‘Every year, on 11 November at 11am — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — we pause to remember those men and women who have died or suffered in all wars, conflicts and peace operations.’ — Australian Government, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 2012.Bermuda’s active involvement in modern wars began in the late 1800s with the formation of the Bermuda Militia Artillery, a home guard composed of ‘gunners’, and that of the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps, mostly comprised of ‘sharpshooters’.The BMA and the Bermuda Rifles (the descendant of the BVRC) were amalgamated into the Bermuda Regiment in 1965 under its first Colonel-in-Chief, HRH The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon.Some soldiers of the pre-Regiment forces saw service in the two world wars. Since the 1950s, Bermudians have served in other theatres of conflict and in the Cold War, including Germany, Korea, Suez, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and others like the Falklands and Northern Ireland.Most Bermudians from 1914 have sat in comfort in a place that approaches paradise, despite internal conflicts of the day, with some in present times objecting to serving on the ‘home front’, with no possible exposure to the travails of open warfare.Tomorrow is Remembrance Day and ‘in Bermuda, which sent the first colonial volunteer unit to the Western Front in 1915, and which had more people per capita in uniform during the Second World War than any other part of the Empire, Remembrance Day is still an important holiday’, for those of you who wonder why you get another day off to go to the beach.While the Second World War will have been over for 70 years in 2015, we still have veterans who served in that global conflict and who yet march in the parade that centres on the Cenotaph in front of the Cabinet Office. That monument is still missing the names of those 80 Bermudians who lost their lives in the Great War of 1914—18, nor are those present who died in service in 1939—45, neither is the one who sacrificed his life for us in the Korean War so inscribed.However, a nearby monument, lately erected, attempts to list everyone who served Bermuda in the last century; to that will have to be added, in due course, those who are presently on the firing line, or who have died in the line of service, as tragically did of late, Major Chris Wheddon of the Bermuda Regiment.As long as our species inhabits this Earth, conflicts are unfortunately inevitable, especially when loonies assume the cloak of ‘leadership’ and then usually start by waging war on their own people, often followed by the consumption of the lives of their neighbours and beyond. As there will always be a need for soldiers and policemen in human society, so the necessity for armed forces will remain, not only to reject aggression, but also to enforce peace on the home front.One Bermuda family is here an example of the presence of soldiering forces in its midst over the last century, that is, the ancestors and descendants of Colonel Sumner Waters and Karin Waters of Southampton Parish.Their son, Lieutenant Charles Waters, USA, is presently on active duty with the United States Army in Afghanistan, perhaps the most recent of Bermudians who have served with the forces of our great neighbour to the west over the last hundred years. The present patriarch, Col. ‘Chip’ Waters had a 27-year career in the Corps of Engineers of the US Army, and was the highest-ranking Bermudian ever in that defence force.As this article is about military heritage, we can go back several generations in the Waters’ genealogy into the days of the First World, or ‘Great’ War. Captain Gifford D. Horton, an American, volunteered to serve with the British before the United States entered the conflict and was a fighter pilot who enlisted in late October 1917. His, unfortunately, was a short war, for his DH9 biplane was shot down by the Germans, when he was on a raid on submarine pens in Belgium on 31 May 1918. He was later buried at Ypres, where some Bermudian casualties also rest, for that area of Belgium is replete with the burial places and memorials of millions of Allied and German servicemen.Another ancestor, Lieut. Charles’ great grandfather, Leonard Chuter, served in the East Surrey Regiment in the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, also in the Great War. In that last conflict wherein horses and mules were essential, Chuter worked with a Remount Unit, the difficulties of which can be gleaned from the fact that the British had over a million such animals in service and almost half of them perished, as in their memorial ‘Most obediently and often most painfully they died — faithful unto death’.Known to some Bermudians personally and to many otherwise for the legacy of paintings he executed here on local maritime subjects, Karin Waters’ father, Deryck Foster, served in India in the Second World War for almost five years. Attempting to enter the Royal Navy, his glassed visage elicited the recruiter’s response: ‘Right — COOK’. As his military son-in-law has noted: ‘In 30 years I have never known Deryck to cook anything.’ Foster, later an outstanding marine artist, joined the Royal Air Force and survived the War; the National Museum recently obtained his last model from his widow, Denise, so in the end, for Deryck, it was always about ships and the sea, despite his culinary disability.Colonel Sumner Waters supervised the construction of key elements of the massive Israeli airbase at Ramon in 1981 and 1982 and yet serves the military by his presence on the Defence Board for the Bermuda Regiment. He is also engaged in the redeployment of the Bermuda Dockyard fortifications for heritage purposes as a trustee of the National Museum. Remembrance Day is not a holiday from world cares, but perhaps, as no other, is a day in which all in this land should remember all of those who came before us in matters military and whose heritage of sacrifice, some fatal, underpins the lives of peace that we enjoy, almost without thought of its foundations in these somewhat selfish times.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.