Remembering the "Gate Keepers" of our world

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

Thanks V. Lawson for sharing this beautiful poem. How many of us remember at this time these brave men who fought for us?

Still are!

It's a whale of a poem poem V; powerful stuff. Yesterday we celebrated Veteran's Day in the US. My question is embarassing as I think I should know the answer. Anyway, is the Day celebrated universally in the West? I remember we wore images of the poppy flowers in primary school but I forgot what date it was or what that Day was called. Please don't be harsh in replying as I left Yard long ago and am already in my senior years!

Nostalgic, Yes, we remember those who fought here in Australia on November 11 each year. I was pleased to see the respect in my local large shopping mall when everyone stopped and silence reigned for a minute that morning.

Hello Nostalgic, In Jamaica, our schools also supported Remembrance Day, we sold poppies and the pennies went to support the veterinarians.
Our schools were divided into groups which were named after relevant local Government ministers, the group who sold the most poppies won a Trophy, and that is how I remembered it.

The poem "Flanders Fields" is a very fascinating one, here is a synopsis of how it came to be.

LT. Major John McCrae, MD (1872-1918) a Canadian spent seventeen days treating injured men - Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook..and the poem was born.

I have attached another poem written by an American, an answer to Flanders Field.

By: R.W. Lillard
Rest ye in peace, ye Flanders dead
The fight that you so bravely led
We've taken up. And we will keep
True faith with you who lie asleep,
With each a cross to mark his bed,
And poppies blowing overhead,
When once his own life-blood ran red
So let your rest be sweet and deep
In Flanders Fields.

Fear not that ye have died for naught;
The torch ye threw to us we caught,
Ten million hands will hold it high,
And freedom's light shall never die!
We've learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders' fields.

Thank you V. When read back to back, the two poems paint such a vivid picture. War; so sad.

Respectfully, Try To Remember...The Waste of WAR

Inscription for a War

Stranger, go tell the Spartans
we died here obedient to their commands
—Inscription at Thermopylae

Linger not, Stranger; shed no tear;
Go back to those who sent us here.
We're the young they drafted out
To wars their folly brought about.
Go tell those old men, safe in bed,
We took their orders and are dead.

by A.D. Hope from Collected Poems: 1930-1970

Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on November 11, 1918 that the First World War came to an end.
It's now considered one of the most wasteful and meaningless wars in human history, fought mainly because Austria, Serbia, Germany, Russia, France, and Great Britain got caught up in a tangle of alliances and none of them wanted to back down from a fight.

But nobody realized how the brutal the war would be, especially with the introduction of modern weapons like the machine gun, which could fire 600 bullets per minute. The machine gun turned the war into a long and intensely bloody stalemate. Most of the fighting took place along the Western front, stretching for 475 miles through Belgium and France, with about 10,000 soldiers per mile.
Each side dug trenches for cover and then each tried to charge the other side, only to be mowed down by machine gun fire. There were numerous battles in which entire squadrons were wiped out in minutes.

Some 260,000 French soldiers were killed in just the first month of fighting. On just one day in 1916, more than 50,000 British troops were killed without advancing a single foot. By the end of the war, on this day in 1918, 9 million soldiers had died and 21 million were wounded.

It has long been thought that the United States helped end the war by getting involved in 1917, but most historians believe that all the armies involved were ready to collapse — especially after the flu epidemic hit in 1918 — and the Germans just happened to collapse first.
Rudyard Kipling was one of the millions of parents to lose a son in the war, and he wrote a poem about it that consisted of two lines:
"If any question why we died, / Tell them because our fathers lied."

(from the Writer's Almanac)

I agree w2ith Zed on the futility of war. I have an only son--an American Citizen--and I'm glad he took a stand very early in life (not because he is a coward, but for some deeper reason) that he would never go to war.I found this interesting poem about the the war titled “poem from an American war veterans wife : "Words Not Spoken, Truths Untold” by Claudia Whitehead McCoy. This poem could be a foreign one , but the experience is universal to each country which is having a conflict.

WORDS NOT SPOKEN, TRUTHS UNTOLD


My Grandfather never spoke
Of the Great War.
Instead he told of dancing
With French peasant girls.
Sometimes I wanted to dance
With my Grandfather,
But he had left his legs
In a foxhole in Belgium.


My Father never spoke
Of World War II.
Instead he told of
Telling stories around a campfire
On Guadalcanal.
Sometimes late at night
A dozen years later,
He would scream and writhe in pain
With the Malaria
He couldn’t leave in the Pacific.


My cousin never spoke
Of the Korean Conflict.
Instead he told
Us how much our letters meant
In that cold forgotten place.
Sometimes I would like to write
To him again, but
The telegram forgot to mention
The zip code for someone killed in action.

My husband never speaks Of Vietnam,
Instead he tells me
How beautiful the flowers were.
Sometimes in July
When fireworks crack and sparkle
He cowers in a closet,
Holding his head
And calling out,”Incoming! Incoming!”


Do I speak to my children
Of wars gone and those yet to be?
I can’t begin to know
The horror or the exhilaration.
I’ve never been there.
But sometimes I tell them
Of Peace and the price
That some have paid
For this illusive gift.


And if I never spoke
Of war?
How would they understand
About honor, courage and patriotism?
But sometimes I have to tell them
About greed, power and carelessness.
Because war isn’t always what it’s said to be,
And God isn’t always on our side.

Thanks for sharing that poem, Truth Seeker. I've never read that before.

Truth Seeker, the poem you posted reminds me of I conversation I had exactly one week ago. We were discussing the futility and illogic of war. The other person pointed out that, every now and then, we are reminded that this or that person happens to be the last survivor of a previous war. We both expressed the hope that there will come a time when we will all be able to point to the very last survivor of the very last war. Wouldn"t that be something?

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae's poem, In Flanders Fields, memorializes the loss of a friend in battle and seems to spread a message to graveyards of the war-dead everywhere. But is there a hint of heraldic patriotism in these lines...and the potential for revenge in future conflicts?

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.

All we are saying is give peace and the peace-keepers a chance, rather than the idea of the" foreign you" get not one inch of the sacred motherland...send your negotiators away!

LINK: Flanders Fields VIDEO:
http://writingnorthidaho.blogspot.com/2011/11/in-flanders-fields.html