While today’s time and date offer the potential for some light hearted fun with binary I’m more inclined to stick with the altered background theme of my own blog this week and go for something a bit more reflective.
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.Lt Colonel John McCrae,Canadian Army Medical Corps,Dec 1915
And I’d say that if the Allied dead of two world wars were indeed fighting for freedom then to its great shame my generation has largely failed to hold that torch high and has occasionally dropped it altogether. We broke faith, and by rights it should cause as many sleepless nights among the living as among those who died nearly a century ago on the Western Front.
I have to admit to often wondering whether we deserved what those brave generations did for us.
It reminds me of the line from Pink Floyds “The Final Cut”:-
“A place to live, enough to eat.
Somewhere old Heroes shuffle safely down the street.”
For many of those that remain, that “somewhere” is not the place where they live.
(3) Wilfred Wilson Gibson, Lament (1916)
We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?
A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings –
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?