The Flea gives us cause to weep.

Of course, Old Soldiers are prone to weep. Our dead look over our shoulders.

My father's father fought in WWI. He survived, and is buried in Jefferson Barracks Cemetery in St Louis. Among other warriors much younger than he.

The Flea has a post about a recent find in Belgium, near Ypres ("Wipers"), also known as Passchendaele. Where soldiers of the Great War saw the light of day again, after the loamy darkness of an unmarked, unknown grave for 86 years.

"Something like 60 bodies are uncovered each year on the 1914-18 battlefields in France and Belgium - an annual "harvest of bones".

A mound of earth on one corner of the site was heaped with poppies by British and Belgian visitors to mark Remembrance Day and to record the discovery at the spot last week of the body of an unidentified, but probably British, soldier of the Great War.

Only the lower half of his skeleton was found. Another of the bodies discovered near the trenches several weeks ago has been identified, provisionally, as that of a 20-something member of the 5th Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers.

As Laurence Binyon observed in "Lest We Forget,"

They may have died in the first gas attack of modern war, as described by Wilfrid Owen...

Many people alive today in the US (this is NOT as true in Commonwealth Nations, in my experience) do not understand the significance of the Poppies on Remembrance Day, Veteran's Day here in the U.S.

This is it as described by John McRae, yet another War Poet:

Welcome home, soldiers.

In the United States military, when we honor our dead, we play Taps, a song written by General Dan Butterfield during the Civil War, it served as the signal of the end of the day - and by extension, the end of the labors of a soldier's life upon his death.

Many people don't realize there are words - many different ones; these are my favorite:

We follow with an honor only dead veterans and living Presidents rate: the 21 gun salute. At graveside - three volleys from seven rifles.

The Commonwealth Armies have similar traditions. Their song for end of the duty day, or a soldiers life is "The Last Post."

The Flea has a feature, where he says, "Now is the time at the Flea when we dance."

We at Castle Argghhh! do not dance. It is too reminiscent of the "Dance of the Hours" in Fantasia for those so unfortunate as to view it.

But today, we make exception.

Now is the time at Castle Argghh! when we dance. In Memoriam.

Not just for these soldiers of the Great War, but for the dead of the war of a new generation, of the American, British, Canadian, and Australian and other allied nations, who took the torch from their forbears, and, while dying fell - and passed the torch to those who as we speak walk the ramparts, pitting themselves, and their future - against the goblins who boil out of the dark places in the earth.