Remembrance Day

Thank you, pogge. My dad's big brother, my uncle whom I obviously never knew, died at Passchendaele in 1917, smothered in the mud.

Conservative though his family were, they were remarkably good at facing the grisly truths of that war rather than the sentimental platitudes. The documents they saved were the tough ones, which came from other soldiers rather than the army or the government.

I revere McRae's poem too, but WWI changed poetry as it changed so much else. One other poem that I think deserves to be remembered as well as "Flanders Fields" is Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." I quote just the last stanza:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.