Today is Remembrance Day
The poppy is a symbol of Remembrance and hope, including hope for a positive future and peaceful world.
They are a show of support for the Armed Forces community, those currently serving, ex-serving personnel and their families; and a symbol of Remembrance for all those who have fallen in conflict.
John McCrae wrote the poem In Flanders Fields which inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of Remembrance.
In the spring of 1915, shortly after losing a friend in Ypres, a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote his now famous poem after seeing poppies growing in battle-scarred fields.
In Flanders Fields
The poem by John McCrae
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.
Something very similar must be permanently established in Ukraine, once the occupier vermin have gone for good.
It should pay tribute to the combatants and civilians murdered by the worst totalitarian regimes in history: Germany and Russia.
Germany has at least acknowledged its nazi past and paid limited reparations. (But none to Ukraine). Russia acknowledges nothing and reveres its evil monsters of the past as well as the evil monster running its current dictatorship.
Every year we have a small rememberance service at my Masonic Centre in Cambridge to remember those brethren who gave their lives.
My particular Lodge lost two members during WW1 and we remember them at this time and again at our Ceremony of installation of the new Master, when their names and details are read out.
UGLE headquarters in London was built to commemorate those brethren from Lodges all over the World, where at the time, UGLE was the governing body of Freemasonry in England and Wales and overseas territories. The money to build it came from our own pockets and was completed in 1933.