A crowd estimated at 30,000 gathered in Ottawa on Sunday for the annual Remembrance Day ceremony to honour Canada's war dead.

The ceremony included military and political leaders, veterans, serving members of the military and those who lost family members in Canada's service.

Canadian soldiers attack Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917. There were 3,598 Canadians killed in the battle.
(Courtesy of Veterans Affairs Canada)

Wilhelmina Beerenfenger-Koehler was chosen by the Royal Canadian Legion as the 2007 Silver Cross Mother, to represent all those who lost children in military service.

Her son, Cpl. Robbie Christopher Beerenfenger, was killed along with Sgt. Robert Short on the mission in Afghanistan on Oct. 2, 2003.

"I cry a lot for him," she told CBC News in an interview on Saturday. "I haven't been angry. I would just like him to walk back through the door."

During the ceremony on Sunday, Jack Frost, the president of the Royal Canadian Legion, read lines from British poet Laurence Binyon's For the Fallen, first published in 1914: "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."

Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of the defence staff, said the public attendance at the ceremony in Ottawa was inspirational for the forces.

In Afghanistan, family members of five Canadian soldiers killed on the mission arrived at Kandahar Air Field on Saturday to tour the base and mark Remembrance Day.

The CBC's Piya Chattopadhyay talked with them and reported that the most important thing for the visitors was a chance to meet serving soldiers because some of them had memories of the dead.

It gave the eight family members "a sense and an idea of what this place is really like," she said.

Canadian casualties in the five wars that the country has fought in since 1899 include:

• 244 in the Boer War (1899-1902).
• 66,655 in the First World War (1914-1918).
• 44,893 in the Second World War (1939-1945).
• 516 in the Korean War (1950-1953).
• 71 soldiers and a diplomat in Afghanistan (since the mission began in early 2002).

Remembrance ceremonies are taking place all over the country.

In Belgium, on the site of a bitter battle in 1917, Federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice marked the death of his great-uncle, Pte. Roy Urquhart.

Urquhart was 22 when he died in October 1917, one of more than 4,000 Canadians killed in the battle that finally drove the Germans out of the village of Passchendaele on Nov. 6.

Prentice placed a photograph of Urquhart on the Canadian memorial near the village.

In London, the Queen led the Remembrance ceremony and laid the first wreath at the Cenotaph memorial.

With files from the Canadian Press