I did not wear a poppy last year on Remembrance Day. It wasn’t a statement: I simply forgot.
But as I learned today on the shores of Dieppe, forgetting is a statement.
Yesterday I visited the famed Flanders Fields of John McCrae’s poem. Rows of crosses, row on row. Thousands and thousands of them. Each representing a boy-child, son, husband, father, lost on the Ypres Salient in World War I, gaining a mere eight kilometres for the Allies through the many months of brutal attacks. Stones marked “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God” because their bodies could not be identified in the carnage. Men lost to the first crippling gas attacks, in the days before gas masks. Men whose body parts could not be sorted from the others and reassembled for a proper burial. Men who died, and died, and died again, not knowing the outcome of the war that was supposed to end all wars.
