At the stroke of 11am yesterday, Bermuda fell silent for two minutes to honour our war dead.

The tradition dates from the signing of the Armistice, which ended what was then called the Great War at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” in 1918 after four years of unrelenting and historically unprecedented carnage.

A handful of ageing Bermudians gathered in the rain to watch the solemn Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph, no doubt thinking about friends, spouses and family members who died in the service of their Island and the greater cause of freedom.

Younger Bermudians, residents and tourists respectfully paid homage to those who fell. But for them the two World Wars of the 20th century, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the crucibles that shaped the modern world and Bermuda’s place in it, are now almost beyond living memory.

One Bermudian war veteran left a first-hand battlefield account of the Armistice, which ended the fighting between Germany and the Allied powers on November 11, 1918.

Enlisting with the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps as a private soldier in 1914, Allan Livingstone Cooper left a job sweeping the sidewalk outside a Hamilton shipping office to become one of 16 Bermudians in that unit promoted to an officer from the ranks during the First World War.

He served on the Western Front in France — a 450-mile network of trenches, barbed-wire entanglements and machinegun emplacements extending from the Swiss frontier to the English Channel — where the German and Allied front lines were separated by only a few yards of shell-blasted no-man’s land.

The stalemated Western Front became symbolic of the futility and slaughter of the First World War, a conflict that Winston Churchill said “differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought.

“ ... When all was over, torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilised, scientific, Christian states had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.”

Lieutenant Cooper belonged to a generation of Bermudians who had never struck a child or kicked a dog before becoming embroiled in the mass carnage of a conflict that ultimately claimed the lives of an estimated ten million military personnel and about seven million civilians.

He recorded the reaction of troops on the Western Front when the Armistice between the Allies and Germany came into effect at 11am on November 11 in 1918 in accordance with the Armistice signed by representatives of Germany and the Allied powers between 5.12 and 5.20 that morning.

“There was a sort of tension in all ranks as rumours of an early peace were in the air: Bermuda didn’t feel too far away at this point,” Mr Cooper wrote in his journal.

“Finally the rumours were a concrete fact — an Armistice was to be signed at 11am. The tension was eased and we paraded as usual as if nothing had happened.

“Whereas the world was celebrating the joyous event, we were taking it in our stride. Inwardly, we felt a great calm that the bloody thing was over.”

But it wasn’t over, not really.

As a French statesman remarked, it proved easier for the Great Powers of the day to make war than to make peace.

An excessively punitive peace treaty produced seismic economic, cultural and political shock waves that devastated post-First World War German society and led directly to the rise of Adolf Hitler and an even uglier worldwide conflagration.

The entire world was once again transformed into a global battlefield during the epochal 1939-1945 conflict between fascism and the alliance of necessity between the rival ideologies of liberal democracy and Stalinist communism, including tiny Bermuda.

This Island became a mid-Atlantic fortress, giving up fully 10 per cent of its land area to the Allied war effort against the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan.

Flying boats hunted German U-boats out of Bermuda. Fleets of long-range bombers being ferried to the European Theatre of Operations flew in and out of the newly constructed airfield at the East End after coming off American assembly lines. Destroyers underwent shakedown training for convoy duty in the waters of the Great Sound.

Even the Island’s hotels were requisitioned for war use, British intelligence officers and codebreakers billeted in suites, which had been filled by wealthy North American vacationers and honeymooning socialites before the outbreak of hostilities.

Addressing Bermuda’s House of Assembly on January 15, 1942, on his way home from meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt in Washington DC, Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, told Members of Colonial Parliament that “you in Bermuda happen to be called upon to play a part of especial importance and distinction”.

He added: “Everybody has to do his duty to the cause — first to the British Empire, but above that to the world cause.”

Sir Winston went on to refer to the new wartime bases constructed in Bermuda as “important pillars of the bridge connecting the two great English-speaking democracies”.

“You have cause to be proud that it has fallen to your lot to make this important contribution to a better world,” he said.

He concluded his remarks by expressing his “profound gratitude” to the Island for the sacrifices it had made in terms of land.

But, of course, Bermuda’s contributions went far beyond hosting Allied bases along with US, British, Canadian, West Indian and Free-French military personnel on its territory. Virtually the whole Bermudian population was mobilised, in one way or another, for the conflict, which became the pivot of modern history.

All military-age males resident in Bermuda were liable for military service in one of the two racially segregated local units. In addition to maintaining guards at the Royal Naval Dockyard and the Darrell’s Island flying boat base, the local soldiers guarded the transatlantic cable facilities, beaches and inlets, patrolled the Island and operated motorboat patrols.

Both local militia sent detachments overseas and Bermudian servicemen participated in such now-legendary engagements as the Battle of Britain in 1940, El Alamein in 1941 and the 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy.

Thirty-five young Bermudian men and women gave their lives in the Second World War fighting for the freedoms we now take for granted.

For them and millions of other young men and women who bore arms in that conflict, loyalty, duty and honour were not archaic concepts but real and enduring truths.

They battled their way across continents and fought one another in the air and on and under the seas to stop the pitiless and seemingly inexorable march of fascist tyranny.

As a great postwar German statesman said, anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present, and whoever refuses to remember man’s sometimes epic propensity for inhumanity is prone to new outbreaks of savagery.

“It is vital to keep alive the memories; [the fascists’] constant approach was to stir up prejudices, enmity and hatred,” the former West German President Richard Weizsacker said on the 40th anniversary of the conclusion of the Second World War in 1985.

“What is asked of young people today is this: do not let yourselves be forced into enmity and hatred of other people.

“Let us honour freedom. Let us work for peace. Let us respect the rule of law. Let us be true to our own conception of justice.”

November 11 provides us with an annual opportunity to reflect on all of the themes outlined by Weizsacker as well as to commemorate the unmatched courage of our forebears.

On Remembrance Day we not only remember and honour those who died on the battlefield, we remember why they died. So we are also being reminded of the obligation we all have to remain vigilant — to always remember that what we do today can prevent the need for any similar such sacrifices in the future.