Today’s Remembrance Day is particularly poignant, the first one on a century anniversary from the beginning of the war. And I think that no one who fought it is with us any longer. My paternal grandfather was a veteran. He had emigrated from Eastern Europe as a young man, and then returned to fight in France.
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.
My paternal grandfather was in the Italian Army for a little over year at the start of the war. He came to the U.S. during the war, and was drafted into the U.S. Army, and spent the last year in our Army in France. The men of that generation were men of uncountable strengths in my mind.
As many times as I’ve read that poem, it still makes me weep, Thank you, Rand.
More PC foolishness mars the day in a Wisconsin school.
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/veterans-day-program-cancelled-because-irrational-fear-21-gun-salute
Laurence Binyon’s “Ode of Remembrance”:
They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
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.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam