This is probably not really appropriate for this board. Today was Armistice Day in my youth. My Grandfather lost an eye in a Tank in the Somme. WWI was the War to end Wars. My father was killed in Normandy 25 years later inWWII. It became Veterans Day under Eisenhower.

For French wife WWI never really dies and poppies still appear in the house on this day. Her Grandfather was gassed at Verdun. Her father was sent to Dachau - stepfather carried Roosevelt off the cruiser in his wheelchair at Casablanca. Her mother and grandmother starved in Lyon under Klaus Barbie.


Doesn't really matter what's it called now. It is a day for the living; Memorial Day is to remember the departed. And I do think this is an appropriate adjunct to posting about double guns. The posts I just made about Saint Etienne shotguns brought this back to me and you can't understand Saint Etienne and it's shotgun manufactures without taking into account 1914-1918 and 1940-45.

To all of you vets...thanks...and take care brothers. We are all Americans no matter the politics.
Gene Williams

Edit: I put this in a separate thread because David mistakenly locked the Veterans' Day line. Sorry for the double post.

Most of us no doubt get the significance of the poppy, but if not:

Lt. Colonel John McCrae M.D. "In Flanders Fields", written after the 2nd Battle of Ypres during which the Germans used chlorine gas on the Canadian line April 22, 1915:

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.

Not entirely off topic, Gene.

When the fund raising scheme was set up a major part of the plan was creating employment for blind or disabled war veterans in the factories making the poppies.

I suspect much of the work would then have been done by hand.

Looking at that beautiful old example you show, and contrasting it with the modern plastic version, brings to mind the recent posts about the presence of “soul” in hand crafted items.

Though McCrae's poem may be better known, this is the better poem:


Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.

McCrae calls his reader to action, to continue the fight. Isaac Rosenberg, the author of the poem above, points in a different direction. Neither survived the war.

May all who served, who serve, rest in peace.

JP

Europe basically committed suicide with the two horrendous wars of the 20th century. The 3rd (called the Cold War aka the 45 year war, aka the War Between the East and the West; aka The Great Ideological War) never quite went to its logical end which would have destroyed everything. Maybe that's why.

Who would have thought, we who were born during WWII and grew up with its tales and history and carrying its losses, that we would see war on the European continent on such a similar scale. God help those solders in Ukraine and yes in Russia. They did not deserve this - a war foisted on them by the ego and intransigence of one old man.

If you are referring to Putin, and indications are that you are, he is 70 years of age. You may not consider that "old" when you reach that age.

Personally, I think his age has nothing to do with his decision to invade the Ukraine, but that's just me.

His decision to invade Ukraine was no doubt based on watching the incompetence of Joe Biden’s handling of Afghanistan, and realizing that a puppet installed in the White House made it the right time.


Best,
Ted

Thanks Stanton. Actually the "44" and fact father was killed in Normandy should be a clue that I am 78 going on 79.

In the 1970's the CIA ran a psychological study on aging rulers. They found that as death approached, these men became more aggressive trying to obtain their life-long goals before they passed from the scene. A lot of people attributed Afghanistan December 1979 Soviet invasion (Not the 29 April 1978 overthrow of Da'ud Khan) to Brezhnev, his dream of the age-old Russian push for a warm-water port, and to American perceived weakness after Vietnam, Carter and the Iran hostage imbroglio.

Both you and Ted may be right about Putin's Ukraine debacle. It may well be that he decided now or never after the Kabul fiasco. Interesting to re-read my Sophomore college Political Science 1963 textbook "Politics Among Nations" by Hans J. Mortanthau, who discussed exactly this. Nations are kids in a sandbox. If you look like a victim, you will be mugged. And that's when world threatening mistakes are made.

And to make this relevant, I still have that old home-made Baluch SxS from Quetta. I really like that locking system!! Simple and effective. Makes you wonder about the need for double and triple bites.
https://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=569041

Thank you for the beautiful remembrance, Gene, and the exceptional history of your own family. However, I would take issue with blaming the Europeans for the apocalyptic wars. It was the Germans both times, the Germans who murdered your father in law, the Germans who exterminated my father's entire extended Dutch family, scores of people, my four great grandparents well into their nineties, shipped off in cattle cars to be murdered in the camps in 1942.

You gotta admit ol' Joe has 'em on the run in Ukraine, eh? Oh well.

Brent, I've talked with a lot of our advisors who worked with the Ukrainians over the past 7 years. They lost 10,000 men in the fighting around Luhansk beginning in 2014. For instance, you'll see pictures of Ukrainian solders riding atop the APC's not inside - the Russian thermobaric weapons cook soldiers inside. Ukrainian artillery originally used a Facebook computer page for fire computations - this was bugged by the Russians and resulted in a lot of artillery casualties...etc. This war is not new. Our guys unanimously say the Ukrainians are awesome soldiers and they absorbed a lot from their experience and from us.

Biden deserves credit for deciding that, Kabul debacle aside, the world order promulgated in the UN Charter that you do not change your border by force, needed upholding. (Remember, Biden was the sole cabinet member who voted AGAINST going after Bin Ladin in Pakistan on 1 May 2011; He does not have a bellicose reputation; no-one lifted a finger over Crimea or South Ossetia previously - Obama and Bush 43).

Biden gave weapons. But it was the Ukrainians in the Pripet Marshes fighting with nothing that destroyed those Russian columns advancing on Kyiv like the Finns did in 1939. The credit goes to them. The question remains though, if Putin had perceived a real risk, would he have started this stuff in the first place? History will have to answer that.

It's still a darned tragedy. I've been fighting for 55 years - Vietnam, central Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sahel. Sick of it.

Took you long enough. Bit of a dim bulb, aren’t you.


___________________________________
War is a racket. Smedley D Butler