Each year, for the past 15, hundreds of firefighters have marched down Broadway to honor their fallen colleagues.

Saturday the marchers numbered 99.

The reason given, more whispered than spoken aloud in the knots of blue serge gathered on the yellowed grass of the Chelsea Parade, was a boycott.

Firefighters snubbed the Norwich diocese's annual parade and Mass to honor them, they said, because organizers of this year's event banned firetrucks from the procession.

“They like bringing their truck, showing it off, you know?” said Buddy Hernandez, past captain of the Portland Fire Department. “They spend a lot of time cleaning it up and stuff, and it's what we do, you know?”

“Volunteers are very proud of their equipment and what they do,” said Alfred Brooks, past chief of the Mystic Fire Department. “And they don't do it for money.” The ban on trucks, he said, “kind of hurt them.”

“If they don't want to be here, shame on them,” seethed Chief Kenneth Scandariato of the Norwich Fire Department.

Two Connecticut firefighters lost their lives this year, he said — Capt. Joseph Pagano Jr. of Middletown and Capt. John Keane of Waterbury — and he had asked their chiefs how they wanted their men to be honored.

They said “that the best way firefighters can honor the dead is to walk for them, not ride,” Scandariato said, and so he made those feelings known to those who headed up the committee planning the Mass.

“This isn't about me, and it shouldn't be about anybody that's standing here today. I'm just coming to make sure that those they've left behind know that I still care about the sacrifice they made. I don't even need to be in the dress blues to do that,” Scandariato said.

“So if they want to boycott, what were they really here for to begin with? To ride on the apparatus? Or to honor the dead?”

The Mass is to honor both firefighters and emergency medical service personnel, and it usually draws people from across the state. On Saturday there were people from Mystic, Bozrah, Stafford Springs, Danbury, Griswold, Cromwell and Tolland.

But in a city which, between its fire department and volunteer companies, has some 350 firefighters of its own, the slender turnout startled many.

“It would be nice” to have the trucks, said Sandy Nordgren, rescue lieutenant for the Bozrah Fire Department, “but that's not why we're here.”

“There's usually a much bigger turnout,” said Joe Comarrella, deputy chief of the West Stafford Fire Department, who has attended the Mass for the past 10 years and now stared across the virtually vacant field of the parade.

Describing the boycott as a “rumor,” Matthew Traber, chairman of the Mass committee, said, “There is a staggering decrease in people that have come, and for the 15th anniversary this year, we tried to do something new, and bring a little bit more homage to it.”

“No one has called me. No one has walked up to me. No one has sent me a letter or e-mail. I've got nothing,” said Mark Sicuso, the committee's co-chairman.

“You know,” said Traber, “It's all about sacrifice, I believe, and honoring those that have ...”

“... made the ultimate sacrifice,” Sicuso interrupted. “The least we can do is walk a quarter mile.”

Traber said he had envisioned something much more grand.

“You know, I enjoy watching a military procession. They're straight and narrow, and they're very professional,” he said. “There's something about a firefighters' procession. It's just a bunch of grouped firemen walking unevenly, bouncing down the road, and it's just got this unique bit to it, you know.”

And so, cradling axes and preceded by bagpipes, the 99 firefighters marched from the Chelsea Parade to the Cathedral of St. Patrick, where they prayed and remembered their dead.

“It's not about the firetrucks,” said Sicuso. “It's about the people. People put out fires, not firetrucks.”