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
In Flanders fields.
================================
If you see one of these stands out today at your local shop, be sure to buy a poppy pin.
I think it must be possible to at the same time honor the soldier who does his duty while not glorifying war. It’s seems to be a miserable and expensive business by all accounts. Most importantly, let us care for every returning veteran as well as we can, and only when that is done can we tally the material as well as human cost of war.
Paul Fussell for one believes that the following is the finest poem written in WWI. Some, him included I think, find “Flanders Fields” a little bellicose.
‘Break of Day in the Trenches’
By Isaac Rosenberg
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
geronimo
You state that I ‘sneer’.
At what? I am thoroughly aware of the Brize Norton story and personally find it moving. War can have its decencies as well as its horrors. War can be utterly stupid, wasteful and still have its nobility. War usually brings out the best in people; and the worst. I have stated above my view that it is politicians who are most to blame.
I differ with your view that soldiers are somehow just the victims of war, that they there are there because they are doing their duty, and that they are doing what they are because they were ordered to do so. This was a line that did not pass muster at Nuremberg, and for very good reason. Individuals, like nations, have choices and are accountable for those choices.
BTW, I have also indicated above that I have a view that there is such a thing as just war.
michel – I’m not sure I would quote ezra pound – didn’t he support the axis in the war? Didn’t he live in Italy or Germany?
As for the Brits – we were thankful when the Americans entered the war – it saved our bacon.
“””””…..
Howskepticalment says:
November 11, 2012 at 1:28 pm
……………………..
BTW, people need to be careful when they use the word fighting for ‘freedom’ in the context of world war one and world war two. World War One ensured the survival of very unfree colonial empires.
Our biggest ally by far in World War Two was a despotic, genocidal dictatorship run by a chap called Stalin……”””””
I guess the history books got it wrong when they said Stalin signed a mutual defence treaty with Hitler, and then got stabbed in the back by him. I could have sworn that US made trucks and stuff were shipped via dangerous shipping lanes to Russia to help them in their war, with their mutual defence partner.
Come to think of it, didn’t Stalin declare war on Japan, after the atomic bomb was dropped, and then sieze the northern Japan Islands, which they still occupy today.
I agree that Russia had its hands full with the problem they brought on themselves. Don’t ever remember them being a US ally. Well Churchill seemed to think they were the real enemy of freedom, and he told the US as much in his Iron curtain speech.
I don’t exactly remember many of the WW-I battles fought in the Colonies; I must be getting too old.
But the French colonial empire did survive WW-II, thanks to de Gaulle, thereby leading to the Vietnam War.
The Old Crusader.
War is a sacred Cow, It’s an institution protected from scrutiny via a combination of pro-democracy historical bias and fiendishly clever exploitation of human grief and sorrow. This is how government functions on every level -it is a decivilisation agent and also the panacea. Why would it be any different with war? Virtually all wars are fraudulent and could have easily been averted via political diplomacy and the non-aggression principle. You are correct, we question the climate change consensus, some of us question central planning, , yet war is taboo for many conservatives.
Dizzy Ringo
michel – I’m not sure I would quote ezra pound – didn’t he support the axis in the war? Didn’t he live in Italy or Germany?
Yes indeed. Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, from which I quoted, was written in the aftermath of WWI. In the second war he remained in Italy, the Cantos descended into the direst sort of mindless and disconnected anti semitism, he broadcast for the Nazis (or for the Fascists, I forget which). On returning to the US, he was tried for treachery, which he had clearly committed, and was confined to mental hospital.
All the same, HSM remains a fine poem (though there is a trace of the rot to come in the reference to usury). And there are fragments in the Cantos which are admirable. We are a complicated species. He was not a man anyone could approve of. Much of his work was the poorest sort of pastiche. He seems to have had little or no sense of how to read the literature he often derived his efforts from. Pound on the troubadors is ludicrous reading.
Still, ‘there died a myriad’ remains true.
We should remember, considering the English reaction to WWI, that there was a reason why the Cambridge University debate of the thirties concluded that they would not fight ‘for King and Country’. They did fight and die in a very different cause 5 or 10 years later however. For England, WWI was a betrayal and remains so. Kipling was the apologist of empire, and the concept and myth of empire was an essential part of that betrayal. Kipling was also a glorifier of a certain disgusting sort of sanctioned violence and abuse by the strong. Read the last chapter of Stalky, if you can get through it, and shudder. This too, the falsification and sentimalisation of abusive institutions, was complicit in the way WWI was waged.
The London Cenotaph ceremonies reflect a struggle between the two elements, that of mourning, and that of glorification. Like many others the country has never been able to reconcile them. They are irreconciliable. But in the end, in England, mourning has won.
You will notice that in London you have Marble Arch. In Paris you have the Arc de Triomphe. A very different emphasis. And in Ypres you have the Menin Gate. Very different again. If you go to Verdun, you see the glorification of sacrifice. If you go to Tyne Cot, you’ll see something quite different and much deeper. You saw the same thing in the people lining the streets in Wooton Basset.
We should remember WWI in a way differently from how we remember WWII and many, probably most in England do. Sassoon’s finest poem says it all:
On Passing the new Menin Gate
Who will remember, passing through this Gate1,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
@Michael:
I think enough here have picked up on your unsuitable in insensitive remarks to save me the further trouble.
This day is not about the legitimacy of war or otherwise but about the men and women who sacrificed their lives for others.
It does not require any such as you belittling them and especially those who died.
Reading the memoirs of Francis Law (A man at arms, memoirs of two world wars) there is nothing but respect shown for him by his fellow officers and men. He may have had bad eyesight and his father may have used influence with Lord Roberts to get him into the Irish Guards.
But many lied about their age or contrived to hide any medical problems. Later when conscription came in and in desperation medical standards were lowered and lowered again.
One of my great uncles had false teeth but was allowed to enlist.
I wonder at your ability to so incisively and with such assurance damn the character of his father and question his grief. Did you know the man or his father? did you fight in the trenches yourself or in any war?
And I wonder what you might instead be saying had Kipling used his influence to keep his only son from being accepted? Or what you would have to say about his writing on the death of his son had he made the attempt and failed when medical standards were relaxed so far that the mere matter of poor eyesight was of no consequence? I suspect we would then only hear bout the privileges of fame while the common man had to suffer his lot.
At any rate your comment strikes a sour note amongst those more thoughtful and sensitive.
Casualties amongst officers were very high indeed and known to be high even to those officers still in England and yet to go abroad.
Officers were not only subject to all the hazards their men were subjected to but they were also singled out by German snipers. Initially easily identified by their dress and accoutrements and later on by their manner and actions on the battlefield when they dressed more like their men and carried a rifle. It is not so much a surprise that he was killed but that some survived. That he was Kipling’s son has nothing to do with it and I do not see any reason to make disparaging remarks about his father.
On a personal note our family has been fortunate not to have lost members in the US civil war nor in the great war or the second world war, the Korean war nor Vietnam though we did lose an ancestor in the Indian wars in Nova Scotia. But not for want of trying. My grandfather was in the Cavalry and when the great war broke out fought through the trenches and was then part of the Army of the Rhine. Like many a regular solider he joined the Territorials during the inter-war years and the home guard in WWII while serving in Naval Intelligence.
He made many a trip to the Menin Gate to remember his fallen comrades.
My Father went from the CCC to the army (artillery), thence to the QM as a cook (more pay) and finally to the paratroops. He was one of just 7 men amongst the 47 left of the 509th PIB when it was disbanded in April 1945 (and then sent to the 508th) who had served from its prewar (pre US entering the war) beginnings. He fought from from North Africa through to the final stages of the war. He was hit in the stomach by machine gun fire during a night drop in France and spent some time in hospital so goodness only knows what sort of injuries saw others invalided out and of the others from Operation torch forward the attrition rate must have been very very high.
One of his brothers fought in the pacific – island hopping and another was in the infantry. Funnily enough it was only a couple of years ago that either of them realised they had both been at the Battle of the Bulge, at or near Batsogne (my fathers second purple heart, his uni was attached to the 101st at that time).
Why do I mention this?
Because while it may be easy to read some modern day destruction of any of the great names it is quite something else to imagine you can judge any man who fought in the trenches as undeserving of our respect nor judge his parents similarly wand without justification unless simply parroting the opinions of others. I cannot say how I could have behaved in any capacity during the Great war nor could I even begin to understand how men such as my father fought on in campaign after campaign wondering when their turn would come. Nor imagine the survivors guilt.
So I hesitate to make any judgement of my own having never fought a war and while I can try to imagine some of the horror of it all, I have no way to judge them but accept the judgements of those who were there and who did fight.
I only know how little my grandfather would have thought of you and your judgement and I can imagine how my cousin would react after his time in Vietnam to someone who finds it so easy and on such an occasion to belittle both serving soldier and grieving parents.
Shame on you.
What I posted in Facebook:
At Rememberance/Armistice/Veterans day, we should remember why wars occur and how to prevent them.
War comes from someone’s desire to control or even annihilate others. Reasons include:
– grabbing goodies (totalitarian societies don’t produce well, so look outside for more)
– ideological control (the ultimate being Totalitarian Islam’s desire to kill all infidels – people who don’t believe including those Muslims who they think are not properly practising the religion)
– psychological problems (Hitler for example, the ultimate nationalist)
I especially thank the people of the United States of America for their productive capability that stopped the tyranny of Imperial Shinto Japan & enabled the Allies to stop National Socialist Germany. (While the US had stayed out of the war in Europe it was providing money and equipment, often through Canada.)
Remember history – appeasement of Hitler and ignoring Imperial Shinto regime’s aggression only allowed them to gain strength and confidence toward their goal of conquering everyone.
Keep in mind that both National Socialist Germany and Imperial Shinto Japan were making progress to having atomic bombs. Fortunately the Allies stopped them.