This is the text of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Commemorative Address at the Remembrance Day Service, held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Fellow Australians, friends of Australia, Veterans of Australia:

90 years ago today, the great guns fell silent.

After fours years of bloodshed, the battlefields were silent.

Great empires had been broken.

Millions, millions lay dead.

Among them, sixty thousand Australian heroes whose final resting place will forever be foreign soil.

And then there were the wounded a further one hundred and fifty thousand whose bodies and minds were to be forever scarred by the horrors of war.

And all this from a country of some four millions.

The scale of the carnage; the new ways of killing on an almost industrial scale; the tiny pieces of land over which so much blood was spilt; the sheer, stark horror of life and death in the trenches made all peoples hope that this could never happen again. [Read more…]