ARMED forces veterans and cadets marched together through Pontypool town centre yesterday in solemn centenary remembrance of acts of bravery by Gwent soldiers during the First World War.

The parade and service in honour of the Monmouthshire Regiment Territorial Force followed similar events in Newport and Chepstow last week to mark the 100th anniversary of the second battle of Ypres in May 1915.

A crowd of around 150 people gathered at the war memorial at the gates of Pontypool Park for a wreath laying ceremony after a parade led by the band and drums of the Royal Welsh, with representatives from the Gwent and Powys Army Cadet Force, the Monmouth School Combined Cadet Force, and branches of the Royal British Legion.

This was followed by a service at St Cadoc's Church in Trevethin to commemorate the part the Monmouthshire Regiment Territorial Force played when all three of its battalions stood together at Ypres to prevent the German army from occupying the city.

Overcoming great odds, their role was all the more important for helping keep German forces from reaching vital Channel ports, albeit at a cost in lives that even then, barely nine months into the war, had become grimly familiar.

The 2nd Mons was unique in the territorial forces as it was the first Territorial Army battalion to go into the trenches in 1914 to occupy a battalion sector of the line.

It was also the last to return to these shores in 1919, having been the only territorial battalion to march into Germany at the end of the war, although by then, very few of its 1914 intake had survived.

At Pontypool's war memorial today, a two minutes' silence was impeccably observed by participants and onlookers alike.

Standards were lowered in remembrance, and Last Post was sounded, and the familiar words from Laurence Binyon's First World War poem For The Fallen were read out:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.