More than 100 years after WW1, the threat of conflict haunts Europe again

As nations across the globe observe Remembrance Day, also known as Armistice Day or Veterans Day, the specter of new conflict haunts war memorials amid threats in Europe.

Red poppy flowers were dropped onto soldiers, politicians and onlookers from across the world gathered in western Belgium on Tuesday to commemorate the end of World War I.

They laid wreaths at a newly renovated memorial for the fallen in Ypres, the Belgian town that earned the grim honor of being synonymous with the brutality of conflict.

Tuesday is known as Armistice Day — or Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Day in Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa — marking the end of WWI.

Soldiers from New Zealand to Canada paraded through town toward the Menin Gate, a massive stone memorial inscribed with the names of tens of thousands of soldiers who were killed but left without graves.

Bagpipes and bugles rang out alongside an electric guitar that played “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan in Flemish and English. A choir sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

In Britain, many people paused for two minutes of silence at 11 a.m., marking the moment the war ended in 1918, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron attended the traditional ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe and lit the eternal flame at the memorial engraved with the words: “Here rests a French soldier who died for the nation.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that the nation’s minute of silence was “a noiseless echo of the hush that fell across Europe when the guns stopped in 1918.”