RE: Reflections on Remembrance Day, Nov. 10
Lest we forget, indeed, the other poem synonymous with the remembrance of war other than John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” namely Wilfrid Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum.” To only speak of taking up “our quarrel with the foe” is in fact to tell, to repeat to children the “old Lie.”
As it were, to take the time just “once a year,” as last week’s editorial suggested, to honour veterans is actually a disservice to them, eliding their experiences of war in the name of a national identity built upon their very bodies, memories, and hearts: remembrance ought to be every day then. Such should be the painful prick of the past when wearing a poppy, too easily tossed off on Nov. 12.
—T.A. Pattinson
