Armistice Day
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The Great War was symbolically, if not actually, over. America should have a day set aside to thank & honor our still-living veterans, just as we have a specific day—Memorial Day—to honor our glorious dead, but we harm ourselves grievously, & place our progeny in the gravest peril, if we forget the causes & course of the Great War. In this, our cousins in the Commonwealth countries do the better job, for Remembrance Day is yet sacred as Armistice Day once was to us. Lest we forget.

Lest we forget.

"The Soldier"
by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.





"For the Fallen"
by Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

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.

They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.


The Rebel Black Dot Song of Armistice Day
Rupert Brooke (lyrics) & John Ireland (music), "The Soldier" from The Pity of War: Songs and Poems of Wartime Suffering (T.L.A.M.)