SCOTS PGC College principal Michael Harding reflected on his travels around France with 70 students from his school earlier this year and on the Korean War during his Remembrance Day address yesterday.

"One cannot walk through the fields of the Somme today, as I and a group of 70 Scots members did earlier this year, without being overwhelmed by the reality of the sacrifice," Mr Harding said.

"Our service today reminds us of this sacrifice.

"This year we particularly remember those some 17,000 Australians who served in Korea and especially the 340 who lost their lives in the conflict that lasted some three years, so close to our shores.

"The connection between the awful events in France, some 35 years earlier and conflict in Korea is strong.

"This was particularly the case in the final phases of the war in Korea where a virtual stalemate along the 38th parallel, according to historians, resembled the trench warfare in France.

"Veterans of the conflict in Korea describe their experience in ways that look to an observer now 60 years later, as having a familiar, disturbing rhythm.

"The initial journey, arrival and reasonably rapid progress, in a war fought for ideological as well as practical purposes, was clearly exciting for many. Just like in France though, and, indeed in World War II and Vietnam, the sheer brutality of war rapidly became the dominant feature.

"For the men involved, the initial excitement of travelling to serve with great glory must, just like those who spent such awful times in their lives dug in above the beaches at Gallipoli and in France, have seemed a long time ago.

"That the Korean War came to an uneasy armistice in July of 1953 along essentially the exact same border that existed prior to the conflict is of salient interest.

"Just like in France 40 years earlier, ground gained inch by inch must have been done so with the expense of incalculable human and physical resources."

Mr Harding finished his address by reading a poem written in the final stages of the Korean War by a young Digger, titled Dear Mum.

"Just as the words of the great poets of the First War brought the reality of war alive to our touring party as we travelled among the remnants of the trenches in France in April, this too reminds us of the terrible contrast between life giving forces of families and the terrible reality of the stalemate on the 38th parallel in Korea in 1952," he said.