Copyright 2001 by Edward Willett

As I write this, it's a couple of days before Remembrance Day.

This Remembrance Day has a special resonance because of the events of September 11 and the current war in Afghanistan.

CBC Radio's November 9 Remembrance Day concert at Knox Metropolitan United Church (7:30 p.m.; free admission) and the Regina Symphony Orchestra's November 10 concert at the Centre of the Arts will use both music and poetry to help people reflect on those who have made and continue to make sacrifices in the service of this country.

The CBC concert, which will air on CBC Radio Two's Gallery on Sunday, November 11, from 12 to 1 p.m. and Monday, November 12, on CBC Radio One's Afternoon Edition from 4 to 5 p.m., features an eclectic mix of local performers, including Hart Rouge, Cathy Miller, Streetnix, Ken Mitchell, Gwen Bergman, Clayton Mills and the University of Regina Chamber Singers.

I normally sing with the Chamber Singers, although I can't be at the concert on Friday night, and the music director Kathryn Laurin has chosen is a good example of how songs can help focus our minds on remembrance.

Consider these haunting lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest, set to solemn music by Ralph Vaughn Williams: "The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

Another piece is not immediately connected to remembrance. It's a passionate love poem by Garcilaso de la Vega, set to music by Z. Randall Stroope. Amor De Mi Alma (You Are the Love of My Soul) ends with the somber line, "For you I was born, for you I live, for you I must die, and for you I give my last breath," particularly chilling when you learn that de la Vega, considered one of the finest of the Spanish Renaissance poets, died at age 33 from wounds received in military combat.

The Chamber Singers' contribution to the concert also includes a musical setting of In Flanders Field, which Ken Mitchell will also be reading...and which I will be reading during the Remembrance Day concert of the Regina Symphony Orchestra on Saturday, November 10.

That concert, Until We Meet Again, will also feature the poem High Flight, wartime music sung by Lynn Channing, and a tribute to Regina resident Gladys Arnold, who covered the fall of France for the Canadian Press and the Leader Post and whose subsequent work to boost support for De Gaulle's Free French forces eventually earned her France's highest civilian honour.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the reaction some artists have had to the events of September 11, the notion that somehow they could no longer create art after such an atrocity. As we look back at the Second World War and even further back to the First, however, we should remind ourselves that things were far bleaker then, casualties immeasurably higher, the horrors far greater. Yet art survived.

In Flanders Field is one example of an artist's response to war. John McRae, the author, was born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1872, and began writing poetry as a teenager. A teacher and doctor, he served in both the South African War and in the First World War. In April 1915, while working as a surgeon in the trenches at the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, he wrote In Flanders Field in between the arrival of fresh batches of casualties.

The day before McCrae wrote the poem, one his closest friends was killed in the fighting and buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross. McCrae saw that wild poppies were already beginning to bloom between the crosses marking the many graves...and thus was born In Flanders Field.

Far from concluding he could not create art in the face of such horror--and it's hard for us today to even imagine the brutality of trench warfare, or for that matter of the front-line surgery of the time--McCrae used art to respond to what he saw.

In Flanders Fields was the second-last poem McCrae wrote. He died before the war ended, of pneumonia and meningitis, in January, 1918; not, perhaps, a victim of enemy action, but a victim of war nonetheless.

That his poem will be recited or sung numerous times in Regina, across Canada and around the world this weekend is a testament to the power of art to give voice to thoughts and emotions that might otherwise remain unspoken, and an admonishment to the artists of today to use their creative gifts to express their own reactions to war, to help all of us remember and reflect, not just on November 11, but throughout the year.

Posted September 22, 2004