How Quickly We Forget

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada - a day when we remember soldiers who fought and died in recent wars, starting with World War I.

The date of Remembrance Day is based on the day World War I ended - November 11, 1918.  That really wasn't that long ago.... before my lifetime, for sure, but a mere eight months before my mother was born. My father, a few years older, lived in Europe and remembered visiting his father, a cook on the front lines.

Every year, Remembrance Day would bring to mind those terrible times, World Wars I and II...

I've never been a serious student of history, so a lot of what happened must have gone over my head... because I was shocked to read - in the autobiography of Glenn Clark, a man born in the 1880's - that although World War I took 10 million lives, the year the war ended (1918), more than twice as many as that were killed by influenza!

Really?!!

A Google search confirmed that the pandemic Clark refers to in his autobiography was the Spanish Flu, which in two years killed an estimated 20-50 million!

The war and then the flu... Such great tragedies! I can't imagine living through all that!

How those events must have altered the world! And how quickly we forget!