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Some brief thoughts on Remembrance Day: when I was a child, I was convinced that the poem In Flanders Fields was an anti-war poem meant to recognize the horrors of WWI and the senseless death that came with it. (1)
Every year we heard John McCrae's poem, and I only remembered the first section about the crosses and the birds. It was a poignant contrast of life persevering in spite of humanity's descent into war. (2)
I had completely blanked out the section where McCrae thinks the dead want us to keep killing: "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"
I don't think it is just faulty memory on my part, but a matter of how the poem was understood in the 1990s when major military conflicts appeared to be long in the past. In the Heritage Minute version, Colm Feore as McCrae only mumbles these passages (4)
And I had no idea that In Flanders Fields had been a tool of recruitment and war financing across the Commonwealth, let alone used as a cultural club against draft resistors particular French Canadian (5)
All of this is to say that as a child, when I heard a text that was once used to drum up support for war, I took the opposite message and understood it as a condemnation of war, in spite of a 3rd verse that essentially said that war is morally necessary (6)
It is an odd thing to observe historical memory shift in one's on lifetime and to see cultural change in your own recollections (7)
