Bill Hillman's
AS YOU WERE . . .
Special Remembrance Day 2010 Issue

Read
A Day of Remembrance
from Canada Veterans Affairs
www.airmuseum.ca/web/pdf/dayremembrance.pdf

A TEN DOLLAR REMEMBRANCE DAY COMING UP
 
THE VETERAN ON OUR TEN DOLLAR BILL    
If you look at the back right-hand side of a Canadian $10 bill, you will see
an old veteran standing at attention near the Ottawa war memorial.
His name is Robert Metcalfe and he died last month at the age of 90.
That he managed to live to that age is rather remarkable, given what happened in the Second World War. Born in England , he was one of the 400,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force sent to the mainland where they found themselves facing the new German warfare technique - the Blitzkrieg.

He was treating a wounded comrade when he was hit in the legs by shrapnel.   En route to hospital, his ambulance came under fire from a German tank, which then miraculously ceased fire. Evacuated from Dunkirk on HMS Grenade, two of the sister ships with them were sunk.

Recovered, he was sent to allied campaigns in North Africa and Italy. En route his ship was chased by the German battleship Bismarck.

In North Africa he served under General Montgomery against the Desert Fox, Rommel.
 
Sent into the Italian campaign, he met his future wife, a lieutenant and physiotherapist in a Canadian hospital. They were married in the morning by the mayor of the Italian town, and again in the afternoon by a British padre.

After the war they settled in Chatham where he went into politics and became the warden (chairman) of the county and on his retirement he and his wife moved to Ottawa . At the age of 80 he wrote a book about his experiences.

One day out of the blue he received a call from a government official asking him to go downtown for a photo op. He wasn't told what the photo was for or why they chose him. 'He had no idea he would be on the bill,' his daughter said.

And now you know the story of the old veteran on the $10 bill.

Nathan Denette for National Post
In the tradition of Western poetry, flowers and flower imagery are inevitably associated with mortality. “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes,” is Yeats’ terse summary of our human condition. Nothing captures the bittersweet brevity, the “vanishingness” or our estate, better than the heart-stopping beauty and simultaneous fleetingness of flowers in bloom.

The gathering of flowers is itself a most enduring symbol of human mortality — we are “gathered” by accident, illness, war or, finally, time. Milton made the comparison explicit when he wrote of how fair “Proserpine, gathering flowers/ Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis was gathered.”

Flowers also are the abiding symbols of regret and remorse — a truth true as much outside poetry as within it. We mark funerals with great floral tributes — to signal affection and honour for the dead; to signal as well, by the beauty of the flowers, the joy that while alive those now gone once brought to the world. Scripture is thick with such imagery — the ultimate and most vivid passage being that of Isaiah:

And he said, “What shall I cry?”
“All flesh is grass,
And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades …”

The kernel maxim strikes innumerable echoes in English verse, the whole passage being (I think) most successfully recapitulated by Williams Cowper in the 18th century:

All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades,
Like a fair flower dishevelled in the wind

All great English elegies concerned with memory and regret are — as it were — strewn with flowers. The very greatest of them all, Milton’s Lycidas has one of the most remarkable floral passages in verse history. Milton drew upon a great tradition that the world of Nature herself mourns when a good person dies, and Nature speaks or manifests her sympathy through the flowers.

He calls for Nature to bring “every flower that sad embroidery wears” to strew his friend’s hearse. Milton writes most eloquently of all of the hyacinth, as “that sanguine flower inscribed with woe” alluding to the myth of Hyacinth accidentally killed by Apollo, and Hyacith’s blood staining the lily purple.

“Inscribed with woe” might do as a compressed description of all floral mementos of departed loved ones, or for any flowers devoted to the commemoration of those who lost their lives early, either by accident or in the great upheavals of disaster or war.

Certainly when most people think of Nov. 11, on the nation’s great commemoration — our remembering — of the horror and magnitude of the sacrifices of our soldiers and their loved ones in all wars since the First World War, their thoughts are primarily “inscribed with woe,” a compound of regret, remorse and gratitude.

Those remembering think on the sorrow and pain of loss and death, not triumphalism; certainly not something as callow and cheap as “nostalgia and romanticizing” of war — whatever that eerie, glib phrase is really supposed to mean. Those words come from the Ottawa White Poppy Coalition, whose activists currently are promoting a “white poppy” campaign symbolizing, in their own Dr. Phil formulation, “non-violent conflict resolution.”

Activists have no manners. They are heedless of the sensibilities of veterans and their families who have made the poppy campaign a cardinal national rite since its institution in 1918. Nor can they launch their own little publicity rocket without parasitically leaching off a far more honourable and far more venerable tradition. They have to have a “poppy,” too. Such originality.

Well, the poppy, the poem that made it famous and the ceremony that is now a genuine part of our civic liturgy will more than survive these efforts to degrade or misread them. When he wrote the great war poem, In Flanders Field, John McCrae — both in his call for future generations not to forget, and in his depiction of the field and its “blowing” poppies — was linking his verse to one of the great patterns of human art and human memory, the intersection of Nature and man’s mortality.

No white poppy will disturb that.

National Post Copyright 2010
Rex Murphy offers commentary weekly on CBC TV’s The National, and is host of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup.
Read more:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS
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.

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.

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.

The poppies referred to in the poem grew in profusion in Flanders in the disturbed earth of the battlefields and cemeteries where war casualties were buried and thus became a symbol of Remembrance Day.

Remembrance Day – also known as Poppy Day or Armistice Day (the event it commemorates) or Veterans Day – is a Commonwealth holiday (observed in all Commonwealth countries except Mozambique) to commemorate the sacrifices of members of the armed forces and of civilians in times of war, specifically since the First World War. It is observed on 11 November to recall the end of World War I on that date in 1918 (major hostilities of World War I were formally ended "at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month" of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice). The day was specifically dedicated by King George V, on 7 November 1919, to the observance of members of the armed forces who were killed during war; this was possibly done upon the suggestion of Edward George Honey to Wellesley Tudor Pole, who established two ceremonial periods of remembrance based on events in 1917.

(Note that "at the 11th hour", refers to the passing of the 11th hour, i.e. 11:00 am.)

>>>More at Wikipedia

Visit this month's other AS YOU WERE. . . features
plus previous Remembrance Day Tributes at:
www.airmuseum.ca/web

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 © 2010 Bill Hillman and respective contributors