My thoughts exactly! What kind of nation steals its inspiration from other nations’ war dead?
Some sort of hybrid of stolen valour and disrespect for the fallen.
That always chokes me up.
And I have my Canadian-flag socks ready for Dominion Day (even if they insist on calling it Canada Day now).
Canadians, and I speak as one, are rather happy to appropriate the culture of others. Not every poem YOU studied in high school was written by a Canadian.
This is a strangely ahistorical claim, inasmuch as the reason Canada was involved at all is because it was NOT separate from mother England. We didn’t even declare war on our own behalf. We shouldn’t have been involved at all.
Are we not allowed to appreciate Canadian literature? 
Plenty of both countries died at Normandy some thirty years later to excuse major US looses in WW I being due to a flu epidemic. 
Pierre Berton and the Established Canadian Historic NarrativeTM disagree with you.
You’re correct that we started the war as a country for whom England declared war and commanded, but we ended the war as lieutenant to none.
4 people identifying as Canadian in this thread, and you’re the only one who hasn’t expressed surprise (Leaffan and Northern Piper) or disapproval (me). Your right to speak for Canadians has been revoked democratically.
I had to memorize it in 4th grade (1970’s in California) and it’s always stuck with me. I didn’t know it wasn’t universally known until recently.
In all things Canadian, we Americans are annoyed that we did not win the war of 1812, despite our best propaganda efforts.
[bolding mine]
Speaking as an American, be my guest! Wouldn’t bother me at all.
I have no trouble with other people appropriating US cultural things. (Some, I suppose, would say that is part of the problem with the US…)
I was going to say that Canada was only involved in the war because Britain was, so your statement about “big boy responsibilities” is kind of odd…but I see **RickJay **, an echt Canadian, beat me to it, so I’ll shut up about that.
I would not say that Flanders Fields is well known in the US. It probably was better known back in the fifties and sixties than it is now, at a guess. I was familiar with it as a kid, but not from school–not sure where I ran into it. I will admit to not liking it very much; while the first two stanzas are definitely moving, the last stanza, with its “Keep Fighting Whether It Makes Sense Or Not” ethos, is problematic for me. Of course it is fair to say that we know things about the Great War now that the poet did not know, or did not see very clearly, less than a year into the fighting.
Lamar Mundane, thanks to your uncle. Three wars–pretty impressive.
It’s your thread and you’re entitled to be irritated if we’ve shit in it. But it’s US Memorial Day, and you’ve opened a thread on that topic.
After WWI, the difference between Great Britain and Germany was this: the country with the tradition of free thought had a prevailing though unofficial belief that it had been a great waste. The country with less free thought (and even less in its future) took the attitude that it had been a great sacrifice. So that’s kind of a scary attitude.
And now, even after the fuck up in Iraq, we live in a largely pro-war culture. We look at ISIS and feel some people are so bad and killing is the only good. We sew dragons teeth with our wars and then fight more.
And we get these Memorial Day Moments on TV, that showcase some brave Snuffy Smith’s mactions in the war to stop the Nazis, but if anyone points out that the Nazis were in 27th place in German politics until the Americans irresponsibly crashed the world economy in 1929, he might as well spit on Snuffy Smith’s grave.
If we had a holiday for kids who died in school fires, people would say “let’s just build safer schools.”
It’s beautiful poetry, and the first two stanzas capture the grief of senseless loss like few other poems. But this morning I read it to my third graders, and yeah, we all kind of stumbled around that line about taking up the quarrel.
When I first asked what it meant, one boy volunteered that the poet was trying to make peace with the enemy. Of course that’s exactly the opposite of what the line means, and there’s no way you could read it otherwise; rather, the sentiment–“We have died horribly; you keep fighting!”–is so foreign to him. Overwhelmingly when we talk about war, we talk about looking for a path to peace. (And if you quote Chamberlain I will cut you).
So I had to explain why the poet thought that the war should continue, even after so many dead–which led to a discussion of how the Germans thought the same thing.
It was a good discussion. I’m not sure I like that poem as my students’ entrance to understanding Memorial Day, however; next year, I might use that gutwrenching Carl Sandberg poem instead.
Accepted, but you still get this warning.
Seriously, though, you’ve been here long enough to know better.
Well, thirteen years later, at least, after the Statute of Westminster. And you did go and declare war on Germany in World War 2 a week after the Brits did, even though Canada never had any treaties with Poland.
I should imagine that the dead do not want to die in vain.
One can’t have Kaiser Wilhelm running Europe to his strange desires, or another German wiping out Jews.
When I had to memorize and recite this poem, the US was winding down our meat grinder in Vietnam. I was already aware that wars are seldom glorious or noble. Vietnam wasn’t and WWI wasn’t. My great grandfather served in WWI too. Doesn’t change that that poem was twaddle.
According to Wikipedia,
Don’t know where the fuck you get the cultural theft nonsense from. Which bit of culture is being stolen? Flanders Field? All of Belgium? France? The Germans, who started the war, and without whom the poem would never have been written? The writer of the poem has no stake in Flanders Field. He was there because the enemy was, and, per tradition, even threw the poem away, and his soldiers retrieved it. Is the culture that is stolen a ritual of dumpster diving?
At any rate, per the OP: Upon a cursory inspection of the text, doesn’t it seem a promise to be haunted by the dead unless we continue the War?
I discuss Decoration Day a bit here: My Memorial Day speech this morning - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board
I want to expand on this just a little. I knew my great-grandfather very well. He died when I was 16. He was a quiet, gentle little man. He was a farm kid who grew up in a very rural area. Going to church of a Sunday was the biggest thing in his family’s lives. In the war, he was mustard gassed and he got what they called “shell shock” in those days. Today, we would say he had PTSD. He came home from that war wrecked physically and psychologically. He never fully recovered. Lots of nice guys just like him from all the nations involved got fed into a mad inferno of destruction and death all to further the aims of various empires. None of them had goals that weren’t, in the end, cynical grabs for wealth and territory.
That poem is twaddle.
Ils ne passeront pas!