ASK YOURSELF : "Have we broken fiath with those who died?"

In Flanders Fields—will they rest?

An op‑ed for Remembrance Day (November 11)

 

By the numbers — Canada’s world‑war sacrifice

Conflict	Forces Served	Fatalities	Wounded
First World War (1914–1918)	≈ 625,877	67,960	174,080
Second World War (1939–1945)	≈ 1,159,000	44,090	54,414

Every November 11, Canadians stand in silence at 11:00 a.m. and listen for something more than bugles. We listen for the vows we’ve made—never to forget, never to look away from the cost of our freedom, and never to let our gratitude grow thin with time.

Those aren’t just statistics. They are empty chairs at kitchen tables, names etched in stone from St. John’s to Saanich, and lives cut short so ours could continue. Canada was a nation of fewer than eight million during the First World War; the scale of enlistment and loss would be staggering even today.

Remembrance isn’t nostalgia. It’s duty. It asks something of the living: to be worthy of the gift we were handed, to carry a measure of the load our grandparents and great‑grandparents shouldered across Vimy’s ridge lines, the North Atlantic’s grey seas, Dieppe’s shingle, and the long road from Juno Beach.

We honour them best by keeping faith—with veterans who still bear wounds seen and unseen, with military families who carry long absences and hard homecomings, and with the ideals those Canadians fought for: liberty under law, responsibility to neighbour, courage in public life. Remembrance is not a once‑a‑year ritual; it is a promise renewed.

John McCrae—physician, soldier, Canadian—gave us the words that still frame that promise. Read them aloud. Let them work on us again this year. And then answer the question his last line puts to the living: Will they rest?

In Flanders Fields — John McCrae (1915)

(Public domain)

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.