I have poppies on all of my jackets: my jacket for a cold day, my jacket for a windy day and a rainy day, a poppy in my car if I’ve lost my poppy, as I am inclined to do or because it decided to be a warm day and I didn’t plan for that. I watch the young cadets at the grocery store with their trays of poppies, dressed in their uniforms, the sense of their honourable task written on their faces, proud to be participating in the act of “remembering”.
None of us living can “remember” the day the armistice ended the Great War, before we knew we would have to number the global conflicts, with the second on its way just over twenty years later. Canada’s last known veteran, John Babcock, of the First World War died Feb. 18, 2010, at the age of 109. We can do the math and calculate that there are no living veterans of that war anywhere in the world.
The Armistice took effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, with the first Armistice Day held in 1919. Parliament changed the name to Remembrance Day in 1931. We now honour all those who served in the military and gave their lives, but the two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. is the continuing tradition since that first Armistice Day.
I look at the elderly men and women sitting at a table at various establishments, inviting us to honour the many lives lost in conflict. They wear their military regalia with a deep sense of purpose and pride while offering poppies as the rest of us scurry past in our busy days. We need to be reminded that conflict is not the answer, and yet those with the power seem to willingly categorize “might” as being “right”.
We think of loved ones on this day, some we never had the opportunity to “know” because of their sacrifice. My father’s commission from the Second World War hangs on my wall, photos of him in uniform framed beneath his commission as a pilot officer on June 22, 1941. He looks more like a boy than a man in those photos, standing upright, shoulders back.
He later headed to India, ferrying a Liberator across the Atlantic after departing Gander, N.L., stopping at the Azores and into Africa with a stop in Morocco in Northern Africa on his way to India. He was to lead a Squadron of bombers that would join the “Burma Bombers”, the nickname used for Commonwealth airmen supporting the Burma-India operations to keep back the Japanese threat to India after Japan’s conquest of Burma in early 1942. He kept a meticulous logbook, detailing his travels and his flight time. Thankfully, his only grandson Travis has the honour of holding on to that document, inheriting his grandfather’s love of flying.
We are called to pause on this day, to bow our heads and give thanks to those who bravely went ahead. It seems so little to ask of us and even a smaller effort to give. “Lest We Forget,” is both a promise and a warning: a promise to remember those who served, and a warning not to forget the human cost of war.
