Song Lyric Sunday Theme for 11/11/18

Today’s Helen Vahdati has given us the promo Soul for Song Lyric Sunday.

Today is Remembrance Sunday. I like so many others have written about remembering and honouring the dead of war.

Children are our souls, our future so today I have chosen War Child from the Cranberries.

The words say it all so please read them. The video is painful to watch but it’s all true.

“War Child”

Who will save the war child baby?

Who controls the key?
The web we weave is thick and sordid,
Fine by me.

At times of war we’re all the losers,
There’s no victory.
We shoot to kill and kill your lover,
Fine by me.

War child, victim of political pride.
Plant the seed, territorial greed.
Mind the war child,
We should mind the war child.

I spent last winter in New York,
And came upon a man.
He was sleeping on the streets and homeless,
He said, “I fought in Vietnam.”

Beneath his shirt he wore the mark,
He bore the mark with pride.
A two inch deep incision carved,
Into his side.

War child, victim of political pride.
Plant the seed, territorial greed.
Mind the war child,
We should mind the war child.

Who’s the loser now? Who’s the loser now?
We’re all the losers now. We’re all the losers now.

War child. [

The human cost #Remembrance

Lest we forget 💜

The Silent Eye

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, one hundred years ago, the Armistice came into effect and the guns fell silent after four years of horror. The Great War, the ‘war to end all wars’, was over and the survivors of the conflict would be able to come home. In fact, we have known not one year of peace since that date.

No-one knows how many would never come home from the Great War. Between military and civilian deaths, it is estimated that over twenty-three million people died. World War Two, a generation later, would claim the lives of somewhere between seventy and eighty-five million people. Of those who survived, not all came home whole. None would return unchanged. Many lost limbs, sight, health and hearing. Many minds were overturned by horror.

“We were in the trenches. I was so cold I went out (and…

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Rememberance

Major John McCrae .

The GreatWar 1914-1918

by John McCrae, May 1915

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.

Inspiration for “In Flanders Fields”

During the early days of the Second Battle of Ypres a young Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed on 2^nd May, 1915 in the gun positions near Ypres. He was a friend of commander Major John McCrae .

John McCrae was a field Dr in the same unit as his friend Alexis. For some reason the Chaplin was called away and so John was asked to take the funeral service for his friend. It is thought that in the evening after the funeral he wrote his most famous poem. In Flanders field.

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The Poem is so sad, it speaks of how so many young men died, cruel and painful deaths on the muddy fields and squalid trenches of Ypres. He talks about the larks bravely singing, as I see it he is alluding to the fact that life just goes on as this evil war raged. “The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.”

They died so quickly without warning, though better that than maimed and dying slowly in agony. They were young, they had lovers, family and then they were gone so suddenly. I think they hung around for a while as ghosts trying to adjust to death.

The dead, he tells us, implore those who follow them to take up the torch and fight the enemy to the end. For if they loose or shirk the challenge the dead will never rest and forever haunt the poppy fields of Flanders.

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Just a thought crosses my mind. What would those dead men buried under Flanders field have though of the tanks and foot soldiers of the 2nd world war. The young men of the 1st world war thought they were fighting the war to end all wars…………. Sadly they were so wrong. War strides on as I type.

I think the video from Black Adder goes fourth says everything there is to say on war.

Bright young Men

We sent them off to war,

These bright young men

We had no knowledge of what they saw,

They came home bright young men no more .

Yes though brave they were no longer whole

Those that survived had no soul.

Many died,the lucky ones, death to them was kind.

Those who returned were faded in body and in mind.

Their loved ones at first relieved

Soon found they had much cause to grieve.

Though there, in body broken,

Their fears left unspoken

Their minds were left behind.

They went out whole, these bright young things.

They returned lost, holding on by gossimar strings

They went full of pride for God and King

They ran head long into hell

On return they could not relinquish it’s bad spell.

So we had a nation of half men, half ghosts

Fearful, their heads still had them at their posts.

The trenches and the blasts of bombs, the smell of death

Clung to them and bled them dry, the whole in body, the blind of eye

The amputee, it was as if they had never left.

We sent them off to war,

These bright young men

We had no knowledge of what they saw,

They returned bright young men no more.

Paintings by William Rothenstein.