Silence across Scotland to remember fallen war heroes

The nation has paid silent tribute to those who lost their lives in conflict on a coronavirus-hit Armistice Day.

Covid-19 restrictions forced much of the British public to observe the traditional two-minute silence at 11am on Wednesday from their homes this year.

But scaled back socially-distanced commemorations were also held across Scotland, including at Central Station in Glasgow.

This year, Armistice Day marks the centenary of the burial of the Unknown Warrior in London’s Westminster Abbey after the end of the First World War.

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage has penned a poem commemorating the anniversary, which honours the symbolic “son we lost” who is “a soul without name or rank or age or home”.

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall attended a private service at the abbey to mark the funeral of the unknown British serviceman whose body was brought back from northern France in 1920.

He was laid to rest at the west end of the abbey’s nave on November 11 that year to represent all those who lost their lives in the First World War but whose place of death was unknown or body never found.

In his poem The Bed, Mr Armitage charts the fallen soldier’s journey, from being “broken and sleeping rough in a dirt grave” to being buried “among drowsing poets and dozing saints”.

It concludes: “All this for a soul, without name or rank or age or home, because you are the son we lost, and your rest is ours.”