Flanders Fields

Remembrance Day has assumed a more important place nationally and locally than ever.

Yesterday I walked past the three war memorials in Margravine Cemetery. A wall erected by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists all the service personnel buried in the cemetery. At its foot is a wreath laid by Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

Margravine Cemetery, 11th November 2023.

The Blake Memorial commemorates the eleven women and two men killed in an explosion at the Blake munitions factory in Wood Lane on 31st October 1918. The wreath was again laid by the Council.

Margravine Cemetery, 11th November 2023.

Two memorials from the J Lyons factory at Greenford were moved to the cemetery in 2002 and it is here that the pupils at the William Morris Academy laid a wreath.

Margravine Cemetery, 11th November 2023.

This tribute of remembrance from a generation born almost a century after the First World War means more to me than the two wreathes from the Council. A new generation remembers with the same emotions deaths in war and hopes never to see such conflicts again. Of course every Remembrance Day takes place against a background of war. Yesterday I talked to a friend walking her dogs. She was going to join the pro-Palestinian march, some 300,000 strong, in central London. The last march opposing the government was over the Gulf War in February 2003 attracting up to 1.5 million protesters. They had a point twenty years ago and I feel sympathy with the marchers yesterday.

The William Morris Sixth Form put on their wreath a quotation from a poem written in the First World War by John McCrae, a Canadian doctor serving in France.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place; and in the sky
    The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
 
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
        In Flanders fields.
 
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
    The torch; be yours to hold it high.
    If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
        In Flanders fields.

2 comments

  1. I shall be reciting the poem by Laurence Binyon at our village war memorial this morning. Ten men of the village gave their lives in the 1914-18 War, and one man in the 1939-45 War, from a population of around 300.

    They shall not grow 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.

    We will remember them.

    1. That was part of a Saying Lesson that I was set at school over 51 yrs ago .
      Christopher’s House Master took.my Div during part of that year .

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