Again, a thank you to all of the troops fighting beside their friends and countrymen, and to those who gave all.
Here's a piece I wrote for Remembrance Day last year:
The poppies, of course, are a symbol of WWI dead thanks to Canadian John McCrae. He was a surgeon-major during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. After a friend died, McCrae sat down on the back of a truck and wrote a poem, casting his eyes on the poppies and graves around him.
The poem was In Flanders Fields, and it almost didn't get published. McCrae tossed the poem away, but it was retrieved by another offer. In England, the Spectator rejected it, but Punch picked it up and published it on December 8, 1915. Three years later, McCrae (now a Lieutenant Colonel) died of pneumonia.
From Ypres, to Starbucks. I'm not sure if the Starbucks chick knows what the poppy means, but I don't really care. I just hope that she goes on wearing it every November.
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