Next Tuesday will be a day to remember and to honor all the members of the army who have died while they were in duty. The Poppy Day.
And we celebrate it this exactly day to make it coincides with the end of the confrontation of World War I at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month on 1918. After six hours, the armistice was signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne, France. With the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the 28th of June of 1919, the War was officially ended.
On the Remembrance Sunday, United Kingdom celebrates two minutes of silence. This period start and end with the firing of an artillery piece. In London, some of the main commemoration points will be held in Whitehall, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Big Ben.
The symbol of Remembrance Day is a red poppy. Some of the Flanders battlefields changed the blood spilled in the war for red and beautiful poppies that bloomed in that same place. The Canadian soldier John McCrae, on May 1915, wrote the poem "In Flanders Fields" to explain this perfect and sad metaphor.
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.
But the poppies become an emblem thanks to Moina Belle Michael, an American teacher who on the 9th of November of 1918, while she was taking a look at the Ladies Home Journal, saw the John McCrae poem. Since that very moment, she encouraged people to "Keep the faith" and to wear the red flower to remember all the people who died and suffered because of the war.
On Tuesday, The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation, created by artist Paul Cummins, will be completed. But be aware, because the Tower of London and surroundings are becoming overcrowded these days.
The Tower certainly has become dangerously overcrowded. I went along last week to hear an ancestor being read out at the Roll of Honour and it was extremely overcrowded but people had such respect and kindness so we didn't feel that we were being crushed. I am sure that it will take a long time to dismantle the poppies so there will still be a few weeks left to see it. A lovely post Maria x
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