Today is Veterans Day in America, and Remembrance Day throughout the Commonwealth. It is also the anniversary of the moment the guns fell silent in what was the war that made the world we live in. With that in mind we present an encore presentation from the Mark Steyn Club anthology of video poetry.
Last year, on the hundredth anniversary of the end of the Great War, I read the most famous poem to come out of that conflict - though its author John McCrae, physician and soldier, did not live to see the armistice. In this video I discuss the background to the poem, and recite it, in front of a live audience from America, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and beyond at the Royal Canadian Navy's home port of Halifax, Nova Scotia on last year's Mark Steyn cruise. To watch (or hear) "In Flanders Fields", prefaced by my introduction, please click here and log-in.
Steyn's Sunday Poem is made with the support of members of The Mark Steyn Club, for which we're profoundly grateful. If you'd like to catch up on earlier poems in the series, you can find them all listed in convenient Netflix-style tile format on our Sunday Poems home page. We will have a brand new poem for you next weekend.
~My book The Face Of The Tiger contains the column I wrote eighteen years ago - on the first November 11th after September 11th. It too leaned heavily on John McRae, and in the years since the ethos of the greying boomer quoted below has metastasized throughout the land:
On CNN the other day, Larry King asked Tony Blair what it was he had in his buttonhole. It was a poppy β 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 β in Canada, in Britain, even apparently in America, which instead of sending in the cavalry is now dropping horse feed for the Northern Alliance, in the hope they might rouse themselves to seize an abandoned village or two, weather permitting.
Nonetheless, though we can scarce grasp what they symbolize, this year the poppies are hard to find. Three Canadian provinces had sold out by last Monday, and by the time you read this the rest of the Royal Canadian Legion's entire stock of 14.8 million will likely be gone. That's not bad for a population that barely touches 30 million and includes large numbers of terrorist cells plus those students at Montreal's Concordia University who openly celebrated the attacks on the World Trade Center. Evidently, the public has made a connection between September 11th and November 11th, though no one seems quite sure what is: A general expression of solidarity with the victims? Or a renewed respect for the men who gave their lives so we could get fat and complacent and read celebrity features about Britney?
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.
This year, President Bush has declared the week of Veterans' Day to be National Veterans Awareness Week, which is just a terrible name and makes America's armed forces sound like a disease ("National Breast Cancer Awareness Week"). He's also announced an initiative to get every school, in the week ahead, to invite a veteran to come and speak to students. A fine idea, but one likely to run into problems in a culture where not just tony bastions like Harvard but many less elevated outlets of academe decline to permit the ROTC on campus.
When Oxbow High School in the small North Country town of Bradford, Vermont mooted a JROTC program, the proposal was quickly shot down by the usual activists protesting JROTC's policies on gays. (JROTC doesn't have any policy on gays β that's the problem.) "Being a teenager," said one middle-aged graying hippy-dippy Vermonter, "is not about wearing a uniform and fitting in. It's about standing up and declaring who you are." There speaks the voice of the eternally adolescent Boomer in all its woeful self-absorption.
Actually, most Americans are already "aware" of their veterans, it's the elites who need reminding β like the chaps at The New York Times and other big papers who carry (by my estimation) less than a tenth of the military obituaries Britain's Daily Telegraph does. True, NBC's star anchor, Tom Brokaw, has found himself a lucrative franchise cranking out books about "The Greatest Generation" β the World War Two generation β but Brokaw's designation is absurd and essentially self-serving. 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 understood that there are moments in a nation's history when even being a teenager is about standing up and declaring who you are by wearing a uniform. When we β their children and grandchildren β ennoble them as "the greatest" and elevate them into something extraordinary, it's a reflection mainly of our own stunted perspective.
So for many of us "sacrifice" is all but incomprehensible. Responding to Robert Putnam's recollections of "civic community" in World War Two β "victory gardens in nearly everyone's backyard, the Boy Scouts at filling stations collecting floor mats for scrap rubber, the affordable war bonds, the practice of giving rides to hitchhiking soldiers and war workers" - Katha Pollitt in the current edition of The Nation sneers: "Those would be certified heterosexual, Supreme-Being-believing scouts, I suppose, and certified harmless and chivalrous hitchhiking GIs, too - not some weirdo in uniform who cuts you to bits on a dark road." Somehow I don't think poor paranoid Ms Pollitt has met that many fellows in uniform, weirdoes or otherwise.
To the broader constituency for which Katha speaks, those guys in uniform are weirdoes β not because they want to cut her to bits but because they're willing to go and slog it out on some foreign hillside, getting limbs blown off by grenades, blinded by shrapnel β and for no other reason than something so risible as "love of country"!
Today, across the western world, the generals dislike conscript armies. They want light, highly trained, professional regiments. But it's hard not to feel that the end of the draft β the end of routine military service β has somehow weakened the bonds of citizenship.
Citizenship is about allegiance. We benefit from our rights as citizens of the state and in return we accept our duties as citizens of the state. And let's not be embarrassed about supposedly obsolescent concepts like the "nation-state". If we've learned anything since September 11th, it's that, if it were left to the multilateral acronyms β the UN, EU, even Nato β Osama bin Laden would have the run of the planet. The great evil of September 11th is being resisted by a small number of nation-states, by the United States, the United Kingdom and a handful of others. Ultimately, it is as Americans or Britons, Australians or Canadians that we resist the assault on our liberties.
But how do we play our part in this war? Hug your children, advised the President, and shop till you drop. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your outlet mall. But, for most Americans, that's not enough. They're ready to do more, and Mr Bush isn't giving a lead. We may not be asked to scramble up over a trench and across a muddy field in Flanders, but it's all too possible we may be called upon to demonstrate great heroism close to home, as the firemen of New York and the passengers of Flight 93 were. They are the Dead. 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 β including Katha Pollitt β 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 faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
In Thursday's otherwise unsatisfactory speech, the President finally used the words he should have spoken a month ago, the last words of Todd Beamer before he and his ad-hoc commando unit took out the hijackers of Flight 93 at the cost of their own lives. And so Mr Bush ended his address by informally deputizing the citizenry: "We have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let's roll.".
It's not as poetic as John McCrae, but then, in the dust of Ground Zero, no poppies blow nor ever will.
~adapted from Mark's book The Face Of The Tiger
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It just occurred to me, while reading the comments, that this would be a good time to point out why we Americans, and the whole world, should be thankful that Abraham Lincoln, and so many other Americans of his day, fought to preserve the United States as a single nation, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. If the Confederacy had won, it would have been easy for states that dissented from any national policy to secede, or threaten to secede, and there would gave been more breakaways, like Texas and California and Oregon Territory, and a much weaker nation. Russia would still own Alaska; perhaps the it would be the home of the anti-Bolsheviks, as Taiwan is to China, and a continuous invitation to war with the regime in Moscow.
A disassembled and weakened United States would not have been able to fight both Japan and Germany and liberate Western Europe and much of Asia. A disunified America would not have been able to wear out the USSR in the Cold War and liberate Eastern Europe. As important as it was to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery, it was vital to the freedom of the rest of the world that the USA remain one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. So pur gratitude also goes to the soldiers who fought in that first war where technology, from railroads to telegraphs and iron clad steamships, greatly affected the outcome.
I beg pardon for the repetition in which I am about to engage, but can think of no other way to make my point.
I agree it is right and proper to remember those who fell in wars. Many did not particularly want to defend the causes in which they fell; many did not want to be there; many were impelled by motives which we might not wish to celebrate; many were morally compromised by their involvement in war; many died because of the folly and negligence of those set in power over them; many died without much contributing to military outcomes, one way or the other; and many died horribly and painfully in ways which sabre-rattlers prefer to forget. None of that means that they should be forgotten, and much of that vastly strengthens the case for remembering them.
They should especially be remembered with gratitude by those who survived, most of whom would acknowledge that they survived entirely as a matter of luck, and in my opinion it is indeed survivors who most regularly and most deeply remember the fallen, whether or not those survivors are partial to the ceremonies organised for the purpose.
The fallen of other nations should equally be remembered. Many of those too did not particularly want to defend the causes in which they fell; many also did not want to be there; many were equally impelled by motives which we might not wish to celebrate; just as many were morally compromised by their involvement in war; many of those also died because of the folly and negligence of those set in power over them; many died without much contributing to military outcomes; and many died horribly and painfully. But I think that the fallen of other nations are not widely remembered, and so nothing is learnt from the loss.
And, now that war is again made principally on civilians, I think the civilian fallen should be remembered at the same time, however they died. Many of those too did not particularly support the causes for which they perished; many also did not want to be there; many were equally impelled by motives which we might not wish to celebrate; just as many were morally compromised by their involvement in war; many of those also died because of the folly and negligence of those set in power over them; many died without much contributing to military outcomes; and many died horribly and painfully. I submit that forgetting the civilians who died in war represents a breach of faith as notable as that of forgetting the military dead, if not more so, and will enable the death of many more. I regret to offer the opinion that we do not do enough to remember those folk. I suppose they do not make for pageant.
Thanks for bearing with me. I was the merest subaltern, involved in a sordid little war best forgotten, but sentiments run deep even among nonentities.
It's difficult to believe that at a time when us pampered First-Worlders live lives that couldn't even be imagined a century ago, we argue about how to honour our dead. The implication that we carve out a special day for those who served and died in favour of unlucky civilians who were caught in the crossfire is ridiculous and β dare I say it β offensive.
The soldiers in the front line were there for their families, their homes, their flags (including, not incidentally, you and me), and most importantly each other when things went sideways in combat. Volunteers and otherwise, they were the ones with guns in their hands and bayonets in their vitals, hoping this would be the last war.
Death is tragic, and war is despicable, but the ingratitude β the obliviousness β of 'we the living' is unforgivable.
Larry Robinson
Jasper
Heartily agree, L. It is offensive. At any rate, it offends me.
If I might expand, I'd wish to liken these commemoration pageants to contemporary Christmas festivities. I am much touched by the idea of an innocent child being born to expiate the wickedness of mankind, and am repelled by endeavour to turn it to profit, even when I'm sympathetic with the profit motive in general. I'm equally repelled by jingoists (and those who oppose them, too) who try to score political points out of the tragedy of war, even when I'm sympathetic with the political points. Humble gratitude and pity should in my opinion be the proper focus in both cases, and the exclusive recipients of the giving of it should be the victims.
But who am I, after all? I have my hands full trying to answer that.
Thanks, Mark, for this reminder of the sacrifices made for us, and our duty to make the same sacrifices.
--Raymond Takashi Swenson
Lt. Colonel, USAF (Retired)
"When we ennoble them as "the greatest" and elevate them into something extraordinary, it's a reflection mainly of our own stunted perspective."
This observation perfectly reflects the very poignant sentiments of David and Glenda about their humble, dutiful - and courageous - fathers.
Being revered as "the greatest" diminishes the fact that those who served were - above all else - ordinary, good men. Many thanks for the wonderful essay and poetry recitation to mark the occasion.
My appreciation goes beyond words.
This is a beautiful piece, and surely one of Mark's more sobering. I've listened to Mark's reading of In Flanders Fields two times, and I think I'm due for another.
There are several times of the year that I am especially drawn to ponder my father's service during WWII. Memorial Day, of course. D-Day - although he did did not land in France on June 6th, he was deposited on Omaha Beach in late October 1944 where the ETO greeted incoming soldiers with the vast cemetery at the top of the bluffs. Christmas Eve, when after two desperate weeks of combat in the Ardennes in 1944 he along with his regiment were finally safely behind the newly established 82nd Airborne line and saved from their nearly hopeless situation. And Veterans Day - it was known as Armistice Day in 1944 when he found himself delivered to the front lines in Germany's Huertgen Forest on the day commemorating the end of the war to end all wars.
My father was not in any way a man of war. He was a very gentle man of peace who found himself at the point of the spear fulfilling his duty as a citizen of the United States. Unlike many he survived the harrowing events into which he had been thrown and returned home to resume his career as a school teacher, marry & build a family, and serve the community as best he could. The little he shared about his service centered around non-combat events.
Upon his death in 1993 my mother gave me a small folded-up piece of paper he had carried in his wallet beginning late in the war and then for the rest of his life. It was a piece of paper from a Red Cross note pad onto which he had written the following words from a Walter Lippmann column in Stars & Stripes:
"In this struggle of life and death, where some men give their lives and all give a part of their youth and of their happiness and their hopes, there is no reward except the honor and glory of being part of a great enterprise that will always be remembered and celebrated gratefully. There can be no inducement and no repayment except the honor of belonging to an army which has done so well its duty that it will be forever famous in the history of the world."
Thank you Mark for once again sharing "In Flanders Fields" and its story. My father loved and taught poetry in his high school English & Literature classes. You motivated me to pull from my bookcase a combined edition of American and British poetry he used in his classes. It's filled with his hand-written notes making it quite a treasure and a wonderful way to remember him on this day commemorating the end of the war to end all wars.
Bravo, David.
"Citizenship is about allegiance. We benefit from our rights as citizens of the state and in return we accept our duties as citizens of the state. . . . If we've learned anything since September 11th, it's that, if it were left to the multilateral acronyms β the UN, EU, even Nato β Osama bin Laden would have the run of the planet. The great evil of September 11th is being resisted by a small number of nation-states, by the United States, the United Kingdom and a handful of others. Ultimately, it is as Americans or Britons, Australians or Canadians that we resist the assault on our liberties."
Hear, Hear! True then, true now, especially with our current set of betters banging on about the dangers of "nationalism" in the Age of Trump.
Hail to our soldiers and veterans, this Veterans/Remembrance Day, and to the memory of those who lost their lives in our defense.
My wife Shaunie and I were on the first Mark Steyn Club cruise. Today's poem and Mark's comments reprise that event. Thank you very much for the remembrance of Flanders Fields this Veterans Day from an older veteran.
The poem laments "If ye break faith with us who die".... and allows us to reflect the horrible and tragic conditions of war. In the year since that cruise, I fear a weakened faith within the US created by the socialist left in this country. Their attempt to overturn the election of President Trump is another type of war, bloodless but real. For the conservative struggle that continues, let the faith continue, unbroken.
"The War That Made the World We Live In" is my favorite SteynPost of all. I still revisit it now and again.
I like that post as well. We knew back then what was worth fighting and dying for and we fought for victory and not a stalemate. Now we have warmongers who want stalemates and want to dictate foreign policy.
I had dinner last night with a couple roughly a generation my junior - the husband was born the year I graduated from high school and the wife is two years younger. We got to talking about WWII veterans. My dad served in the Pacific theater, arriving in March 1945 - the long-running joke in our family was that once the Japanese realized he was there, they knew it was time to surrender - he was a crew member on one of the bomber aircraft that operated off aircraft carriers pounding the heck out of the Japanese. Anyway, in the couple's living room is a somewhat enlarged, framed, tinted photo of the wife's maternal grandfather, with the various medals he was awarded attached to the mat below the picture. He did get to see his baby daughter born before heading off to Europe with many other young men in the U.S. Army. Killed in the battle for the bridge at Remagen. The only thing I can say about that woman's comments in The Nation is that my dad served and Kelly's granddad died so that she could be free to be a snotty ingrate.
I think the shopping line gets to the heart of why the Bush administration was such a disaster. He conceived of America entirely as an economic notion, a people in service of a marketplace. If America was just simply a costco writ large why not import ever greater numbers of your shoppers from the middle east. If you thought that those new arrivals might bring more than the cash to buy Kirkland brand nuts you would be to falling victim to the "soft bigotry of low expectations" and that's not "who we are". I really can't believe that in retrospect I ever thought well of the palaver coming out of that Presidency. Who declares a war on a military tactic... what a wasted decade. There should be a law you cannot declare war on anything other than an identifiable group of humans - there is no such thing as a war on drugs, poverty or terrorism - these are not things against which it is possible to wage war.
This is my second favorite Steyn column. My favorite was "The Queen's Tears", posted a week after 9/11.
Legendary hockey broadcaster Don Cherry is under fire for saying on air that the new immigrants to Canada, who came for the nation's "milk and honey" ought to dig in a pocket or two and donate a few bucks for a poppy. Sportsnet has, of course, apologized profusely for his "divisive" comments and noted that they gave him a stern talking to. They even trotted out the "diversity is our strength" balderdash.
I applaud Don Cherry and hope that he picked up his phraseology from the great Merle Haggard's "Fightin' Side of Me".
Today I remember my WW2 veteran father who would have celebrated his 99th birthday last week. He only made it to 97. Bless 'em all.
Came here to make this comment! Cherry was officially fired about an hour or two ago, and his response was perfect: "I know what I said and I meant it," and "to keep my job, I cannot be turned into a tamed robot." Good for him.
This is a beautiful tribute and as I sit here in front of the fire, safe and reflective, I am profoundly grateful to my personal hero, my quiet, reserved, intelligent, first generation American Dad, a Marine who served quietly in WWII, enlisting early and sent to the Pacific, to Midway. He made it back, but that witnessing forever changed him, and by extension, our family. He died in 2006 and we were honored to have both women and men raise their rifles in salute to him that day, a beautiful Flag presented to his Grandson. He would not recognize what we seemingly collectively have become, more snarl than compassion, more me too than honesty, empathy, and personal responsibility. I remain in awe and reverence for these men and women across the years, never forgotten, and also hopeful that their spirit remains and grows.
...may I add...and Mr. Steyn is that, the boldest, bravest, most fierce...carry on!
Lovely comment, Glenda.
Generations are hard to categorize. I'm a boomer, but I've never identified with those who typify my generation. Some were born more than a decade before I was, and their obsessions with the Beatles, drugs, and protest mattered not a whit to my obsession with the '69 Mets. My disinterest grew into disgust with the television show Thirtysomething in the 1980s (when I was a late twentysomething). As a portrait of friends dealing with the demands of adulthood, it preceded Seinfeld's claim to be "a show about nothing" by a decade. Baby Boomers thought their birthdays were Year Zeros in the cultural history of the country. As the largest demographic, they were coddled in that belief by advertisers and marketers. They were the China of their day, and they expected the same unearned deference. It is with some bitter satisfaction that I hear them dismissed today in two scornful words, even if they apply to me too: OK Boomer. (A distillation of Boomers' own "Talk to the hand.") In spite of (or because of) their vanity, Boomers marched in protest against discrimination, war, nuclear stuff, you name it. Gray and stooped, many still do. They were on "the right side of history" on some issues, the wrong side on some others. But now, younger people just don't want to hear it. The young themselves are right on some things, catastrophically wrong on others. Dismissing Boomers may be one of the only things they've gotten right.
PS: I always found Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generationβ’ campaign distasteful, as well. You didn't discover them, Tom, they were always there, doing their jobs, living their lives. Just as previous generations had done after fighting in France or Virginia. I'd say any generation of young women and men volunteering to serve their country in combat (potential or real) is pretty great. Hat's off to them all.
I'm a 1948-model boomer, and I think Steve Sailer is a 1958 model. At one point in 2017, he referred to "my immensely tiresome generation," which struck me as about right regarding all of us boomers.
Readers may have heard about the Canadian girl suspended from school last week because she did not want to wear a poppy in rainbow colours.
Apparently, this didn't happen. The woman who said it did has posted an apology. Google sometimes is my friend.
Thank you for your reply. I respect facts, and if I'm wrong I'm wrong. Have you got a link for your story? Here is mine: https://www.thepostmillennial.com/exclusive-girl-suspended-for-rejecting-rainbow-poppy-speaks-out/
I googled it. I'm not sure how to post a link. I typed "girl suspended for refusal to wear rainbow poppy" on Google.Your link brings up the original story. As a card carrying right wing conspiracy theorist, I was kind of hoping it was true. Anyway, it's hard to keep up with all the stuff out there. My one rule is if it sounds too good to be true, then it might not be. I'm actually living with a conspiracy theorist and I have a friend who emails me stuff that flat out isn't true. After the woman posted the suspension story, in good faith, she then posted later, it didn't happen. Then she recited her LGBTQWERTY credentials. Oh, well...
She was suspended because she protested the school choir director promoting the rainbow poppy by putting up flyers around school...from what I gather from the news reports. No word on whether the school administrators called her a bigot or a hater, but given that this is Canada, they have a short tradition of admin bullying students.
Apparently it did: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/student-school-suspended-me-for-hate-speech-when-i-protested-wearing-lgbt-rainbow-poppy
The school denies 'directing, mandating or suggesting' the student wear a rainbow poppy but, curiously, doesn't deny berating & suspending the student.
And since this is the era of literalism, the fact that they didn't deny it is an admission that they did it.
I would be loath to classify that as an admission per se but the phrase 'modified limited hangout' does come to mind.
I think about the wars we fight on the battlefield, in our neighborhoods, and in the ballot box and I think that the message as to why we're able to do this is lost. When we help those in need, we want the lesson to be: "This is my chance to change my life around and not be a burden to anyone anymore and to prove that their sacrifice isn't for naught." But the left is teaching a different lesson: "It's not my fault I'm a failure and the country that I came from is a failure. It's the fault of the west and the white's that created it. They owe me and my people a future and to hell if they suffer for it." This is the lesson being taught. Capitalism and Socialism can never coexist at the same time. Socialism depends on one entity to control everything. Capitalism just manages the control. Socialism will always be the party that has the nice houses while the rest of us live in tents. If the world is a supermarket, the left says "You can live on free samples while we elites get to actually buy our food." Live on samples all you want but like every promotion at an MLB game, the first hundred or so will get fed and you'll have to come back at a later date to get fed.
There are no shortages in socialism, only miscreants interfering with its efficient operation. These scapegoats are dropped in the shredder, the only socialist thing that works.
They are promoting the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They are the mantra of Millenials. Because "sin" is so yesterday, vices have become virtues. But in the end, to quote King Solomon: There is nothing new under the sun.