I don’t think people can fathom the depth and oddness of World War 1. There has never been a war like it since nor likely before. The devastation and impact on the world was breath taking. Images just do not do it justice.
It wasn’t as clean as this painting by Richard Jack. It was more like some of the photos I’m about this post. So today, whether you’re at work, at school, or at home really think about what all of our soldiers went through and why we wear the Poppy.
And think about our soldiers who are sent into battle at our command putting their lives at risk.
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On November 11th I took a minute in silence to think about lives lost, changed, and found…
An Uncle Jack, who I knew only through my mother’s eyes, eyes that misted over year after year on the 6th of June…
A cousin Michael, whose legacy was, in sad part, the making of a Silver Cross Mother; the first peacekeeper’s mother to lay a wreath on behalf of all mothers who have lost children in the service of their country…
A grandfather, that survived the First Great War and its horrors only to go back for the Second, because ordinary life and family would have been the alternative.
Then came the second minute; the invention perhaps of someone that thought “if one is good then two must be better”…
The kind of thinking that came from those like General Douglas Haig, who felt that “in for a penny in for a pound” was just the ticket, as he sent wave after wave of “human ordinance” to death and dismemberment, in lieu of real strategy.
A second minute, I’m afraid, is destined to be an invitation for all manner of inattention and indifference; a tempting moment to text something to a friend… Maybe a “less we 4get”
And just how did a narrow and trite promise that “we will remember you” come to replace the more challenging “lest we forget”?
Is it too demanding to consider the whole? …the lives lost and broken, the destruction of culture and community, the greed, the hubris, the ambition that cuts lives short and pours misery over the living?