“If ye break faith…” People have tried to twist “In Flanders Fields” various ways, including into a pacifist manifesto, though they haven’t yet started changing the words as if it were our mere national anthem, or calling the cemeteries stolen land. But when today’s politicians put on poppies and feign reverence, I fear the dead rest uneasy.
Normally, Remembrance Day is a time to put aside polemics and divisions. But only because beneath our intellectual and verbal disagreements, we were united on the big things that made our civilization a distinctive miracle, both capable of victory time and again against long odds and worthy of it. Were, I say.
Today, if we are to recite the poem and not awaken angry ghosts, we cannot just recognize the opening, “In Flanders fields, the poppies blow/ Between the crosses, row on row,” then lament “the Dead” who very recently “lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow” and now lie in a foreign field. We must recall and answer the challenging finale to which those verses build: “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.”
It is not enough to go, oh how sad, they died young, war is awful. And it is worse than useless to say that war is never worth it. Not only because author John McCrea thought war in general, and the Great War in particular, absolutely worth it. Because he was right. Our way of life deserves defence, and cannot survive unless defended. Yet who now champions it? Intellectually and morally, as well as practically?
Unkind words, to be sure. But true. Whereas “a key role in supporting a free and open Indo-Pacific region” is a flat-out, oily lie. If, say, China were to invade Taiwan, what would CornerBrook do? Run? Hide? Sink? Moreover, what could our armed forces generally do in any conflict, anywhere? Nothing, because a public indifferent to security and unsupportive of defence spending nibbling into free money elects politicians vacuous about geopolitics and hostile to our heritage from an elite in revolt against Western civilization and in default of its obligations across the board.
They have broken faith. Speaking of which, don’t ask them to explain what Faith, Hope, and Charity are doing up there, let alone defend it. Because “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” is St. Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians, 13:13.
We haven’t just dropped the torch, we’ve hurled it scornfully into the mud. Should they sleep?
