I always cry reading this poem AND to keep that tradition, when at a Remembrance Service, I cry there as well. Such losses - such sacrifices - so many - And still wars go on. Thanks for your tribute Diane.
Thanks Diane. Just heard it read at Remembrance Day service here in Toronto. Also lovely song The Green Fields of France about an Irishman who was buried in Flanders. Brings tears
I always cry reading this poem AND to keep that tradition, when at a Remembrance Service, I cry there as well. Such losses - such sacrifices - so many - And still wars go on. Thanks for your tribute Diane.
On remembrance day we should also remember those brave men of the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion who went to fight fascism in Spain .
A wonderful message for us to remember the fallen who scarified their lives, and the lovely Poem “in Flanders Fields “
Thanks Diane. Just heard it read at Remembrance Day service here in Toronto. Also lovely song The Green Fields of France about an Irishman who was buried in Flanders. Brings tears
Thanks for this post, Diane.
A muchy gloomier, not to speak of realistic, take on the situation was penned by Charles Sorley just before his death at the front at age 20 in 1915:
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“Yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.