Remembrance Day

This is Veterans Day in the United States, when we honor military service members who fought -- and their fellows who were injured and killed -- in wars.   The day was first known in the U.S. as Armistice Day, when World War I armies agreed to lay down their arms on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

In England, the day was named and still is called Remembrance Day.  The British and their allies won the war, but at a horrible cost.  Nearly 900,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers died in World War I.

Also today, a British cadet planted the final ceramic marker in a remarkable installation at the Tower of London.  It involved the placement a hand-made red poppy for every Commonwealth soldier killed in the war.  I spoke of this project in an earlier post, "Poppies," on August 5.

A few days ago, the Telegraph newspaper sent an aerial photographer to document the scale of the project.  As you can see from the video, the installation was drawing large crowds even before Remembrance Day.



The project inspires many thoughts:

     -- That each poppy represents the loved son or brother, or daughter or sister, of a bereft family.

     -- That the enormous number of lost Commonwealth soldiers, huge as it is, represents far fewer than half the military deaths in World War I.

     -- That even after the horror of that war, a second world war, lasting half again as long, involving even more of the world's countries and leading to many more deaths, began just 21 years later.

Individual losses scar families, but the loss of much of a generation scars the world.  It has been observed often that many European countries were led by limited and often malign characters in the 1930s.  Perhaps many better candidates did not arise because they had died young in the Great War.