People stood in silence to remember the war dead at exactly 11am this morning at Tavistock war memorial, to mark Armistice Day.

Only the sound of the traffic disturbed the solemn act of remembrance, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and 108 years to the day when the signing of the Armistice Treaty ended the bloodshed of the First World War.

Royal British Legion chairman Chris Smerdon said the ceremony was about remembrance, not the glorification of war.

“War to end all end all wars, it didn’t work,” he said. “It is all about remembrance, all those names on there, on the memorial, were sons, fathers, brothers and even a sister and auntie.

“All of us who served, we do not want to see wars again, it is about remembrance not celebration and glorification of war.”

There was a good turnout for the ceremony, which began with the Exhortation:

‘They shall not grow old, as we are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.’

After the two-minute silence, he read the Kohima Epitaph: ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today’.

There followed a verse of the Lord’s Prayer and the singing of the first verse of the National Anthem.