We're too young. We're all too young. We can't put our minds into the mindset of people in Post-WW I Britain and France. I am an American, so I specifically have an issue with doing it. We live in a world where that idea of king and country and the innocence of youth just doesn't exist anymore. They did. It was a rude wake up call for humanity as a whole.
That world had been dying since the late 19th century, and was certainly killed with millions of others in World War I. It is difficult now to blame England and France for not wanting to go through that again, the slaughter of an entire generation. I feel that while Veteran's Day in the United States is great that we can remember all of those who fought and died, or fought and lived, Remembrance Day means something more to our neighbors across the pond.
It's a shame that we're all too young to remember when our naive world view was savagely ripped from us. It needed to happen, but not the way that it did. People have died for something, and people have died for what is seen as nothing, but all the while, they died so that others might live.
I will thank the Veterans who fought for my freedom, who fought for the freedom of Kurds and Kuwaitis, and I will pray for those who we lost or who were hurt in ways that I could never imagine.
On one hand, we have In Flanders Fields, and on the other hand, we have Dover Beach.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
edit : Interesting that Dover Beach is written more than half of a century before the first world war, but after the revolutions of the late 1840s. Amazing how prophetic it is.