Commemoration: The act of calling to memory by marking with a ceremony, observation, or memorial.
Less than two months after the World War I began, Laurence Binyon wrote on of the most well-know and often recited poems of remembrance, “For the Fallen,” that the lives sacrificed in war would be preserved in memory for the living.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn;
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a noted Canadian physician before the war, served with Canada’s First Brigade Artillery as a surgeon at a field hospital in Belgium. As he worked within sight of poppies blooming across old battlefields and fresh graves, he crafted a poignant testament against war and wasted lives that arguably became the Great Wars’ most famous poem, “In Flanders Fields.” McCrae himself died from disease in 1918, the war’s last year.
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 high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
