Memorial Day | Gratitude, Humility, Resolve

National Pride, International Precarity.

If I try to find some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our Austrian Monarchy, then almost a thousand years old, seemed built to last, and the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability….Everything in this wide domain was firmly established, immovably in its place…and nothing in the well-calculated order of things would change. Anything radical or violent seemed impossible in such an age of reason.

—Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

This war has caught us at our worst, and now that shrapnel is killing an entire generation, we are left staring at God.

—Margot Asquith, spouse of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, in her diary, October 26, 1914

Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep

Clare Harner (1934) 

Do not stand at my grave and weep;

I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow;

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain;

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush,

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight;

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep;

I am not there, I do not sleep.

Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there, I did not die!

In Flanders Fields

Major John McCrae (1915)

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.

It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognize them in the early stages.

—Zweig, Ibid.

Image Credits | Wreaths on the Cenotaph, Martin Place, Sydney, Anzac Day, April 25, 1930, photographer Sam Hood, State Library of New South Wales collection, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons; “Illustration for John McCrae's ‘In Flanders Fields’ from a limited-edition book (1921) containing the poem. Here, the first line reads ‘the poppies grow’ instead of ‘the poppies blow,’ which is probably based on the handwritten version of the poem that McCrae likely wrote from memory which was included in In Flanders Fields and Other Poems (1919),” From In Flanders Fields by John McCrae (W.E. Rudge, New York, 1921), via Britannica.