A century after the ‘war to end all wars’

Today, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017, will see no brilliant red poppy blooms in Flanders fields.

It will be a cool, cloudy November morning as crowds gather at war memorials scattered across the Flanders region of southern Belgium and northern France.

Poppies that grow “between the crosses row on row” bloom in late spring, the season when Canadian soldier, doctor and poet

John McCrae buried a friend and fellow soldier.

The image of fields of poppies is etched in the minds of generations who have read and recited McCrae’s famous poem. And so the poppy became the symbol of remembrance.

It is not important that most have only a vague idea where those fields lie. That Flanders includes Ypres, site of three of the deadliest battles of the First World War. That one of those was Passchendaele, perhaps the bloodiest and most controversial Allied victory of the war.

Six thousand Canadian soldiers died at Ypres, 20,000 were wounded or captured. A century later those figures are still staggering.

They are not symbolic. The casualties of that awful time were sons, fathers, husbands, brothers. They and tens of thousands of others killed or scarred by battle then and since are who we honour on Remembrance Day.

Today, Nov. 11, 2017, poppies will bloom on the coats, jackets and uniforms of those who crowd Confederation Square in Peterborough to honour our local war dead.

If anything positive comes from bloodshed and carnage it is that the world seems to have learned.

The First World War did not live up to the hopeful title bestowed on it at the time, The War to End All Wars, but it pushed the nations of the world down that road. The Second World War, ending as it did with an apocalyptic warning of the power of nuclear weapons, pushed farther.

War has not disappeared since 1945 and the horrific devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it has been reduced. In more than 70 years since there has not been a war where various nation states lined up on opposite sides and marauded their armies across borders.

Symbols played a role in bringing the world to that uneasy, relative peace. The beautiful, brilliant poppy and the terrible, brilliant nuclear flash are both reminders of how destructive and futile war will always be.

McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, like many deeply affecting poems, is built on layers of symbols. Finally there is the torch, passed from dead to living hands, and a call not to break faith.

That faith is resistance against oppression. A better world resists with compassion, determination and diplomacy, not war. The fewer dead hands to remember, the better we honour those who died.