. Everyone needs remembering.

My MIL is German, East Prussian. Their area their family home is in is now in Poland. At the end of the war they had to flee from the Soviet Army who had been told that it was OK to rape German women.
Three sisters a cousin and their mother fled. It was minus 30 degrees, the land routes were blocked and at one stage they walked across the frozen Baltic while being straffed by Soviet planes. Millions were evacuated from East Prussia. The women became separated but all made it to West Germany, not without injury. My MIL has no idea what happened to her father and brother, she thinks the boy was sent to a camp.

She met my FIL in Germany and moved to England as a war bride. She says there were other German women who pretended to be Polish once they were here. She never did.

My family thought for about 40 yrs my aunt (by marriage) was polish - when her dad died they found 4 diff passports - all diff ages / nationalities for him. He was apparently a little paranoid about being taking back. He'd been in the camps too.

They left an adult sister behind in E Germany.

What they went through is beyond my comprehension & I thank my lucky stars it is.

For a soldier to fight with honour and integrity is noble. The moral censure does not belong to the soldiers but to the politicians - mostly older men who should know better.

I think that might have applied once,

certainly during the first world war, and to some degree in the second

personally I don't believe their was much honour and integrity in WW2 just a need to get a nasty job done as quickly as possible, but then most of my stories of the war were from my grandfather who was a medic who saw Dunkirk evacuation for what it was possibly a slanted perspective

But to day in the modern electronic media age, their is no ignorance of the fact that its a politicians war and that many innocents will die and as a result, I think you assume some of the moral burden when you sign up for military service

I can't understand what peoples motives for signing up today would be. The whole honour integrity issue may have rung true in the past, but with no-one knowing the real reason they are fighting anymore, what are their reasons??????

I can no more (or less) understand the motives of people signing up to join the various Armies, Navies and Air Forces of the world than I can joining the Police Service. They are all (essentially) there to enforce some kind of order, nothing more or less. My problem comes when politicians feel the 'need' to (continually) 'sacrifice' uniformed personnel in what amounts to nothing more than a personal and economic crusade.

But at least if you join the police force your job is to enforce the laws of the country and catch the bad guys. I can get that.

But isnt the purpose of the armed forces to enforce order and defend the borders? As I say why deploy to 'arenas' outside of a countries control (unless PERHAPS under the auspices of the UN)?

Your post asks more questions than it gives answers.

Yes, it is very probably true that the military of any any country has as its prime mission to defend that country. It doesn't always work like that, though, does it?

Some of the large military campaigns that take place are for economic/foreign policy reasons. That is not a good thing. Others take place because there is a need to stop people butchering each other for no reason other than than their colour, name, tribe etc.

The UN is toothless and the peacekeeping troops it puts on the ground have their hands tied.

Rant over.

Why? What 'right' do we (as people of {largely} european extraction) have to enforce our new found morality given our histories of butchering other ethnicities? Do we really have a 'Moral Obligation' to involve ourselves? Did we send a force into Sri Lanka? Would the US, Britain and Canada have ever involved themselves in Afghanistan if the former Soviets had not had an interest?

This I wont dispute

I can understand the most common motivation, which is desperation to move on from a hopeless youth which has gone or is going right off the tracks.

I don't think noble feelings come into it at all.