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.

Poppies

Above is a photo of a remarkable art project taking shape around the Tower of London.

For months now, volunteers have been setting out ceramic poppies at the rate of 180 a day.  By November 11, Armistice Day, there will be almost 900,000 poppies, one for each British and Commonwealth soldier who died in World War I.

Poppies have been a symbol of the Great War for many years, partly because of a famous poem about the British war dead in Flanders.  The poem is set at the site first of an early trench battle and, then, a soldiers' cemetery.

An English ceramic artist, Paul Cummins, and a set designer, Tom Piper, came up with the idea and have cooperated on its execution.  At the end of the project, the poppies will be sold and proceeds devoted to veterans' charities.

Several elements strike me here -- beautiful flowers representing death, the mass of flowers acknowledging the staggering numbers of war dead and the placement at the Tower of London, for hundreds of years a prison notorious for the torture and execution of people deemed enemies of British kings and queens.  During World War I, 11 spies were executed by firing squad at the tower.

It looks in photographs like a thoughtful, respectful remembrance, and it makes me wish I had a trip planned to London this year.


The Poem

In Flanders Fields

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 sunsets flow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

in Flanders fields

The poem, memorized by Commonwealth children for generations, was written in 1915, early in the war, by a Canadian army doctor, John McCrae, after he watched a friend die on the field.  "In Flanders Fields" is marked by the theme of sad but honorable loss.

As the war ground on and the carnage continued, later British poets composed more graphic verses about the frustration, suffering and even horror that they had witnessed.  (More about them later.)

John McRae died toward the end of the war, still in service, of pneumonia, in 1918.