British Commonwealth Remembrance Sunday

[bigwheelzip]

The second Sunday of November is known as "Rememberance Sunday" in the British Commonwealth. With all the red poppies being worn by the Brits on TV in remembrance of war dead, I was thinking about the touching "Last Post" ceremony I witnessed at the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres Belgium.

I looked up how this usually crowded, nearly century-old nightly ceremony is being completed in this time of pandemic.
The ceremony is now done by a single bugler, with no spectators or pedestrians allowed to pass through this city entrance during the "Last Post". The buglers nightly lament in this now empty edifice covered with the names of the Commonwealth's missing soldiers is incredibly moving.

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u170M86wN7Y[/ame]

 

[Moo Moo]

My wife is a high school teacher over here in Australia. She's been making cardboard poppy badges all weekend.

 

[bigwheelzip]

My wife is a high school teacher over here in Australia. She's been making cardboard poppy badges all weekend.

The annual connection of the poppy to military memorial is a brilliant rememberance.
The ceramic poppy art installation at the Tower of London, " Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red", on WWI's centenary, was unforgettable. A poppy placed for each man lost from the Commonwealth.

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.

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[Dave_n]

It is always the closest Sunday to the 11th of November, due to the WWI armistice starting at the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month in 1918. There is an excellent history book entitled basically what I listed above, and gives the last man to die on that day.

Growing up in the UK (from 1939 to 1968) "Poppy Day" as it is colloquially known was always a sombre day even for a youngster after WWII, as a lot of my primary schoolmates, like me, never knew their grandfathers on either side of their family as they were killed in WWI.

Like you I have been at the Menin Gate in November and it is a really moving ceremony. Dave_n