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I'm not sure where I'm going with this post, so be forewarned. Your local weather report may have a more definite relationship with outcome than I will achieve. Part of the problem will be that I'm going to write about history and I'm not a professional historian. Like you, I have lived some of it, and like you, I have opinions. Hang on to yours; here we go.

National pride and sacrifice have a long history, and not all of it admirable. It may be true as so many have said in one way or another that history is written by the victors, suggesting that accounts of the past are always going to promote the prejudices of the writer, but it's a rabbit hole of conflicting argument to start pulling apart the threads of an historical tapestry — and how d'ja like them mixed metaphors? The weavers of a nation's tapestry of military history do more of it. Try this:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
    The Captain of the gate:
"To every man upon this earth
    Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
    Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
    And the temples of his Gods."

That's from Thomas Babington Macaulay's (1800-1859) "Horatius" stanza XXVII of LXX (work on it) and one that explicitly promoted the ideal of the nobility of sacrifice for a nation's safety, albeit in the form of your father's undisturbed ashes and your deity's temples.

It recounts the legend of Horatius and two brothers-in-arms who hold off Etruscan invaders while citizens dismantle Rome's defensive bridge across the Tiber. I learned an abridged version from an elementary school reader in 1950, but even then the concept of heroic-tragic sacrifice was undergoing a softening in the aftermath of WW2.

So many—military apologists perhaps—have written of how soldiers from the 20th century's Great Wars simply came home after decommissioning and got on with their lives. Some did and that's fine; some others drank themselves to death. And they did so without any PTSD diagnosis or trauma-mitigation available. I had uncles on both sides of that divide, and I'm sure many of you did too.

There were other writers, even among the victors, who gave rebuttal to the notion of tragic-heroic sacrifice. Wilfred Owen was one of them. Again referencing, though in irony, Roman-era aphorisms, he concludes his "Dulce et Decorum Est".

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Margaret MacMillan from the end of: The War That Ended Peace - The Road to 1914 after a detailed account of that "Road" had this conclusion:

"And yet, if we want to point fingers from the twenty-first century we can accuse those who took Europe into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go to war. There are always choices."

Pierre Berton was a masterful journalist whose lengthy descriptions of iconic Canadian events gave him a well-earned reputation as historian, and yet at the conclusion of his Verdun he wrote simply this:

"Was it worth it?

  No."

It could have been the more honest answer from the War Dep't. to families bereft of a father after the catastrophe of Dieppe.

The common folk voted in different ways, theatre-goers among them. In 1937, Laurence Olivier played the lead in Shakespeare's Henry V. It was a very successful run with an intention to rouse a national pride and perhaps increase enlistment with those "Once more into the breach" lines before the Battle at Harfleur or the St Crispian's Day speech at the later Battle of Agincourt.

In 1944, the War Department commissioned a film version, again with Sir Laurence; however it had a most "lacklustre" attendance in Britain. True, the film went on to win Academy Awards in the US, but its initial reception in London may well have been indicative of people who were simply tired of jingoism while they mourned their dead.

This is November, the month of Remembrance. In recent years, countries have broadened their services to acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of all who served in wartime, women and men, and the poppy has become the symbol of that act of honouring. There is also a white poppy and its history, contrary to what some would have us believe, is almost as old as that of the traditional red one. Its use was first advocated in 1926 and first sold by the Co-operative Women's Guild of the UK in 1933.

I dug into Wiki for this piece, and then went on to learn about a prolific British author and philanthropist, Sir Michael Andrew Bridge Morpurgo who described his decision to wear a white poppy alongside his red one:

Wearing the red poppy for me is not simply a ritual, not worn as a politically correct nod towards public expectation. It is in honour of them, in respect and in gratitude for all they did for us. But I wear a white poppy alongside my red one, because I know they fought and so many died for my peace, our peace. And I wear both side by side because I believe the nature of remembrance is changing, and will change, as the decades pass since those two world wars.

… let the red poppy and the white poppy be worn together to honour those who died, to keep our faith with them, to make of this world a place where freedom and peace can reign together."

And the concluding personal connections come from Beverly's family tree. Her dad did wartime service in Canada's navy with the rank of Chief Petty Officer. It was her maternal grandfather however who held the record for military service. When I heard his remarkable story, I composed this in his honour, and I share it to recognize the boys who became men in service to ideals they may have but dimly grasped and who joined up sometimes to help put a soldier's pay in the family coffer.

Duncan Hendry was the family war veteran and no one thought that was particularly unusal. Men and women were decommissioned and went back to civilian life. They picked up the threads of family life and jobs that the great conflicts had interrupted and for the most part they didn't talk much about their wartime experiences. Duncan Hendry did that three times and that did make him unusual.

He wasn’t the only one to lie about his age to get into the army, but to do it three times was certainly stretching his luck as well as the truth. This maternal grandparent of Beverly's went off to earn a soldier’s pay in Britain’s Boer War. Later, he served in the Expeditionary Force sent to France in WW1. Finally, he fudged an application and was accepted in WW2. After surviving these three hostilities, he retired with his younger bride to Victoria and got a job with a local bakery. The story may be exaggerated a tad when it comes to the "Dad's Cookies" bit, but the rest seems accurate enough as the grave marker in God's Acre and the obituary post indicate.