Very moving, Ann - thanks so much for posting this! I think we think about things like people who have died in wars like WWI as abstractions until something like this brings home to us the impact on human lives. Seeing those poppies poured out like blood around the Tower of London makes us all stop for a moment and remember.

I'm sure our roses have similar kinds of memories attached to them, though some of them are sweet and personal in "Deuil" or memory of someone well-loved. We do have the WWII Memorial Rose and others in honor of other wars, not to mention the Lancaster and York roses for the "War of the Roses", that of course was about more than roses. In more recent times, we have the roses commemorating the firefighters, police officers, and people who lost their lives in 9/11. A huge bed of one of those roses for the hundreds of people who lost lives in 9/11 would be a living tribute to add to the One World Trade place tower that has just opened.

Cynthia

Such a loss! Those images are stunning. It is hard to imagine what a devastation WWI was to that generation of Europe.

I once read the autobiography of a popular woman writer of that age who never married. She would have loved to marry, she wrote; she loved children dearly. But the men she and many of her friends would have married were all killed in the war. It was a generation heavily weighted in single women.

Rosefolly

The best history books (and best historical novels) bring alive the events, often the sufferings, of an era. An impressive work I read recently about the equally horrible WWII was 'Inferno', which concentrated on the experiences of ordinary people from all the countries involved in the conflict.

In my anthology of German poetry it is noticeable how many writers born in the 1880s died in the period 1914-1918.

We were in England this past summer. It being the centenary of WWI there were memorials everywhere. It came much closer to the people in Europe. Sad to think that they thought it was the war to end all wars. Sad to think of so much loss.

Thanks for the link Ann, truly moving.

Melissa what you say is so true. There are so many books and movies, to name a few:

All is quiet on the western front: an amazing experience.

A Hilltop on the Marne by Mildred Aldrich is a day to day experience of the first months of the war.

I found Vera Brittain's a Testament of Youth (Both book and series, and there is a new movie coming soon).

Her letters are gut wrenching, especially those to Roland Leighton, a budding poet.

It still makes me sick to the heart, that so many brilliant men were killed to satisfy the fear and warmongering of others.

But I let - Roland Leighton (1895- 1915) say the last word, lest we forget:

Hedauville

The sunshine on the long white road
That ribboned down the hill,
The velvet clematis that clung
Around your window-sill
Are waiting for you still.

Again the shadowed pool shall break
In dimples at your feet,
And when the thrush sings in your wood,
Unknowing you may meet
Another stranger, sweet.

And if he is not quite so old
As the boy you used to know,
And less proud, too, and worthier,
You may not let him go-
(And daisies are truer than passion-flowers)

It will be better so.

This post was edited by true-blue on Wed, Oct 29, 14 at 9:02

...that's quite beautiful and so poignant...

Sad, too, to think of the men and women who came of age during WWI having to watch their own sons and daughters go off to combat or dangerous war work just a generation later.

Since then we've had a lot of very ugly little wars, but thankfully, nothing on that scale. May it never happen again.

I think I'll go work in my garden.

Rosefolly

I couldn't see that phrase without thinking of Jean Brodie telling her young students about the lover who "fell in Flanders field."

Perhaps not the most appropriate character to evoke for this post...