[JaredMilne]

John McRae's In Flanders Fields, as read by CBC's Michael Enright:

[Thanos]

A more difficult than normal Remembrance Day this year. Not due to anything bad happening in Canada. It feels that way thanks entirely to the terrorists who openly want a second Holocaust & their brain dead supporters choosing today to defile what should be the most important day for our civilization with a bunch of their hateful & utterly insincere "peace now" marches.

The older I get the more I can no longer see what in the hell it was exactly that all our men in those wars died for, given that the generations (including my own one) that followed them have all failed so miserably in protecting the legacy that was paid for us with all that miserable bloodshed. With our collective complacency, callowness, and outright foolishness we all turned out to be much better at destroying what was given to us than enemies like the Third Reich or Imperial Japan ever could have been.

I can't wear a poppy anymore. What they died for died out with them and disappeared so quickly it's like none of it ever existed at all.

[xerxes]

[JaredMilne]

Thanos Thanos:

A more difficult than normal Remembrance Day this year. Not due to anything bad happening in Canada. It feels that way thanks entirely to the terrorists who openly want a second Holocaust & their brain dead supporters choosing today to defile what should be the most important day for our civilization with a bunch of their hateful & utterly insincere "peace now" marches.

The older I get the more I can no longer see what in the hell it was exactly that all our men in those wars died for, given that the generations (including my own one) that followed them have all failed so miserably in protecting the legacy that was paid for us with all that miserable bloodshed. With our collective complacency, callowness, and outright foolishness we all turned out to be much better at destroying what was given to us than enemies like the Third Reich or Imperial Japan ever could have been.

I can't wear a poppy anymore. What they died for died out with them and disappeared so quickly it's like none of it ever existed at all.

I get what you're saying, but for me it's important to keep wearing the poppy to remember what my grandfathers and so many other people fought for, whatever idiocy comes out of politics. People come and go, but principles can still remain the same-and if I can adhere to those principles through wearing a poppy and my own writings about the wars' impacts on Canada, I will.

It's the same thing with the Canadian flag-I'll be damned if I let the alt-right assholes get a monopoly on it and what it symbolizes, so I'll continue to fly it even as I advocate for what I know Canada can be.

[Sunnyways]

I prefer the poems of Wilfred Owen. They offer a more graphic description of the senseless horrors of the Great War. His anger about the loss of young lives is never far from the surface. Dying for one’s country may be necessary for an unlucky few but it is never sweet:

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Notes:
Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”