In Canada, it's called Remembrance Day

[Rookies]

Commemorating the recognized end of the Great War. As is our wont, my son and I walk over to our local ceremony held nearby. These past years, there is a crowd of about 1,500 to honour those who fought all of the preceeding wars to ensure our rights and freedoms.

There are taps played and generic silence ensues in the audience at the 11th hour and 11th minute. Although it is not a holiday for schools here, there are always respresentation from some very young classes. They sit close to the site of the laying of the memorial wreaths and to the remaining old vets.

There are several prayers from various denominations of the many faiths found in Toronto. The Canadian highlight is always the reciting of this poem from Major John McCrae. Today, it was told splendidly by a young student with a Muslim background.

"In Flanders Fields

by John McCrae, 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.

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.

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/images/poppies200.jpg
Inspiration for the Poem (http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/iffinspn.htm)

On 2 May, 1915 (http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/iffinspn.htm), in the second week of fighting during the Second Battle of Ypres (http://www.greatwar.co.uk/westfront/ypsalient/secondypres/index.htm) Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed by a German artillery shell. He was a friend of the Canadian military doctor Major John McCrae. It is believed that John began the draft for his famous poem 'In Flanders Fields' that evening.

[Greyfox]

Thankyou. Lest we forget the memory of the soldiers who gave their lives so that we can live in freedom today.

John McCrae's poem was written in that bloody hell of a war in 1915.
He wrote what he saw in front of him.
But dissatisfied with it, he threw it away.
A fellow officer retrieved it. The British paper Punch published it in 1915.
Major McCrae died in 1918 of pneumonia while still commanding.
The fuller version of what happened is on the net at

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm
Written at that site is the following:
McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. Here is the story of the making of that poem:


Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:

"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene." In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.

[DeanT]

We recited that poem every November 11th in grade school. I remember it well. I dont know if the kids today are doing it or not. I would guess not. Even walking around town there are very few poppies compared to years ago.

[robert99]

We do not forget.

"On August 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. Canada, as a member of the British Empire, was automatically at war, and its citizens from all across the land responded quickly. A month after war broke out, 32,665 volunteers arrived at the new camp at Valcartier, Quebec, in 100 special trains. Thus began the growth of the colony's peacetime army from a pre-war force of 3,110 regular and 74,213 part-time militia members. By the end of the war, Canada would have 619,636 service people in uniform, including more than 3,000 Nursing Sisters. The tiny peacetime force would grow nearly tenfold. It was a huge army for a population of less than eight million.

Four long years of war would transform Canada from a colony to a nation. At a cost of nearly a quarter of a million casualties—one in four of them fatal—Canada would grow, with sorrow for the fallen and the maimed, yet with a new pride and a more confident awareness of nationhood. It was a heavy price for national identity and peace in the world, a price Canada would pay again 20 years later and in the troubled years beyond. Eventually, Canadians would become peacekeepers to the world. Instead of fighting to restore peace, they would stand between combatants to preserve it. This prime military role supports Canada's foreign policy to this day."

[OTM Al]

I've always felt that it was this war which was the true defining event in the world for the 20th century. Unfortunately we in the US have pretty much forgotten about it. The point can be proved by walking into any bookstore and looking at the military history section. There will be a full bookcase full of American Civil War volumes and another of books on the Second World War. Squeezed on barely a single shelf between the two you may find a couple of books on this war. Though a day late I will also add one of the poems of Wilfred Owen

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
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.