Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day. Veteran's Day. Call it what you will, this is the day we honor the brave men who, amidst the living and the dying, shared love, laughter, hope, dread. Men, boys, alone and together, fought for loved ones, wept bitter tears, offered prayers of thanks and plead for help. Memories almost 100 years old. Fading, because who is left to remember?


I prefer to think of today as Remembrance Day, perhaps because my first memory of this day, I am standing in front of a small brick library, shivering in the cold November wind that sweeps across the plains. I am just 6, aware of intense emotion surrounding the large group as we huddle together. Men and women, boys and girls, we have each pinned red poppies to coats and scarves. My brother, 8 or 9 years old, reads an essay he has written recognizing all who fought during WWI, but especially my Grand-dad.

At the age of 14, with England at war against the encroaching German and allied powers, Grand-dad, my mother's father, convinced an enlistment officer he was 16. Somewhere, in the place where boyhood is left behind and manhood is entered into, Ernst Whitelock existed. His story is complicated, and not well recorded, yet too well known. For the remainder of his life, he and those around him, including his future family, bore the scars of the Great War.

The war finally ended, with the signing of the Versailles Treaty, among several others. But treaties don't give back lost years. An elaborate signature won't bring back husbands and fathers, brothers and sons. An authorized stamp won't dry wet cheeks. The war to end all wars didn't. Is that why we remember? So that four years won't be allowed to be simply catalogued and forgotten in the annals of history?


Is celebration the right word to describe the activities and ceremonies that mark today? Maybe. Maybe we are celebrating that, collectively and individually, we do give recognition to something that, the rest of the year, normally occupies a few pages in the world's history books. We are commemorating with our hearts and minds something real. We are commending life and memorializing death. Because if we don't, who will?

I want to say:

1. Thank-you, Grandad. And thank-you, all young soldiers. Whether you fought with the Entente Powers or the Central Alliance, whether you fought in WWI or any other, I am so sorry for what you have lost, but so thankful for what you have given.
2. I weep tears of gratitude and sorrow for the families and loved ones left behind.
3. I am thankful for the simple red poppy and what it represents.

In Flander's Fields

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.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flander's fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, tho poppies grow
In Flander's fields.

Liet. -Col. John McCrae