Tag Archives: Remembrance Day

Asides, Misc

Remembrance Day 2020

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All the ceremonies will be streamed online this year, because COVID, so my longstanding habit of going to one of our local ceremonies will probably be swapped for sitting in front of my computer, which is an extremely 2020 way of commemorating Remembrance Day.

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.

-- Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

I try to remember to mark Remembrance Day here on the blog too, although will admit these November 11 posts have been patchy the last few years. I feel it’s the least we can do in this peculiar hobby we all share, one that’s simultaneously intimately connected to warfare and weirdly stylised and distant from the realities of it.

I hope you and yours are safe and well, on this strange pandemic Remembrance Day.

Misc

Two for Remembrance Day

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I’ll be off to the main downtown Cenotaph for the ceremony and two minutes of silence today, but after you do your own two minutes, here’s a pair of relevant songs for today.

I first heard “Green Fields of France” at ten or fifteen years ago, after a backpacking trip through Europe that had included time at Ypres, including a walk out of town to see John McCrae’s grave. Here’s the Dropkick Murphy’s cover.

At our main cenotaph ceremony here, we always have both a Royal Canadian Navy band from nearby Esquimalt naval base and the pipes and drums of our local reserve infantry regiment, the 5th (Princess Mary’s) Canadian Scottish. If massed pipes and drums don’t make your hair stand on end, I’m afraid you have no soul. Here they are with our local symphony orchestra doing Amazing Grace.

Misc

Nov. 11, 2011

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Adding Poppies

Went down to our main Cenotaph on the Legislature lawn this morning for the Remembrance Day ceremony, as I almost always do. Good turnout despite the threatening weather, and while it rained off and on through the ceremony and marchpast it had at least stopped bucketing down like it was earlier in the morning.

I’ve always thought those of us who study war for recreational purposes should pay extra attention to Remembrance Day or the local equivalent. It’s not always lead soldiers and dice, after all.

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.

I’ve got a few more photos from our ceremony over on Flickr.