Europe remembers Armistice Day with ceremonies

By SYLVIE CORBET Associated Press

PARIS (AP) - Europe marked Armistice Day Tuesday with ceremonies and moments of silence as France opened an international memorial on a former battlefield.

This year's events had special significance because 2014 is the centenary of the start of World War I. Tuesday is the 96th anniversary of the armistice that ended the war on Nov. 11, 1918.

French President Francois Hollande laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier under Paris' Arc de Triomphe.

Later, he inaugurated an international war memorial at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in northern France, in the presence of German, British and Belgian officials. The Ring of Memory carries the names of 600,000 soldiers from over 40 countries who died in the region during the war. Names are listed alphabetically without their nationalities.

"Yesterday's enemies, these men are now re-united in death as if they belong to the same family," said Hollande -whose grand-father was a soldier during the First World War.

Commemorations are made to "pass this memory on to future generations" and "remind the world's leaders of their duties toward peace, security, human rights and democracy," he said.

A few hours before the ceremony, a military helicopter forced a plane dragging a banner calling for Hollande's resignation over the memorial to land.

In Britain, thousands gathered at the Tower of London, where a blood-red sea of ceramic poppies spilled into the moat as part of an art installation paying tribute to soldiers killed in the fighting.

A 13-year-old army cadet, Harry Hayes, planted the final poppy - the last of the 888,246 glass flowers - one for each of the British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in the war. Among the dead was Hayes' great-great-great uncle, Pvt. Patrick Kelly of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards.

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Europe remembers Armistice Day with ceremonies