In 2014, on the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of the beginning of World War I, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red<\/em> opened at the Tower of London. Flowing out of the thick Tower walls and filling the moat were 888,246 hand-made, ceramic, blood-red poppies, one for each military fatality from Britain and the Commonwealth. This tide of red as far as one could see was a harrowing image, especially while The Last Post<\/em> rang through the warm evening air.<\/p>\n I remember well the first time I heard The Last Post<\/em>. It was 1954, and I was at a Remembrance Day ceremony in our southern Ontario village. I was ten. As a snow-laden wind blew through my thin Brownie uniform, the mournful sound of that bugle burrowed its way past my worries about how long I\u2019d have to stand there in the cold, and planted the first grains of what real loss might mean.<\/p>\n Like big and small communities all across the country, we had a parade every November 11th<\/sup>. People gathered at the bandstand: town officials, band members, and of course veterans. Leading the parade were the flag bearers carrying both the Union Jack and, in those days, the Red Ensign. Then came veterans from the army, navy, and air force all in uniform\u2014some very young, some my father\u2019s age, and some, to me, very old. All men. Following the veterans were the band, the officials, and then we Brownies and Guides, Cubs and Scouts. Some veterans were able to march in formation, but some could only struggle along on canes or leaning on another\u2019s steady arm. I remember how they all held their heads high, their chests proud with medals.<\/p>\n It was a short distance to the cenotaph, a simple concrete column about 10 feet tall, with the names of local men who had died in World War I on one side and World War II on another. I walked by that cenotaph four times a day every day for seven years, but I paid it little attention except on those November days when I was ten, eleven and twelve. I didn\u2019t know that the word cenotaph meant an empty tomb, but I knew it was different from the cemetery gravestones where the bodies lay deep in the cold earth below. I knew that the dead remembered here lay in battlefields and cemeteries and ocean depths very far away.<\/p>\n Many townspeople stood waiting in a straggling half-circle, all in dark clothes, the men in fedoras, the women in plain hats. The ceremony began with Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past<\/em>. Then the minister read from the Bible and thanked God for helping us be victorious over evil, and for giving us the men and women who had suffered to defend our country\u2014both those who returned and those who had made \u201cthe ultimate sacrifice.\u201d The names of each of the dead were read aloud. Then came the recitation of In Flanders Fields<\/em> which everyone, young and old, knew by heart as we\u2019d all memorized it in school. I wish I\u2019d known then that it was a very famous poem read in ceremonies like this all across the country, and I wish I had known it had been written by a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Col. John McCrae, who came from a town only 30 miles away.<\/p>\n Then the wreaths\u2014modest little circles of felt poppies on wire stands\u2014were laid by families, members of the Legion, the village council, and the IODE. There was always one lone woman among them, a mother, guided forward on the arm of a serviceman, carrying a small wreath and walking as if to her doom. Everyone stood very still while she placed her wreath, and then touched it one last time. Just before the 11th<\/sup> hour of the 11th<\/sup> day of the 11th<\/sup> month, the heart-breaking bugle began The Last Post, <\/em>and many eyes, including mine, would fill with tears. The sense of sadness and loss was overwhelming. After the two minutes of silence, the bugler played Reveille,<\/em> and the band played God Save the Queen<\/em>, and then it was over. I remember little clusters of women huddled together afterwards\u2014the widows, the mothers, the sisters\u2014propping each other up under the heavy sky like all those images of women at gravesides. Some were crying, and some were looking off into the distance, far, far away. 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\u2014the millions of soldiers and civilians who\u2019d died \u201cso we could be free,\u201d however numbers like these are unfathomable for anyone, let alone for children. I also don\u2019t remember being frightened by their tales, so they must have kept us from the terrible reality that in wars great harm doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d never seen a poppy in real life, and I had no idea why poppies were the flowers chosen to make us remember. I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t know that these wild poppies in places like Flanders were often the only plants still growing \u201cbetween the crosses, row on row.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t designated, I do wonder whose poppy I got. I know I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Cenotaph<\/strong>
\n
\nI knew so little. I didn\u2019t know Canadians had fought for four long years during the First War, and five more in the Second. I didn\u2019t know that in the First, almost one tenth of Canada\u2019s population of only eight million enlisted, and over 66,000 didn\u2019t return. I didn\u2019t know that almost three times this number were wounded, many forever broken, physically and emotionally. I didn\u2019t understand that trench warfare meant that men lived in muddy trenches for weeks on end, and I didn\u2019t know that the mud in the battlefields wasn\u2019t like the mud down near the river, but a kind that could swallow men and horses whole. I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t know that every day men saw friends blown up and others terribly disfigured, and I didn\u2019t know about shell-shock and how it broke both soldiers and medics, rendering people mad, sometimes forever after. I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\nIn 2014, on the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red opened at the Tower of London. Flowing out of the thick Tower walls and filling the moat were 888,246 hand-made, ceramic, blood-red poppies, one for each military fatality from Britain and the Commonwealth. This tide of red as far as one could see was a harrowing image, especially while The Last Post rang through the warm evening air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1799,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1903,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/994\/revisions\/1903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}