KEEPING FAITH WITH THE FALLEN

 That first Armistice Day, on Nov. 11, 1919, was meant to mark the fallen soldiers with two minutes of silence. 

The day of commemoration had other overt symbols, with North Americans and western Europeans wearing the red poppy from 1921 onward, inspired by John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders’ Fields.” McCrae’s poem reflected the shifting nature of remembrance: in 1915, it was a martial call by the dead to fight the Germans (“Keep up the quarrel with the foe”); by the 1920s, it had been adopted as a symbol of the need to never forget (“To you from failing hands we throw”).

When Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day in 1931, its meaning changed again. This occurred in the depths of the Great Depression, an economic crisis that led to deep despair for many veterans, especially those with invisible injuries that we would now label as post-traumatic stress disorder, but which were little understood at the time.

After the erection of the National War Memorial in Ottawa in 1939, it became the site for the national ceremony, and following 1945, a sacred place to mark the sacrifice of the 45,000 Canadians who died in service during the Second World War and the more than 500 who were lost during the Korean War.