Mark Steyn offers — “in this fifth year of the new war” — an excerpt from what he wrote on “the
first 11/11 after 9/11” four years ago:
On CNN the other day, Larry King asked Tony
Blair what it was he had in his buttonhole. It was a poppy — not a
real poppy, but a stylized, mass-produced thing of red paper and green plastic
that, as the Prime Minister explained, is worn in Britain and other Commonwealth countries in the days before November 11th.
They’re sold in the street by aged members of the Royal
British Legion to commemorate that moment 83 years ago today, when on the
eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the guns fell silent on
the battlefields of Europe.The poppy is an indelible image of that “war to end all
wars”, summoned up by a Canadian, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, in a poem
written in the trenches in May 1915:
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.
Row on row on row. And,
in between, thousands of poppies, for they bloom in uprooted soil. Sacrifice on the scale McCrae witnessed is all
but unimaginable in the west today — in Canada,
in Britain,
even apparently in America . . .
The youthful Americans who went off to war 60 years ago
would have thought it ridiculous to be hailed as “the greatest”. They were unexceptional: they did no more or less than their own
parents and grandparents had done. Like
young men across the world, they accepted soldiering as an obligation of
citizenship, as men have for centuries. In
1941, it would have astonished them to be told they would be the last
generation to respect that basic social compact. . . .
They lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were
loved. They did not deserve their
premature deaths. But they join the
untold legions who helped the Union win the Civil War, the Americans and the British
Empire win the Great War, and the Allies the Second World War. And every single American alive today . . . enjoys
the blessings of those victories.
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 with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
In America, "[u]p until the 1960s veterans
groups used the red poppy as the symbol of Veterans Day." Apparently that changed after the Vietnam War. These days, we barely remember the poppies, much less McCrae’s great poem, or the men and women it celebrates. But we should, especially because we are at war.