A Veterans’ Day primer

Veterans’ Day originally began as Armistice Day, intended to honor veterans, living and dead, of World War I. On November 11, 1918, at five in the morning, a treaty was signed between the Allies in Europe and Germany. The treaty was to take effect at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”—11 a.m. November 11, although it was breeched all that day and shooting stopped only when darkness fell. Over the next year, the treaty was violated several times, and peace did not reign until the Treaty of Versailles, negotiated in 1919.

My father fought in WWI (makes me seem awfully old) for the Canadian army. He survived mostly unscathed, though he was gassed and ever after was subject to bronchial difficulties. When jet planes first whined over our Chicago home (right in the path of Midway Airport), if he was outside, Dad would instinctively duck and head for the garage. To him, it was the sound of incoming. But he never talked about his war experiences.

During WWII, the name of the day was changed to Veterans’ Day to honor all who had served, living and dead, in all wars fought by this nation. When I was young, the world almost came to standstill at eleven in the morning, as people stopped in their tracks to stand and face east for one minute, in honor of the veterans. It is almost an unknown custom these days, but this morning at eleven I stood in the cottage and faced east for one minute.

Another custom once associated with the day is the wearing of red poppies, inspired by the poem written by John McCrae when he saw the blood-red poppies, in reality a weed, blooming on a ravaged battlefield. A French woman, Anne Guérin, is generally hailed as the originator of the poppy custom, although an American woman, Moina Michael, a volunteer for the New York YWCA, was simultaneously inspired by the poem and worked to promote fabric poppies. Europeans still wear the red poppy on Armistice Day but in America, the custom has become associated with Memorial Day, which more specifically honors those who lost their lives. Fabric poppies are sold to raise money for servicemen.

World War I inspired literature—especially poetry—that, little known today, is both intensely terrible and beautiful. It is not the literature of patriotism, but rather works that portray and capture the horror of battle. McCrae’s poem is probably one of the best known.

In Flanders Fields

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.

“. .. . the torch; be yours to hold it high”—words to remember and treasure in these trouble times in our country. On Veterans Day, let us honor and make proud the men and women who died to protect our freedom and our democracy.

An Armistice Day memory

Thinking about my father tonight, Richard Norman MacBain. Born in 1897 in rural Ontario, a preacher’s kid, he served in the Canadian army in the European trenches of WWI. A hundred years ago. If you’ve read about the “war to end all wars,” you know that it was as miserable as the WWII landing on the beaches of France, just in a different way. Much of it fought in a bitter winter, it confined men to trenches that were wet, cold, miserably uncomfortable. They were hungry; their feet rotted from the wet; they rarely slept.

Dad didn’t talk about the war much. I suspect he, a physician, attributed his occasional bouts of lumbago (an old-fashioned term for low-back pain) to those days in the trenches, and I know his frequent chest colds were blamed on the mustard gas to which he was exposed. But my clearest memory of war-related behavior sees him ducking his head and running for our garage when the new jet aircraft from Chicago’s Midway Field went overhead. Their whine sounded like incoming enemy fire to him, and he ducked instinctively, then chuckled self-consciously at himself.

After the war, Dad came to Chicago to study at the Chicago College of Osteopathy. At a relatively young age, he was president of the college and, later, also administrator of the associated hospital. Active in Chicago’s political affairs, he fought for equality for all of his hospital employees—they were his family. And if the maintenance men were to vanish, Dad knew how to start the boiler. He was a man of absolute honesty and integrity, and if I have accomplished anything in life, I attribute it to lessons learned from him at home and, in high school and college, when I worked for him at the hospital. I was, I say modestly, a damn good executive secretary.

While studying osteopathy. Dad roomed with a man from upper New York named Russell R. Peckham. He was one of four brothers who came to study osteopathic medicine. Russell married Alice Peterman, fathered a child, and died in 1934 of meningitis from a piece of WWI shrapnel lodged in his jaw. A few years later and penicillin would have saved him. But after an appropriate time, my father married Alice, and Russell’s son became my brother, John Peckham. The entire Peckham clan was family to us, and when John and I were young, we could count eighteen osteopathic physicians in the family

Today, John is retired as a D.O. but the tradition continues—his son, Russell, is an osteopathic dermatologist, married to an osteopathic neurologist. And my children’s New York cousins, Jordana Alter Blair, is an osteopathic ER doc, having attended the Chicago college after a recommendation from my brother. No six degrees of separation

But, for me, that rich heritage traces back to the trenches of WWI. Some amazing poetry came out of that war. I think of Wallace Stevens, Rupert Brooke, W. B. Yeats, Amy Lowell, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Wharton, Alan Seeger. There’s A. E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” and a poem I can’t quite bring to the front of my mind where a soldier catalogs, from the grave, the things he has treasured and misses. I want to say, “These I Remember,” and Rupert Brooke, but it doesn’t show up on a search.

And always appropriate today is John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field””

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.