O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame . . .
Old Dave Mason used to bring the poppies to school every year to sell to us there. Wearing his Legion blazer and crooked beret like my Dad. Walking with an old soldier's pride. His eyes were watery; his ears were shot; his hands trembled as he pinned the poppies to me. The last year that I saw him there, he asked me about my trip to Quebec. I told him how much I had loved Montreal and he said he had not liked it one bit. "They made us march, " he said, "from Union Station to the other depot. I didn't like it at all!"
"Was that on your way to France?"
"No," he said. "On our way to South Africa." France had been later. I reached to touch his hand that day--this man who, as a teenager younger than I, had fought in the Boer War, and again, as a young man, in Europe.
Proudly you gathered rank on rank to war
As who had heard God's message from afar
All you had hoped for, all you had you gave
To save mankind, yourself you scorned to save.
Dave and my Dad were in different wars, but in many ways their experiences were similar. Rank on rank. The troop ships. The different campaigns and battles. They respected each other. They knew things that the rest of us did not know, and they tried to protect us from those horrors--to shield us from stories of inhuman deeds and shattered wasted lives. They never questioned their own participation when the winds of war had howled. And every year they pinned their medals to their shoulders and marched with the ghosts of their comrades who had not returned. As my Dad read out each name on the Roll Call of the Dead, Old Dave's failing hands pinned a poppy to the white Celtic cross until it stood at last blood red.
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