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http://www.ruxted.ca/index.php?/arc...the-Fallen.html
| quote: | Time to Remember the Fallen
We need only think back a few weeks to remember soldiers like Private Blake Williamson (The Royal Canadian Regiment) and Sergeant Shane Stachnik (Canadian Military Engineers) and only a few months to remember Captain Nicola Goddard (Royal Canadian Horse Artillery). Their faces are still fresh in our memories; we still remember their voices; we shared a joke, a task, a hug, maybe just a nod of the head last time we passed them; they were so full of hope and life so short a time ago. The emotional wounds suffered by their families, friends and fellow soldiers are still raw.
For others the wounds are older but no less painful. The names are less familiar to many but there is someone still who feels the loss. Their names are listed, in volume after volume, in the national Books of Remembrance in the Peace Tower in Ottawa.
For more than 120 years Canadian men and women have been fighting and dying on battlefields on several continents. For every Paardeberg, Vimy Ridge, Battle of Britain, Ortona and Kapyong there were a dozen less famous but still bloody and costly battles – at sea, in the air and on the ground. Canadians fought and died in Africa, Asia and Europe, in the icy North Atlantic and under a warm Mediterranean sun – some are buried in Hong Kong, others in Belgium, many have no known grave.
Sometimes Canadians scanned their daily papers anxiously, hoping against hope that they would not see the name of a husband, son, niece, neighbour or friend on the all too frequent casualty lists. Sometimes Canadians barely heard about the deaths of soldiers; other times the media dwelt too long on each death – searching for or trying to manufacture a bit of controversy from the very real grief of friends and family members.
On November 11th many of us will pause, just for a few moments, to remember Private Braun Scott Woodfield (killed in a vehicle accident in Afghanistan, 2005) and Lieutenant Colonel William Nassau Kennedy (died of disease suffered while serving with the Canadian Voyageurs in the Nile Expedition, 1885) and more than one hundred thousand other brave Canadians who have made the supreme sacrifice for their country, for their service, for their family and friends and, above all, for their brothers in arms.
Ruxted will take time to remember our fallen, with gratitude and with some small pride in what we, Canadians, have done with the opportunities those brave men and women bought for us, with their lives. We invite all Canadians to pause, just briefly, on 11 November, at 11:00 to share that pride and gratitude.
They shall not grow 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. |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6133312.stm
| quote: |
Where did the idea to sell poppies come from?
The first official poppy appeal was held 85 years ago in the UK. But when - and why - was the first poppy sold?
The red poppy worn around the world in remembrance of battlefield deaths has nothing to do with the blood shed in the brutal clashes of World War I.
Instead it symbolises the wild flowers that were the first plants to grow in the churned-up soil of soldiers' graves in Belgium and northern France. Little else could grow in the blasted soil that became rich in lime from the rubble.
Their paper-thin red petals were the first signs of life and renewal, and in 1915 inspired Canadian doctor John McCrae to pen perhaps the most famous wartime poem:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row...
It was this poem which inspired an American war secretary to sell the first poppies to raise money for ex-soldiers.
Two days before the Armistice was declared at 11am on 11 November 1918, Moina Michael was working in the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries' headquarters during its annual conference in New York.
While flipping through a copy of Ladies Home Journal, she came across McCrae's poem, and was so moved that she vowed to always wear a red poppy in remembrance.
Poppy lady
That same day she was given $10 by the conference delegates in thanks for her hard work, which she spent on 25 silk poppies. Returning to the office with one pinned to her coat, she distributed the rest amongst the delegates.
Since this group had given her the money with which to buy the flowers, Ms Michael saw this as the first sale of memorial poppies. She then threw her efforts into campaigning to get the poppy adopted as a national remembrance symbol.
Two years later, the National American Legion's conference proclaimed the poppy as such. Among those at the conference was Madame E Guerin, from France, who saw poppy sales as a way to raise money for children in war-ravaged areas of France.
Having organised the sale of millions of poppies made by French widows in the United States, in 1921 she sent her poppy sellers to London.
Field Marshall Douglas Haig, a senior commander during WWI and a founder of the Royal British Legion, was sold on the idea (as were veterans' groups in Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
So that autumn, the newly-established legion sold its first remembrance poppies. And so the tradition began. |
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| quote: | Originally posted by chinamon
not true. i say "ugh"
but i am a tranny. |
| quote: | Originally posted by kotsy
lol colour me retarded |
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Remembrance Day
