Prince Harry Salutes Fallen Service Members At Westminster Abbey Field Of Remembrance

Prince Harry attended a ceremony at Westminster Abbey’s Field of Remembrance to honor the fallen British service members.

PRINCE HARRY LAYS CROSS OF REMEMBRANCE AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY

The usually cheerful redhead, 33, laid a Cross of Remembrance in front of the Graves of Unknown British Soldiers from the First and Second World Wars, and saluted. The Prince served two tours in Afghanistan during his decade in the army, and wore his dress uniform and a poppy pin – a symbol used since 1921 to commemorate military members lost in war.

After the ceremony, Harry flashed his smile and greeted onlookers. He met with veterans, who stood in front of 380 different plots of planted poppies.

The significance of the poppies comes from a John McCrae poem about WWI called “In Flanders Field.” One related stanza reads,  “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row, / That mark our place; and in the sky /The larks, still bravely singing, fly / Scarce heard amid the guns below.”

The very active royal was recently in Chicago for the inaugural summit meeting of the Obama Foundation, headed by President Barack Obama. The pair spent time with about 20 students about initiatives, and the Prince enjoyed both thin crust and Chicago deep dish pizza.

That same evening, Harry spoke about his late mother, Princess Diana. “I think she had a lot in common with everybody but also she certainly listened,” he said. “In a very, very short space of time she was like a vacuum going around, sucking up all the information, all the criticism, all the issues, all the positives and negatives from everybody, then putting her name and her platform toward the bigger issues that had never been talked about. In society we suffer from this illusion, or reality, that some problems become so big that nobody wants to get involved. She was the one that changed that. I will always look up to her… everything she did and the way she did it was having an impact, making a difference.”