Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
I'm not much of a military guy, but I've been meaning to share this story here for a number of years.
I spent the first 6 months of my life living in a small cottage at a place called Ballymun Cross in Dublin, Ireland. It was originally a rural area located at a crossroads (hence the name) and consisted of about 5 or 6 cottages, a church, schoolhouse and a small shop attached to one of the cottages. My mother grew up in the cottage, as did her mother and her grandmother before her. The cottages and the land were bought by the city in the mid 90s and what was once a quiet country road is now a multi laned busy road leading from the city centre to the airport. A Hilton hotel stands on one of the corners and any semblance of the crossroads past life is long gone.
I randomly moved to Calgary in my mid 20s. I met a girl online and she could've been from anywhere in the world, but she was from here so I ended up here (no longer with her, but I ended up meeting my wife here) The only thing I knew about the place was that the Harts were from here, and nothing else. Anyway, a few years ago, my mother brought over a 40 page booklet about the 20th century history of Ballymun Cross written by a local woman as she thought I'd be interested in it. Flicking through it, I came across a mention of a Thomas Lawless who grew up in one of the cottages, and then later moved to Calgary in 1909! This blew me away. What were the chances of two people from this small clump of cottages randomly ending up moving across the other side of the world to the same city?
I was intrigued and ended up googling for more information on the guy. He lived at 8th Street W (Calgary wasn't separated into quadrants at this time) and enlisted in the 49th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915. Unfortunately he died at Avion, near Vimy Ridge two years later. His body was never found and so was missing, presumed dead.
In 2003, two bodies were found by construction workers during a road construction project. Their battalion was identified based on insignia found on their uniforms and they were shipped to Canada for further identification. The first body was identified four years later as Pte. Herbert Peterson of Berry Creek, Alberta, but it took a further four years to finally identify the second body as Pte. Thomas Lawless. He was given a military burial at La Chaudiere Military Cemetery.
Like I said, I'm not a military guy. I grew up in a country which doesn't venerate its military, and so the concept of Remembrance Day is (literally) foreign to me, but I give Tommy Lawless a thought each year at this time.
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Which of the Remembrance Day ceremonies are short and sweet, here in the city? I'd like to go to one but I recently had major knee surgery so there's no way I can sit through the one at the Jubilee at that's the only one I've been to since moving here.
Yeah...not super impressed with The Legion on this. Mr. Critchley's comments sum it up well
Quote:
Steve Critchley, a retired veteran who joined the legion in 1978 but has since let his membership lapse, said he felt "frustrated and hurt" when he learned how the organization had supplanted Wounded Warriors Canada.
He said the legion was acting like "a schoolyard bully," in his view.
"The legion is claiming they own all images of the poppy? That's like saying the legion owns the Christmas tree. It's gotten to the point of just simply being ridiculous," he said.
"This is painful to see what the legion has done and how they act now," Critchley added.
"It's not the organization that I or my grandfathers were a part of."
I like stories like this, especially because I remember my first rum ration on Basic Officer training in 1989. "Tiny" seems to have been a little bit of a hell-raiser in his teenage military service. Looking through his service records, it's noted that he was stopped pay (day-for-day) for a few instances of AWoL, was dinged with 14 days stoppage of pay for drunkenness (though he complained about that not being legitimate at time of his discharge) and received three days Field Punishment No.1 for refusing an order and insolence to an NCO. But service was still rated as "Good" at time of discharge. My, how the times have changed.
__________________
"If you do not know what you are doing, neither does your enemy."
- - Joe Tzu
Wasn't my plan for the day, but Turned on the TV to HBOs Band of Brother marathon, forgot just how damn good that show was, been sucked in for an hour now, probably cant justify sitting around for another 9 hours.
Yeah...not super impressed with The Legion on this. Mr. Critchley's comments sum it up well
This is a completely unfair assessment of what happened. The rest of the article you didn't quote sums it up well.
Like the quote from the Wounded Warriors Canada themselves:
Quote:
Wounded Warriors Canada was aware of the legion's poppy trademark and would never have agreed to do a fundraising campaign that centred around the image.
So, what happened here was Wounded Warriors Canada got the maximum $25,000 out of the fundraising campaign that was their deal with Telus, using a trademark granted to the Legion nearly 70 years ago. Incidentally a fundraising campaign that Telus did the year before with the Legion.
All the Legion did was ask Telus to stop improperly using their trademark to raise money for another organization (which that other organization said they would NEVER have agreed to do). In the end, Telus does the fantastic thing of running the campaign for both organizations and $50,000 is raised for veterans instead of $25,000.
An accurate summary of the facts is...apparent blunder by Telus (with best of intentions) leads to 100% increase in charitable donation to Canadian war veterans.
How are we as society so weak that we allow media looking for web clicks to make this a controversy that leads to people pitting two amazing veterans support groups against each other?
And by the way, I wonder if the Legion defending its trademark might get a better vibe from Mr. Critchley if he were being asked for comment here instead:
Feel free to put your support to one or both of these organizations however you see fit. But as someone who is a Legion member and also a supporter of Wounded Warriors Canada this article apparently searching for controversy really annoys me.
Remembrance Day 2017
