I knew so little. I didn’t know Canadians had fought for four long years during the First War, and five more in the Second. I didn’t know that in the First, almost one tenth of Canada’s population of only eight million enlisted, and over 66,000 didn’t return. I didn’t know that almost three times this number were wounded, many forever broken, physically and emotionally. I didn’t understand that trench warfare meant that men lived in muddy trenches for weeks on end, and I didn’t know that the mud in the battlefields wasn’t like the mud down near the river, but a kind that could swallow men and horses whole. I didn’t know about the hunger and the cold and the fatigue and the terror and the barbed wire and the craters and the rats and the lice and the snipers and the deafening, relentless noise and the awful smell of cordite, rotting carcasses, and poison gas. I didn’t know that every day men saw friends blown up and others terribly disfigured, and I didn’t know about shell-shock and how it broke both soldiers and medics, rendering people mad, sometimes forever after. I didn’t know that in the First War, deserters, often just shell-shocked boys, could be shot at dawn by their own men, right there on the battlefield.
Even though this village of ours had been settled by German immigrants and many people there still spoke German, our teachers and parents made it clear who had been the bad guys and who the good. I was too young to understand how conflicted some people must have felt knowing their sons might have been fighting their own cousins on the battlefields, but I never heard it mentioned. What we heard about were the losses—the millions of soldiers and civilians who’d died “so we could be free,” however numbers like these are unfathomable for anyone, let alone for children. I also don’t remember being frightened by their tales, so they must have kept us from the terrible reality that in wars great harm doesn’t merely fall on soldiers. What the adults really wanted us to see was that these wars had touched everyone, and the losses were still felt in homes and hearts in every single community across the land. They wanted us to understand about sacrifice, to understand what so many people gave for us, and to understand that this enormous debt could never be repaid.
The flat, artificial poppies we wore then were the same size and shape as the ones still sold every November, although then they were flatter and made of duller red felt. I’d never seen a poppy in real life, and I had no idea why poppies were the flowers chosen to make us remember. I didn’t know they are deeply associated with battlefields, that they grow easily on disturbed soil, and after land battles in the Napoleonic wars, people described those battlefields the next spring blooming with blood-red poppies. I didn’t know that these wild poppies in places like Flanders were often the only plants still growing “between the crosses, row on row.”
I decided to take the option of buying one of those Tower of London poppies to be delivered when the display was taken down. Although they weren’t designated, I do wonder whose poppy I got. I know I’m being both fanciful and self-important to think I have any connection at all to this person who gave his or her life so long ago, but still I wonder what they, the dead, would have thought of this lovely, red poppy that was made as an act of remembrance, and now sits in the warmth and sunny comfort of our upstairs hall.
1 Comment
Beautifully written, and this is just the way I remember it too!