As August comes to a close, there is a quote you will have heard a lot on August 15, Victory in Japan Day. Let me tell you it’s befitting origins on Victory in Japan Day and India Independence Day. Indians fought for Independence in both battles. We who by time and fortune were not there, hold ourselves cheap, and this is why. The quote is "When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say, For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today".
It comes from the epitaph in Kohima, India where in the Second World War the Imperial Army of Japan suffered their greatest ever military defeat to that date. 2,000 Indian troops repulsed 15,000 of Japan's mightiest as they tried to overrun India. Of the victory Field Marshall Slim said "if you want to know how brave were the Indian soldiers, don't ask me, ask the enemy". The epitaph was written to commemorate that victory. But the story does not end there It is based on another epitaph over a thousand years earlier...when 300 Spartans stood up to an army of over ten thousand Persians. That was made famous in a film with this quote: "Remember us." As simple an order as a king can give. "Remember why we died." For he did not wish tribute, nor song, nor monuments nor poems of war and valour. His wish was simple. "Remember us," he said to me. That was his hope, should any free soul come across that place, in all the countless centuries yet to be. May all our voices whisper to you from the ageless stones, "Go tell the Spartans, passer-by, that here by Spartan law, we lie."
It is because men do their duty and the opportunity to do so that Shakespeare’s King Henry V said:
"From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day."
