Posted on 11/11/2006 6:00:06 PM PST by GMMAC
Take up our quarrel
Father Raymond J. de Souza
National Post
Friday, November 10, 2006
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 Flanders 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, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
-- In Flanders Fields, by Lieut. Col. John McCrae, (1872-1918).
WOLFE ISLAND, Ont. - Tim Hortons has been exhorting Canadians to remember our veterans this Remembrance Day with radio commercials that begin, "In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row."
All well and good, until the commercial continues: "That opening couplet comes from the Canadian poem In Flanders Fields." It seems that we have forgotten even the things that help us to remember.
No doubt, Tim Hortons is right in its assessment that the opening lines would not be recognized by many Canadians without an explanation. Things are quite dire when that national doughnut maker -- with its finger on the artery-clogged pulse of the nation -- concludes that the national memory is sufficiently atrophied as to require prompting about perhaps the nation's most famous English-language poem.
I have heard the radio ad several times as I travel back and forth on the ferry from Wolfe Island to Kingston -- 20 minutes across the water which takes you past the Royal Military College. This Remembrance Day, the fallen in battle include recent graduates from there. Yet Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae's poem seems somehow strangely distant, even though our soldiers will mark this Remembrance Day in combat.
It has been so long since Canadian soldiers were in combat that we forgot something of what Lt. Col. McCrae was asking us to think about. The poppy became a symbol of remembering the veterans: lest we forget. But it too often meant only that, just remembering.
This year, there is a minor controversy between the Royal Canadian Legion and a peace group called "Women in Black," which, counter-intuitively, distributes white poppies. The white poppies are to remember civilian victims of war and, as they say, to honour the war dead by working against war.
The point is that the poppies, at least those written of by Lt. Col. McCrae, are not there for remembering alone, and certainly not for remembering our fallen soldiers as victims of war. Indeed, he writes not of remembering at all; he writes of not breaking "faith" with the dead. Keeping faith with the dead means not remembering them with gauzy ambiguity, as if the poppies might just as easily come from a well-tended garden.
The poppies grow in a cemetery in which are buried the men who trained and fought and killed and died for their country. Lt. Col. McCrae's dead do not worry about being forgotten; they worry about us breaking faith with them, in which case they "shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields."
They look to us to take up the "quarrel with the foe." They do not ask to be remembered alone, but for us to fight our enemies as they fought.
The cadets over at RMC are being trained to fight and kill and die in defence of Canada, our freedoms and security.
There ought to be nothing gauzy or ambiguous about our remembrance that others fought so that we might be free, and so we fight that others will be free. The blood-red poppies are very concrete and specific; they grow over specific graves in which lie real soldiers. They deserve our remembrance; our country requires that we keep faith with them.
Now that Canadians have returned to combat, our remembering needs to be remembrance with a purpose. Not only gratitude, but a recommitment to the ideals for which others once fought, and for which we now ask our armed forces to fight. The poppies passively blowing in Flanders Fields need to be complemented by another image from the same poem: to you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high.
Keeping the torch aloft and aflame demands rather more than a poppy in the lapel. Yet that is what Lt. Col. McCrae asks on behalf of those who lie in Flanders Fields, not victims looking for memorials, but fighters looking across the ages for comrades.
We need to remember more than just the poem. We need to remember what it asks of us.
PING!
Amen.
Well said, padre.
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Nails it.
Our neighbors to the North have many problems, but rememberance is not one of them. I was working in Toronto last year on Veteran's Day. Not a person was without a poppy on the lapel, including me. And at 11 AM, all went quiet. The plant closed production and not even a traffic sound intruded. I was deeply moved, then shamed, that my country failed to pay the same level of respect.
Great post, Thanks.
And those of us south of the border should take this to heart, as well.
Bump
ping
Excellent article
"No doubt, Tim Hortons is right in its assessment that the opening lines would not be recognized by many Canadians without an explanation. Things are quite dire when that national doughnut maker -- with its finger on the artery-clogged pulse of the nation -- concludes that the national memory is sufficiently atrophied as to require prompting about perhaps the nation's most famous English-language poem."
There might be some atrophy, but I think dilution is more the case. I don't think I saw one visible minority at our local remembrance. How long until the descendants of those who fought those wars or lived through them here are the minority?
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